Conspiracy Theory and Belief Formation

The working distinction is methodological. Investigation proportions belief to evidence and abandons a hypothesis that fails. Conspiracist belief is structured to survive any outcome. Researchers describe it as self-sealing, in which "both evidence against the conspiracy and absence of evidence for it are misinterpreted as evidence of its truth", so that the belief "becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proven or disproven".¹

Why people believe conspiracy theories

Psychological research on conspiracy belief grew into a defined field in the 2010s. Summarizing it in 2018, Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen Douglas set out four principles: conspiracy beliefs are universal across eras and cultures, consequential in having "a real impact on people's health, relationships, and safety", emotional in being rooted more in negative feeling than in dispassionate analysis, and social in being tied to the motivations that underlie intergroup conflict.²

Epistemic, existential, and social motives

The most cited framework, a 2017 review by Karen Douglas, Robbie Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka in Current Directions in Psychological Science, organizes the evidence around three motive families. Epistemic motives involve "understanding one's environment". Existential motives involve "being safe and in control of one's environment". Social motives involve "maintaining a positive image of the self and the social group".³

The review's second conclusion gets less attention. The beliefs recruited to serve these needs do not appear to meet them, and the authors conclude that for many people conspiracy belief "may be more appealing than satisfying".³

Pattern perception and agency detection

A five-study series by van Prooijen, Douglas, and De Inocencio in the European Journal of Social Psychology tested whether such beliefs track illusory pattern perception, the tendency to find meaningful structure in noise. Participants who saw patterns in random coin tosses and chaotic paintings endorsed more conspiratorial and supernatural claims, and strengthening conspiracy belief experimentally increased the patterns they saw in world events. The authors concluded that "illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanism accounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs".⁴ Researchers have also proposed that conspiracy thinking partly reflects "the human brain's mechanisms for detecting dangerous coalitions", firing where no real coalition exists.¹

Proportionality bias

Proportionality bias is "the tendency to assume that big events have big causes".⁵ In a 2007 study, Leman and Cinnirella had 64 participants read versions of a vignette in which an assassination attempt on a fictional president succeeded or failed. Participants endorsed a conspiracy explanation more readily when the president died.⁵ The bias is closely linked to conspiracy belief because a lone gunman or an ordinary car crash feels too small a cause for the death of a president or a princess.⁵

Historical development

Hofstadter and the paranoid style

The classic historical analysis is Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964. Hofstadter used the term for a recurring political rhetoric marked by "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy". The label described expression rather than illness: the essay concerns "the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people". Its method became the field's method: "Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content."⁶

Hofstadter traced the pattern from the anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic movements of the nineteenth century, through Populist alarm about international bankers, to McCarthyism, quoting McCarthy's 1951 description of "a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture".⁶ The named enemy changes while the structure of the accusation persists.

Barkun, stigmatized knowledge, and the superconspiracy

The standard modern framework is Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2003). Barkun, professor emeritus of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, describes the conspiracist worldview through three premises: nothing happens by chance, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.^7,8

Barkun sorts conspiracy beliefs into three ascending classes. Event conspiracy theories address "limited and well-defined events", such as theories about the Kennedy assassination. Systemic conspiracy theories assign one organization "broad goals, usually conceived as securing control of a country, a region, or even the entire world". Superconspiracy theories "link multiple alleged conspiracies together hierarchically", with "a distant but all-powerful evil force" at the summit.¹

His second organizing concept is stigmatized knowledge: "claims to the truth that the claimants regard as verified" despite their marginalization "by the authoritative institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error". His examples run from astrology and Atlantis hypotheses to alien abduction accounts and suppressed cancer cures, and the book tracks how the convergence of millennialism with stigmatized knowledge, accelerated by the internet, carried once-marginal material to much wider audiences.⁷ Barkun calls the resulting end-times systems improvisational millennialism, assembled from Western esotericism, Eastern religions, New Age thought, fringe science, and radical politics rather than inherited from a single tradition.⁷

Conspiracy theory in UFO culture

A sighting is a field observation, and the study of sighting reports and experiencer testimony is research, not conspiracism. The distinct claim that governments know what the objects are and conceal it is a conspiracy theory in the technical sense, and that claim has organized much of UFO culture since the 1940s.

