PARANOIA (French Edition) 185 LINK

PARANOIA (French Edition) 185 ---> https://shoxet.com/2t86qL

For those who prefer your workshop art to be a little twisted (as opposed to a sexist cheesecake calendar) we offer this poster from the back page of the April 5, 1903, edition of the French illustrated newspaper Le Petit Parisien.

This is obviously a particular case of madness, that of the strange suicide of this joiner from Sainte-Ménehould, with whom all the press is occupied. Mr. Lemaître, the joiner in question, was sick for a long time; He was, in addition, suffering from paranoia; his rationale seemed very shaken.

The answer as to why he too his own life is in the news story provided in the blog entry and the poster. It has nothing to do with the decline of handwork:This is obviously a particular case of madness, that of the strange suicide of this joiner from Sainte-Ménehould, with whom all the press is occupied. Mr. Lemaître, the joiner in question, was sick for a long time; He was, in addition, suffering from paranoia; his rationale seemed very shaken.

Paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories both involve suspiciousness about the intentions of others but have rarely been studied together. In three studies, one with a mainly student sample (N = 496) and two with more representative UK population samples (N = 1,519, N = 638) we compared single and two-factor models of paranoia and conspiracy theories as well as associations between both belief systems and other psychological constructs. A model with two correlated factors was the best fit in all studies. Both belief systems were associated with poor locus of control (belief in powerful others and chance) and loneliness. Paranoid beliefs were specifically associated with negative self-esteem and, in two studies, insecure attachment; conspiracy theories were associated with positive self-esteem in the two larger studies and narcissistic personality traits in the final study. Conspiracist thinking but not paranoia was associated with poor performance on the Cognitive Reflection Task (poor analytical thinking). The findings suggest that paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories are distinct but correlated belief systems with both common and specific psychological components.

Citation: Alsuhibani A, Shevlin M, Freeman D, Sheaves B, Bentall RP (2022) Why conspiracy theorists are not always paranoid: Conspiracy theories and paranoia form separate factors with distinct psychological predictors. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0259053.

Although many specific conspiracy theories are in wide circulation (e.g. the Apollo Moon landings were faked; the British secret service murdered Princess Dianna) there is evidence of a general disposition to believe in conspiracy theories, sometimes referred to as conspiracy mentality [22, 23]. Hence, people who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to believe in other, even contradictory, conspiracy theories, for example that it is plausible that Princess Diana faked her own death and also that she was killed by the British government [24]. A recent psychological model by Douglas and colleagues suggests that this disposition reflects a combination of epistemic, existential and social motivations [25]. For example, with respect to epistemic needs, it has been shown that individuals who have a high need for closure seize on conspiratorial explanations for uncertain events when such explanations are readily available [26]. Existential challenges such as anxiety-provoking situations [27] or the experience that life is uncontrollable also appear to lead to greater willingness to believe in conspiracies [28, 29]. With respect to social motives, some studies have found that conspiracy theories are associated with individual and collective narcissism [30, 31] and, consistent with this last observation, it has been found that people high in conspiracy mentality have a need to feel unique, and are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories if they think that they were endorsed only by a minority [3]. However, other individual differences that have been implicated in conspiracy theories appear to mirror those thought to be important in paranoia. For example, it has been reported that conspiracy theories are associated with poor analytic thinking [32, 29], and that, like paranoia, they are associated with insecure attachment [20, 33].

In a meta-analysis of 11 datasets from seven of these studies (plus one study not considered here because a nonspecific measure of schizotypy rather than paranoia was employed), Imhoff and Lamberty [3] found considerable heterogeneity in the data, but the overall effect size was equivalent to a correlation of r = .36 between paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories. In a complex analysis of data from an online survey of 209 German participants using three different measures of paranoia and three measures of belief in conspiracy theories, inter-correlations within the constructs (e.g., different measures of paranoia) were stronger than those between them and a two correlated factor model was found to best fit the data. The latent paranoia variable was found to correlate more with personal variables (e.g., high neuroticism, the tendency to feel egocentric threat) whereas the conspiracy belief factor correlated with politically relevant measures (e.g., low trust in government). These findings were broadly replicated in larger sample (N = 390) of US citizens.

