Introduction

Conspiracy beliefs are frequently discussed in current social and political discourse and have been intensively studied in recent decades (for an overview, see Bilewicz et al., 2015; Van Prooijen, 2018). Interest in conspiracy beliefs has been fueled by their numerous negative health or political consequences, such as vaccination refusal (Ripp & Röer, 2022), increase in non-normative political actions (Imhoff et al., 2021), intergroup prejudices (Jolley et al., 2020), etc. Conspiracy belief is defined as the belief in the existence of various actors acting in secret to achieve hidden illicit or even malicious goals (Lobato et al., 2014). It could be considered a form of unfounded or speculative belief (Lobato et al., 2014), which is universal in the sense that it is common across times, cultures and social settings (Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018).

Various psychological mechanisms behind conspiracy beliefs have been identified, such as evolutionary (Aubert-Teillaud & Vaidis, 2023), cognitive (Marchlewska et al., 2018), emotional (Molenda et al., 2023), etc. In this study, we focus on personality traits and how they are related to endorsement of conspiracy beliefs. Examining personality traits in relation to conspiracy beliefs is important for several reasons. First, at the individual level, people differ in how intensely and how quickly they respond to external stimuli with a conspiracy interpretation (see below). Understanding inter-individual differences and the characteristics that influence the acceptance of conspiracy beliefs is an important step in planning interventions to mitigate them. As mentioned by Stasielowicz (2022), the results of studies focusing on the relationship between personality and conspiracy beliefs can help identify variables that should be considered when developing interventions to prevent or reduce conspiracy beliefs. In addition, Rebele et al. (2021) suggested that it is important to know whether the targeted behaviour is relatively dispositional or counter-dispositional given the personality of the target audience, as these two types of change require different tools. Understanding the personality dispositions of people who tend to accept conspiracies could inform the way how counter-conspiracy interventions are designed.

Previous studies have examined both maladaptive and non-pathological personality traits in the general range (e.g. Big Five). Among the general traits, Openness has been shown to be a positive correlate of conspiracy beliefs, which is usually explained by the fact that individuals high in Openness seek new and unusual ideas and are more likely to hold conspiracy beliefs (e.g., Ozimek et al., 2022; Swami et al., 2013). On the other hand, agreeableness has been shown to be negatively related to conspiracy beliefs, as it prevents hostility and mistrust that lead to conspiracy beliefs (e.g., Bowes et al., 2021; Bruder et al., 2013). Occasionally, other Big Five traits have also shown relationships with conspiracy beliefs, with neuroticism and extraversion being positively correlated (Heiss et al., 2021; Hollander, 2018) and conscientiousness negatively correlated (Bowes et al., 2021). The possible influence of neuroticism and extraversion on conspiracies has recently been linked to the threat perception behind conspiracy beliefs (Heiss et al., 2021). Neuroticism may increase endorsement of conspiracy beliefs, particularly due to higher uncertainty and anxiety leading to higher threat perceptions. On the other hand, extraverted individuals tend to make impulsive decisions and have less cognitive engagement with social issues, which in turn may lead to higher endorsement of conspiracies. However, meta-analytic studies have shown that when we aggregate the effect sizes of these correlations, the Big Five personality factors are either not significantly associated with conspiracy beliefs or the overall effects are very small (Goreis & Voracek, 2019; Stasielowicz, 2022). Based on these meta-analyses and their research, Heiss et al. (2021) argue that the role of personality traits might be context-specific and further longitudinal studies are needed to clarify how general personality traits can influence conspiracy beliefs, especially in times of crisis. Major crises such as wars or pandemics have a strong impact on levels of distress and mental health in society (e.g. Lim et al., 2022; Chudzicka-Czupała et al., 2022, 2023) and may contribute to the personality-related behaviours that lead to higher acceptance of conspiracy beliefs, e.g. hypervigilant information seeking, etc.

