A series of eight studies has uncovered a consistent pattern among people who believe in conspiracy theories: they tend to be overconfident in their cognitive abilities and significantly overestimate how much others agree with them. The findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that conspiracy belief may be fueled less by active motivations and more by a mistaken sense of certainty.

This research was conducted in response to a growing need to understand why people come to believe in conspiracy theories, especially those that are widely rejected by experts and the broader public. Prior work has emphasized motivations like the desire to feel unique, or to explain social and political events in a way that aligns with personal identity. But the researchers behind this new work proposed a different explanation. They hypothesized that people who consistently overestimate their own intellectual performance might be more likely to hold onto fringe beliefs and to falsely assume that others share their views.
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