People turn to Conspiracy Theories when they're anxious and feel powerless. Research suggests conspiracy belief is strongly related to lack of sociopolitical control or lack of psychological empowerment.
The argument
One psychological account traces belief in conspiracy theories to existential motives, that is, to needs concerning safety, security and control. Causal explanations, of the form 'this happened because of that', serve those needs. To have an account of why an event occurred is to be in a position to anticipate events like it, and the capacity to anticipate is what allows people to feel safe and secure in their environment and to exert control over it, both as autonomous individuals and as members of collectives. On this view explanation is not primarily a cognitive achievement but a condition of feeling secure. The motive becomes visible where control is absent. People who lack instrumental control, who cannot materially affect the circumstances that affect them, may be afforded a compensatory sense of control by conspiracy theories, because such theories offer them the opportunity to reject official narratives and to feel that they possess an alternative account. The compensation operates at the level of understanding rather than action: nothing about their circumstances changes, but their relation to those circumstances does, since they are no longer simply subject to an explanation handed to them by others. Other scholars locate the same kind of motive elsewhere, pointing to the idea that endorsement may be a compensatory reaction to perceptions that society's essential character is changing, a threat not to control over particular outcomes but to the intelligibility of the order a person inhabits. Either way the explanation offered is psychological in form: what is being met is a need of the believer rather than a demand of the evidence. The research also shows that the compensation does not hold, and that conspiracy theory thinking only reinforces the sense of political alienation and disempowerment it answers to. On this account that finding does not undercut the explanation, since existential motives are offered to explain why such beliefs are adopted, not to show that they succeed.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The correlational finding here is better supported than the causal claim built on it. That people who report low perceived control also report higher conspiracy endorsement is reasonably well established; that reduced control *produces* the endorsement is a further step, and the experiments designed to test it — inducing a sense of lost control and measuring the effect on belief — have produced inconsistent results, with the effect sitting inside the wider replication difficulties that have affected priming research in social psychology. The entry states the compensatory-control mechanism as settled when it is contested. The account also carries a tension it notices without resolving. Its closing observation is that conspiracy thinking reinforces alienation and disempowerment. But if the belief is adopted to restore a sense of control and reliably reduces it instead, then either the motive is being systematically frustrated — which itself needs explaining, since people usually abandon strategies that make things worse — or control-restoration is not what the belief is doing. As stated, the premise and its own caveat pull against each other. The mechanism is not distinctive either. Causal explanation serves the need to feel safe and in control, but that is true of religion, ideology, superstition, folk medicine and ordinary scientific explanation alike. A theory of conspiracy belief has to say why this form of explanation is selected over the many others available to someone who feels powerless, and existential motive alone does not distinguish them. Finally, the position and its rivals are not in fact competitors. Cognitive shortcuts, social identity, institutional distrust and existential need can all operate simultaneously, and most current accounts treat them as complementary. Establishing that existential motives are among the reasons does not establish that psychological reasons are the explanation, which is what the position asserts.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The correlation between low perceived control and conspiracy belief is better established than the causal claim: experiments inducing a loss of control and measuring endorsement have produced inconsistent results, and the effect sits within the wider replication difficulties in social-psychological priming research. [Rejecting P2] The premise notes but does not resolve a tension — if endorsement reinforces alienation and disempowerment, it fails to supply the control it is said to be sought for. The mechanism is also not distinctive, since religion, ideology, superstition and ordinary explanation serve the same need, so it does not explain why this form of explanation is selected.