All you'll feel is doom and gloom: Multiple perspectives on the associations between economic anxiety and conspiracy beliefs

Abstract

The article investigates whether and how adherence to conspiracy beliefs (CBs) about COVID-19 pandemic might be associated with (and cause) economic anxiety over various cultural settings and time. First, we examined the extent to which CBs predicted economic anxiety using the European Social Survey data, round 10, from 17 countries (Study 1). Second, using data from a balanced (in terms of age, gender, education, and region) Slovak sample, we employed a cross-lagged panel analysis to determine the direction of the association between adherence to CBs and economic anxiety (Study 2). Study 1 revealed that adherence to CBs was significantly associated with higher levels of economic anxiety across cultural contexts. Study 2 compellingly showed that adherence to CBs increased the sense of economic anxiety over time, whereas the reverse causal path from economic anxiety to CBs was consistently nonsignificant. This work provides evidence that adherence to CBs may be increasingly associated with adverse subjective appraisals of economic realities. We discuss how our results can contribute to the understanding that curbing adherence to CBs could also alleviate the sense of economic anxiety. Finally, we recommend a research agenda to better understand the psychological boundary mechanisms accounting for these effects.