Finally, in Studies 1 and 2 we examined the relationships between paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories and social relationships, although our predictions were more tentative. On the one hand, because (as Hofstadter pointed out) paranoid beliefs tend to be idiosyncratic whereas conspiracy theories tend to be shared, it might be predicted that paranoid people would be more socially isolated, and hence lonelier, than people who believe in conspiracy theories and, indeed, in a previous study with a student sample we found that paranoia was strongly associated with loneliness [47]. On the other hand, in previous studies, loneliness has been associated with poor interpersonal trust [48] and, in our own previous work, we found that conspiracy theories were associated with low social capital [20]. We therefore included a measure of loneliness in Studies 1 and 2.

First, confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were conducted to compare two models: a model in which all paranoia and conspiracy mentality items loaded on a single conspiracy/paranoia factor, and a model in which paranoia and conspiracy mentality are separate but correlated latent variables. Second, after establishing that the two-factor was a better fit, we examined associations with subscales of each of the other psychological constructs of interest (attachment style, self-schemas, locus of control and loneliness). For this purpose, we calculated a regression model in which all of the psychological constructs were entered simultaneously as predictors. In this model, conspiracy mentality (CMQ items) and paranoia (PaDS-R P items) were considered as latent factors, which were allowed to covary. This approach does not require us to partial out common and shared components of paranoia and conspiracist thinking but it does allow us to test for the specificity of the associations between constructs and belief systems. To achieve this, equality constraints were initially placed on the regression coefficients predicting the latent variables; these equality constraints were tested using Wald tests. If a Wald test was significant, the regression coefficients between the construct and paranoia and conspiracy theories were considered to be significantly different.

The model fit indices for the initial confirmatory factor models, which included only the PaDS-R P and CMS items, showed that the two factor model provided acceptable fit (χ2 (64) = 204.888, p > .05; RMSEA = .068; CFI = .934; TLI = .919, SRMR = .046) and the one factor model did not (χ2 (65)=844.474, p >.05; RMSEA = .158; CFI = .634; TLI = .561, SRMR = .126). The BIC was also lower for the two factor model (BIC = 21590.384) compared to the one factor model (BIC = 22300.743) and the difference was much greater than 10 points and so indicates very strong evidence of the superiority of the two factor model. The standardised factor loadings for the paranoia and conspiracy mentality latent variables were all high, positive and statistically significant ranging from .520 to .858, and the correlation between the latent variables was .417. The composite reliability [64] for paranoia (CR = .870) and conspiracy mentality (CR = .841) were high.

To assist in the interpretation of the findings, bivariate correlations and partial correlations (controlling for the other belief system) between paranoia and conspiracy mentality and each of the psychological constructs are shown in S1 Table. Partial correlations between belief systems and psychological constructs for the three studies.

The model fit indices for the CFA models which included the PaDS-R P and GCBS items showed that the two factor model provided acceptable fit (χ2 (274) = 2169.513, p >.05; RMSEA = .067; CFI = .892; TLI = .882, SRMR = .051) and the one factor model did not (χ2 (275) = 5816.359, p >.05; RMSEA = .115; CFI = .685; TLI = .657, SRMR = .120). The BIC was also lower for the two-factor model (BIC = 102145.63) compared to the one factor model (BIC = 107084.68) and indicates very strong evidence of the superiority of the two factor model. The standardised factor loadings for the paranoia and conspiracy mentality latent variables were all high, positive and statistically significant ranging from .488 to .842, and the correlation between the latent variables was .459. The composite reliability for paranoia (CR = .907) and conspiracy mentality (CR =.947) were high.

The regression model and Wald tests of whether the predictor variables are differentially associated with the two types of belief systems are shown in Table 4. In general, the patterns of association are similar to those observed in Study 1, but with higher significance. Both insecure attachment styles are associated with paranoia and not conspiracy theories. Paranoia but not conspiracy theories are associated with negative self-esteem whereas the opposite is true of positive self-esteem. For the locus of control subscales, both types of belief systems are associated with belief in powerful others and chance, although the association for chance is greater for conspiracy theories than for paranoia (the reverse was the case in Study 1); only conspiracy theories are associated with low internality scores (in Study 1 paranoia was associated with low internality). 2b1af7f3a8