Numerous studies have been conducted on various maladaptive or socially-aversive traits. Previous research has shown that paranoid tendencies and schizotypal personality have a positive influence on endorsement of conspiracy beliefs (Brotherton & Eser, 2015; Darwin et al., 2011). This is usually explained by the fact that individuals with higher levels of paranoid and schizotypal traits tend to be suspicious of other people, use magical thinking, have social anxiety, and hold unusual beliefs (Darwin et al., 2011). Regarding the dark triad, narcissism and machiavellianism in particular have been shown to be positive predictors of conspiracy beliefs (e.g. Kay, 2021; Teličák & Halama, 2020). Cichocka et al. (2016) claimed that a narcissistic personality is more prone to conspiracy beliefs due to a tendency towards paranoid beliefs, as narcissistic personalities are overly concerned about how they are perceived by others. In addition, machiavellians have a low level of trust in the environment and a higher need for control, which can be compensated for by conspiracy beliefs (Douglas et al., 2017; Kay, 2021). Maladaptive personality traits have been used in several studies and are represented by an alternative model of personality disorders (PID-5) (APA, 2013). The model comprises five dimensions, each of which represents a maladaptive extreme of one of the Big Five personality traits: negative affectivity, detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism. The studies used the Personality Inventory for the DSM-5 (PID-5, Krueger et al., 2012) to measure these maladaptive tendencies and found that all of these traits in particular showed significant relationships with conspiracy beliefs (Bowes et al., 2021; Swami et al., 2016), with the largest effect found for psychoticism. As psychoticism is primarily characterised by unusual forms of beliefs associated with perceptual dysregulation (APA, 2013), individuals with higher levels of psychoticism may be more inclined to accept a range of anomalous evidence. Individuals with high levels of psychoticism may rely too much on intuitive-experiential processing of information, which favours the acceptance of theories and ideas for which there is no evidence (Swami et al., 2016; Teličák & Halama, 2021).

Current study

In this study, we investigated how personality traits predict belief in specific conspiracies related to current social events, specifically COVID-19 conspiracies and conspiracies related to the Russian-Ukrainian war. COVID-19 conspiracies emerged along with the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 and included conspiracy interpretations of disease origin, prevention guidelines, and vaccination or COVID-19 treatment (Shahsavari et al., 2020; Mulukom et al., 2022). COVID-19 conspiracies have been shown to reduce institutional trust and support for government regulations (Pummerer et al., 2022) and increase vaccine hesitancy (Jennings et al., 2021). When the Russo-Ukrainian war began in February 2022, conflict-related conspiracies also spread in society. These conspiracies related to the reasons for the war (e.g., that the US has secret biological weapons in Ukraine), questioned important personalities (e.g., the Nazi identity of the Ukrainian president), or turned TV reports about the war upside down (e.g., that the war victims are hired actors) (e.g., Terracciano, 2023). In Western countries, these conspiracies can mobilise the public in democracies for pro-Russian political parties or undermine public support for Ukraine (Radnitz, 2023). As mentioned above, some personality traits may contribute to the adoption of conspiracy beliefs, however, most research has focused on general conspiracy measures such as the GMQ (Bruder et al., 2013), but not on specific conspiracies related to new social events. Moreover, the majority of personality research on conspiracies has been conducted with samples from Western Europe or America; studies from Eastern Europe, where levels of conspiracy thinking are higher than in Western European countries (e.g., Jabkowski et al., 2023), are underrepresented. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by focusing on how both general personality traits (Big Five) and maladaptive traits (Personality Inventory for DSM-5) predict two specific conspiracy beliefs mentioned above related to COVID-19 and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the Slovak population. The decision to include both general and pathological traits was motivated by the empirical fact that pathological traits are not only accentuated forms of normal/general traits, but that the variance of both types of traits is distinguishable from each other (Krueger et al., 2012; Suzuki et al., 2017). Hart et al. (2021) emphasise that neglecting pathological traits can limit conclusions and argue for a combination of both types of traits as a step towards a more complex investigation of personality effects. We chose a three-wave longitudinal design with personality measures in the first wave (during the COVID-19 pandemic but before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and conspiracy measures in the second and third waves after the invasion. We formulated three specific hypotheses based on the previous, most robust results (Bowes et al., 2021; Teličák & Halama, 2021):

  • H1: Agreeableness would negatively predict the specific conspiracy beliefs related to COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

  • H2: Openness would positively predict the specific conspiracy beliefs related to COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

