Leave the world(view) behind, but keep the words: The effect of conspiracism on writing

We investigate whether a stable predisposition to interpret events as the result of conspiracies—conspiracism—is associated with the spontaneous generation of conspiratorial narratives when interpreting ambiguous information. Across two studies (N = 385), participants watched the apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind and wrote an essay interpreting its meaning. Contrary to our preregistered hypothesis, higher levels of conspiracism did not predict the spontaneous creation of conspiratorial narratives. However, exploratory linguistic analyses revealed that, echoing online conspiratorial discourse, conspiracism was associated with greater use of conspiracy-related vocabulary, disproportionately sophisticated words, and increased syntactic complexity. We discuss potential methodological and theoretical factors contributing to these unexpected results, including the roles of context, perceived relevance, motivation, and collective social dynamics. We also consider the possibility that conspiracism may not directly translate into conspiratorial narratives. If so, we recommend more comparative research between online and offline conspiratorial writing to clarify whether conspiracy theories are constructed intentionally and independently of genuine belief, or whether they emerge from underlying cognitive biases.