Cover-up narratives from Roswell onward

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that the military had recovered a "flying disc". Within a day, officers under General Roger Ramey identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon, and the case sat largely unexamined for three decades.⁹ Ufologist Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel in 1978, and the 1980 book The Roswell Incident popularized Marcel's account and added witness accounts describing the recovery of bodies.⁹ Roswell became the anchor case in the cover-up record, and polls have found that a majority of Americans doubt the Air Force's explanation.⁹

Real secrecy behind the inference

The cover-up inference fed on real, documented secrecy about other things. In 1994 the Air Force acknowledged that the weather balloon explanation had been a cover story for Project Mogul, a classified program using high-altitude balloons to monitor Soviet nuclear testing. Personnel at Roswell had no need to know about Mogul, and the Air Force's account concedes that the misidentification and abrupt correction "left many people with unanswered questions".⁹

The CIA's internal history reaches a parallel conclusion. Writing in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence in 1997, Gerald K. Haines found that "over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights", meaning the then secret U-2 and OXCART programs, and that Project Blue Book investigators aware of the flights "tried to explain away such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions". Haines drew the consequence directly: "This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and coverup."¹⁰ The documented record confirms the first step of the cover-up inference, that officials misled the public about what some objects were. Whether anything concealed went beyond classified terrestrial programs remains an open question.

The disclosure movement

The cover-up narrative sustains an activist wing. Steven Greer founded the Disclosure Project in 1993 to press for public release of what the project describes as government knowledge of UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and advanced energy and propulsion systems, and in May 2001 he held a National Press Club conference featuring 20 retired Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, and intelligence officers.¹¹

The theme reached Congress in July 2023, when former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified before a House Oversight subcommittee that the United States has run a secret "multi-decade" program to retrieve and reverse engineer crashed craft and had recovered "non-human biologics". He acknowledged he had not personally seen craft or bodies. His testimony rested on accounts from more than 40 witnesses interviewed over four years.¹² In March 2024 the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office published a 63-page review of the historical record and reported: "AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."¹³ In Barkun's terms, an event conspiracy grew into a systemic one, and superconspiracy variants fold the asserted cover-up into hierarchies topped by "a distant but all-powerful evil force".¹

Documented harms

On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch fired three shots from an AR-15-style rifle inside the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., saying he had come to "self-investigate" Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory alleging that Democratic officials ran a child trafficking ring from the restaurant. The theory had been extensively discredited before he arrived. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison in June 2017.¹⁴

The larger record is consistent. Conspiracy theories served as justification for Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik. Conspiracy-driven AIDS denialism by the South African government caused an estimated 330,000 deaths. QAnon and 2020 election denial fed the January 6 Capitol attack.¹

Leading research frameworks

These frameworks address different levels of the same phenomenon and are not mutually exclusive.

Documentation and research record

The record on which this article rests is of three kinds. Belief formation is documented in peer-reviewed psychology, built from motive reviews, experimental studies of pattern perception, and vignette studies of proportionality bias. The historical and cultural record is built from primary analyses, principally Hofstadter's 1964 essay and Barkun's 2003 study. Official conduct is documented in government records, including the Air Force's 1994 Mogul admission and the CIA's 1997 internal history, which establish that real official deception is part of the UFO record.^9,10 The psychological literature explains belief and does not adjudicate particular claims. The boundary it draws is procedural: researchers describe conspiracy theories as "generally designed to resist falsification", so that on conspiracist logic "the stronger the evidence against a conspiracy, the more the conspirators must want people to believe their version of events".¹

Long-run polling adds a measurement layer to the record, and it does not support the common claim that conspiracy belief is surging. A 2022 PLOS ONE study by Uscinski and colleagues examined 46 conspiracy theories in United States polling across spans of up to 55 years, along with European and longitudinal measures, and concluded: "in no instance do we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism, however operationalized."¹⁵ Visibility and harm can grow while underlying belief stays level.

Serious inquiry and conspiracist reasoning

The difference between serious inquiry and conspiracism is procedural, not topical. Careful study of testimony and anomalous phenomena states what is documented, what is reported, and what remains open, proportions confidence to evidence, and revises when the record changes, as the 1994 Mogul admission revised the Roswell record.⁹ Conspiracist reasoning runs the loop in reverse, reading correction as deeper concealment, so that evidence against the plot becomes evidence for it.¹ An unexplained report is an open question, and it remains one until the evidence settles it.