  • H3: Psychoticism would positively predict the specific conspiracy beliefs related to COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Method

Participants

The data was collected over three time points using an online survey developed in Qualtrics. This survey was conducted as part of a longitudinal study examining the psychological factors of unfounded information and beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 925 adults (50.2% women) aged between 18 and 85 years (M = 49.53; SD = 15.81) took part in all three waves of the survey. The data from the first wave was collected in October 2021, the second and third waves were conducted in July-August 2022 and April-May 2023. The dropout rate was 22.7% between the first and second waves and 34.8% between the second and third waves. Attention check items were included in all three waves and only respondents responding correctly to these items were included in the study. In terms of education, 26.4% of the participants included in the analysis had a primary school education or an incomplete secondary school education, 48.5% had a secondary school education and 25.1% had completed a university education. The mean social status of the participants, estimated using a 10-level social ladder (1 being the lowest and 10 the highest), was 5.44 (SD = 1.56). Participants were recruited from the online panel by a research agency that adhered to ESOMAR standards and they were compensated based on the agency’s internal scoring system. The sample was representative of the Slovak population in terms of age, gender, region and education. The data collection was conducted anonymously after the participants gave their explicit consent to participate in the survey. All procedures complied with APA standards and the raw data is available at https://osf.io/yjsfr/?view_only=810e30fba7ef43e796dd13566cb9dd00.

Measures

The COVID-19 Unfounded Beliefs Scale was used to measure unfounded beliefs about COVID-19 (Teličák & Halama, 2022). The scale was developed in Slovak language and contains a wide range of unfounded beliefs related to COVID-19, but we used only the conspiracy dimension, which contains 6 items on conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19, measured on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (e.g., „The COVID-19 pandemic is deliberately caused by pharmaceutical companies to make profit”). The scale in the original study (Teličák & Halama, 2022) showed good reliability and validity. The omega coefficients of the scale in the current sample are shown in Table 1.

Conspiracy beliefs about the Russian-Ukrainian war were measured with the Pro-Kremlin Conspiracy Scale (Šrol & Čavojová, 2024), which included 7 items with responses on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (e.g., “The war in Ukraine is staged; paid actors and actresses can be seen in the scenes”). The individual items reflect conspiracy ideas that are spread in the Slovak context by alternative media and various extremist political groups. The omega coefficients of the current sample are shown in Table 1.

The Slovak version of the Big Five Inventory Short version (BFI-S, Kohút et al., 2020) was used to assess personality traits. This inventory includes 30 items that are answered on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 to 5, where 1 stands for “strongly disagree” and 5 for “strongly agree”. The items are divided into five different dimensions: Extraversion (e.g. “Is full of energy”), Agreeableness (e.g. “Has a forgiving nature”), Conscientiousness (e.g. “Tends to be lazy”), Negative Emotionality (e.g. “Worries a lot”) and Open-mindedness (e.g. “Has little creativity”). The omega coefficients of the current sample are shown in Table 1.

The Short Personality Questionnaire for DSM-5 (PID5-BF), developed by Krueger et al. (2012) in the Slovak version (Heretik et al., 2018), was used to assess maladaptive traits. This questionnaire comprises 25 items, which are answered on a 4-point Likert scale from 0 to 3, where 0 stands for “very false” and 3 for “very true” The items are divided into five different dimensions: Detachment (e.g. “I often feel like nothing I do really matters”), Antagonism (e.g. “I crave attention”), Psychoticism (e.g. “I seen things that weren’t really there”), Disinhibition (e.g. “I feel like I act totally on impulse”) and Negative Affectivity (e.g. “I worry about almost everything”). The omega coefficients in the current sample are shown in Table 1.

Statistical procedures

The statistical software SPSS-23 and R-Studio were used to process the research data. McDonald’s Omega was used to assess the internal consistency of the scales and the individual dimensions. Spearman correlation analysis was performed to estimate the bivariate correlations between the variables. The predictive effect of the Big Five and PID-5 from the first wave on COVID-19 and Russo-Ukrainian war conspiracies from the second and third waves was examined by robust regression analysis using R-Studio, the packages “robustbase”, “dplyr” and “car”. The regression analysis was carried out separately for the second and third waves. Gender, age, education and social status from the first wave were included in the regression equation as predictors together with Big-5 and PID-5. We used skewness, kurtosis and Q-Q plots as a reference framework for evaluating the assumptions of the regression analysis. The presence of multicollinearity among the predictors was determined by estimating the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) coefficients. The descriptive analysis of the measured variables is presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Descriptive analysis of measures
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Results

The results of the correlation analysis of all measures included in the study are shown in Table 2. It was found that specific conspiracies related to COVID-19 correlated with extraversion and partially with agreeableness (negatively) and conscientiousness (positively). All specific conspiracies showed high reciprocal positive correlations across both waves.

The results of the robust regression analysis are shown separately for the second and third waves in Table 3. In all cases, the VIF coefficients were within the favourable range of 1.10 to 2.53. As in the second wave, demographic variables such as age positively predicted conspiracy beliefs related to COVID-19 and the Russian-Ukrainian war, while education and socioeconomic status were negative predictors of these beliefs. Less educated, older individuals and those with low socioeconomic status had higher levels of conspiracy beliefs regarding COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Of the Big Five personality traits, extraversion positively predicted conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and the Russian-Ukrainian war, while agreeableness and openness had negative effects, but only on conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19. As for the PID-5, psychoticism had a positive predictive effect on conspiracy beliefs about the Russian-Ukrainian war. The regression coefficients were generally low (up to 0.19), and the percentage of explained variance was 10% in the case of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and 11% in the case of Russian-Ukrainian war conspiracy beliefs.

The results for the third wave showed a similar effect of demographic variables. Women, less educated, older people and people with low socioeconomic status had higher scores for conspiracy beliefs. Extraversion was a positive predictor and agreeableness was a negative predictor for both types of conspiracies. In this case, Openness was also a negative predictor of conspiracies about COVID-19. From the PID-5, Psychoticism was found to positively predict both types of conspiracies. Again, the effects were rather small and the percentage of explained variance was low: 10% for the COVID-19 conspiracies and 10% for the Russian-Ukrainian war conspiracies. With regard to the hypothesis formulated above, we were able to confirm hypothesis H1, which suggests a negative predictive effect of agreeableness on a specific hypothesis. Hypothesis H3 was also confirmed, although one of the four effects was only marginally significant. In contrast, hypothesis H2, which states that openness would positively predict specific conspiracies, could not be confirmed. Contrary to our assumption, two of the openness effects even showed slightly negative values.

Table 2 Correlation matrix of the variables (Spearman´s correlations)
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Table 3 Results of robust regression analysis of demographic and personality variables on COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukrainian war conspiracy beliefs
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Discussion

In the present study, we investigated how general and maladaptive personality traits predicted specific conspiracies related to recent societal events - the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war. We used a three-wave longitudinal design with personality measures in the first wave (October 2021) and conspiracy measures in the second and third waves (July-August 2022 and April-May 2023). We hypothesised that low agreeableness and high openness and psychoticism would predict the adoption of specific conspiracy beliefs (Bowes et al., 2021; Teličák & Halama, 2021). The effect of agreeableness was confirmed in almost all cases. Agreeableness negatively predicted COVID-19 conspiracies at the second time point, and both COVID-19 and Russian-Ukrainian war conspiracies at the third time point. These results confirmed previous research on the negative relationship between agreeableness and conspiracy beliefs. As we have already suggested, a possible explanation for this effect could lie in the nature of this trait, which includes traits such as politeness, kindness and generosity, but also more trust and a more optimistic view of others. These traits can be related to hostility and mistrust which are correlates of conspiracy beliefs (e.g. Bowes et al., 2021; Bruder et al., 2013).