The record and open questions

Documented: The motive framework, the pattern-perception experiments, and the proportionality studies are published, peer-reviewed research. Hofstadter's 1964 essay and Barkun's 2003 study are the standard historical and cultural analyses. Real official deception in the UFO record is documented by the 1994 Mogul admission and the CIA's 1997 history. Specific conspiracy theories have produced documented violence and public-health harm.

Reported: Surveys across five decades report substantial fractions of the public endorsing specific conspiracy theories, including majority doubt of the Air Force's Roswell explanation. Disclosure advocates report suppressed programs and recovered materials, and the most prominent recent testimony rested, by the witness's own account, on interviews with more than 40 witnesses rather than on firsthand observation.

Open questions: No measured factor predicts which individual will adopt or abandon a given conspiracy belief, and no settled account explains how motives and biases combine in a single case. The origin of the small fraction of aerial reports that remain unexplained is unresolved, a genuine open question that continued observation and research are actively working to settle.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory?

A conspiracy is a real covert plan by two or more people, and documented cases such as Watergate are treated as history rather than theory. A conspiracy theory asserts a hidden plot "when other explanations are more probable" and is typically structured so that no evidence could refute it. The difference lies in method, not subject matter.¹

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

Research identifies epistemic motives (understanding events), existential motives (safety and control), and social motives (a positive image of self and group), along with cognitive tendencies such as illusory pattern perception and proportionality bias. The same research finds the beliefs may not deliver the certainty or control they promise.^3,4,5

What is a superconspiracy?

In Michael Barkun's classification, a superconspiracy joins multiple suspected conspiracies into a single hierarchy with "a distant but all-powerful evil force" at the summit. It sits above event conspiracies, which concern single episodes, and systemic conspiracies, which attribute broad control to one organization.¹

Did the US government cover up UFO information?

Yes, in a specific and documented sense. The Air Force hid Project Mogul behind a weather balloon story in 1947 and admitted it in 1994, and the CIA's history records that U-2 secrecy and misleading sighting explanations fed cover-up charges. Whether anything concealed went beyond classified terrestrial programs remains an open question, and the Pentagon's 2024 review reported finding no confirming evidence.^9,10,13

Are conspiracy theories dangerous?

Some have documented, serious costs: the 2016 Pizzagate shooting, an estimated 330,000 deaths from conspiracy-driven AIDS denialism in South Africa, and the January 6 Capitol attack. Researchers describe conspiracy beliefs as consequential rather than harmless.^1,2,14,15

Sources and further reading

1. Wikipedia. "Conspiracy theory." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
2. van Prooijen, J.-W., and Douglas, K. M. "Belief in Conspiracy Theories: Basic Principles of an Emerging Research Domain." European Journal of Social Psychology 48 (2018). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/68554/
3. Douglas, K. M., Sutton, R. M., and Cichocka, A. "The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories." Current Directions in Psychological Science 26 (2017). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/61995/
4. van Prooijen, J.-W., Douglas, K. M., and De Inocencio, C. "Connecting the Dots: Illusory Pattern Perception Predicts Belief in Conspiracies and the Supernatural." European Journal of Social Psychology 48. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/63244/
5. Wikipedia. "Proportionality bias." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_bias
6. Hofstadter, Richard. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Harper's Magazine, November 1964. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
7. Wikipedia. "A Culture of Conspiracy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Culture_of_Conspiracy
8. Wikipedia. "Michael Barkun." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Barkun
9. Wikipedia. "Roswell incident." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
10. Haines, Gerald K. "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90." Studies in Intelligence, 1997. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf
11. Wikipedia. "The Disclosure Project." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disclosure_Project
12. NPR. "Whistleblower testifies U.S. salvaged 'non-human biologics' from UFO crash sites." July 27, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190390376/ufo-hearing-non-human-biologics-uaps
13. NPR. "Pentagon finds 'no evidence' of alien technology in new UFO report." March 8, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1237100622/pentagon-ufo-report-no-evidence-alien-technology
14. Wikipedia. "Pizzagate conspiracy theory." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
15. Uscinski, J., et al. "Have Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories Increased Over Time?" PLOS ONE 17 (2022). https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10409921