However, we were unable to confirm the positive relationship of openness with conspiracies. On the contrary, openness showed a slightly negative association with COVID-19 conspiracies in both waves. Some previous studies suggested that high openness can promote belief in a conspiracy through the search for new and unusual ideas (e.g., Ozimek et al., 2022; Swami et al., 2013), but our results rather suggest that a reverse effect is also possible. We hypothesise that this might be related to the fact that low openness is often found as a correlate of radical, authoritarian or even extremist attitudes and political affiliations. Previous research has confirmed that low Openness is related to conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism (e.g. Hotchin & West, 2018), militant extremist mindset (Furnham et al., 2020) and support for radical right parties (Aichholzer, & Zandonella, 2016). As Slovakia is one of the countries where politicians often campaign for voters with conspiracy beliefs (Plenta, 2020), the relationship of low openness or narrow-mindedness with political preferences could be significant. Political parties at the populist, radical or extreme pole support the belief in specific anti-system conspiracies (Wood & Gray, 2019). Thus, the explanation for the negative relationship between openness and conspiracy beliefs could be mediated by political affiliation with the radical and extremist parties. In this sense, high openness can also be a buffer against conspiracies (Li et al., 2023).

Contrary to our assumptions, extraversion showed the highest and most consistent positive association with beliefs in specific conspiracies. It predicted both the COVID-19 and the Russian-Ukrainian conspiracies in both waves. Although extraversion was rarely mentioned as a personality trait that promotes belief in conspiracies, Heiss et al. (2021) also found a positive association between extraversion and conspiracy beliefs, which they explained with a higher tendency of extraverts to make impulsive decisions and a lower cognitive engagement with social issues (see also Heiss & Matthes, 2017). We hypothesise that a higher propensity for conspiracies may be associated with impulsive information-seeking patterns, particularly in the case of threatening and unsettling events such as pandemics and wars (e.g. Lim et al., 2022; Chudzicka-Czupała et al., 2022). Kohút et al. (2021) found that extraversion correlated positively with negative emotional reactions to COVID-19, and they argue that extraversion may increase dependence on interpersonal information sources and facilitate feelings of threat, especially when this is the predominant feeling in society. When conspiracies related to threatening social events began to spread, extraverted individuals have a higher likelihood of encountering and adopting them.

Among maladaptive traits, only psychoticism showed a significant association with specific conspiracy beliefs. As we hypothesised, this association was positive and is consistent with previous studies showing that psychoticism had the largest association with conspiracy beliefs compared to the other maladaptive traits (Bowes et al., 2021; Swami et al., 2016). As previously mentioned, psychoticism is characterised by unconventional belief patterns and perceptual dysregulation (APA, 2013), meaning that individuals with higher levels of psychoticism may have a greater propensity to hold various unfounded beliefs, including conspiracy theories. In addition, individuals with heightened psychoticism rely on intuitive-experiential information processing, which may contribute to the acceptance of theories and ideas without empirical evidence (Escolà-Gascón et al., 2023).

Limitations

Our study has several limitations. First of all, despite the longitudinal design, the first time point was during the pandemic (October 2021), and the COVID-19 conspiracies were already widespread. Also, due to space constraints, we did not include personality measures in the second and third waves, so we could not examine possible changes in personality measures and their effects. We based our assumption on the generally accepted assumption that personality traits are relatively stable characteristics. However, some studies suggested that this may not always be the case and that they can fluctuate due to various factors such as life events (Bleidorn et al., 2018). Therefore, the nature of our study and the relationships between the variables are still correlational and the causal interpretation of the effect of personality traits on specific conspiracy beliefs is therefore limited.

Finally, it should be noted that all significant effects were small with absolute values of the regression coefficients around 0.10–0.20. Although we do not consider them negligible, it should be noted that the personality traits selected in our study seem to have only a small association with the adoption of specific conspiracies related to new social events (see also Goreis & Voracek, 2019; Stasielowicz, 2022). In our study, we focused on the Big Five personality traits and maladaptive traits as defined in the Personality Inventory for DSM-5. Several other trait models might be relevant to conspiracy theory, e.g., the dark triad (Kay, 2021) or cognitively based traits such as analytic cognitive style (Ballová Mikušková, 2021). These were not investigated here, but could also be important predictors or interact with other variables in predicting conspiracy beliefs. The other variables and processes should also be considered in the search for general factors for turning to specific conspiracies, especially socioeconomic factors (e.g., Adamus et al., 2024). However, our study suggests that personality traits may play some role in these processes. Possible interactions between personality and socioeconomic factors should be the subject of future research combining both variables.