A conspiratorial mindset subtly reveals itself in the words people choose

People who are prone to conspiratorial thinking do not always write fully formed conspiracy theories when asked to interpret ambiguous events, but their worldview still leaks into their writing through specific word choices. A recent study published in the journal PLOS One provides evidence that while these individuals may not spontaneously construct complex conspiratorial plots, they consistently use a recognizable vocabulary of suspicion and power.

Conspiracy theories are alternative narratives that explain major events as the secret work of powerful, malicious groups. Belief in these narratives tends to have negative social consequences, such as lowered trust in science and reduced adherence to social norms. Belief in conspiracy theories goes beyond harmless internet speculation and has been linked to decreased support for public health initiatives and lower engagement in pro-environmental behaviors. Scientists want to understand the psychological roots of these beliefs to better address their impact on society.

Previous studies have explored why people believe in conspiracies, often pointing to a psychological need for certainty and control in an unpredictable world. Individuals with a strong conspiratorial worldview often have a low tolerance for ambiguity and tend to see meaningful connections between completely random events. They are prone to assigning hidden motives to the world around them, acting as if nothing happens by accident.

However, relatively little attention has been given to how these narratives are actually generated by individuals. Scientists conducted this study to see if a general predisposition toward conspiratorial thinking, often called conspiracism, leads people to spontaneously create conspiracy theories when faced with an unexplained situation.

Alessandro Miani, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, wanted to test this exact link. “After we built LOCO, the largest available corpus of conspiracy theories, we became interested in testing whether conspiracy beliefs and conspiratorial language are actually connected,” Miani said.

“Most prior research has analyzed the language of conspiracy websites and social media at the level of the text, but there were no studies to test whether individual psychological differences such as conspiracy mentality (the tendency to interpret events as the product of secret plots) translate into how a person actually use[s] language and writes.”

To test this idea, the authors designed an experiment centered around the apocalyptic psychological thriller “Leave the World Behind.” This particular film was chosen because it features an ambiguous, open-ended plot with a fractured timeline that invites viewers to guess what is happening behind the scenes. A sample of 285 university students in Italy watched the movie and were asked to write a short essay explaining their personal interpretation of its meaning.

The researchers measured each participant’s level of conspiratorial thinking using a standard psychological questionnaire called the Conspiracy Mentality Scale. To evaluate the essays, they used a large language model, which is a type of artificial intelligence programmed to understand and generate human language. The artificial intelligence rated each essay based on how strongly it featured a conspiratorial narrative.

Against the expectations of the researchers, the scores representing conspiratorial thinking did not match up with the level of conspiratorial narrative in the essays. People with a strong tendency to believe in conspiracies were no more likely to write a complete conspiracy theory than those with low scores.

Suspecting that the specific psychological questionnaire might not have captured the right nuances for their Italian participants, the authors conducted a second study. This time, they recruited 100 different university students. The procedure remained exactly the same, but the researchers swapped the original questionnaire for the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale.

This alternative scale asks more direct questions about government cover-ups, secret organizations, and hidden knowledge. Even with this more direct measurement tool, the results remained identical. The researchers again found no meaningful association between a participant’s conspiratorial mindset and the overarching narrative of their written interpretation.

“We were surprised that conspiratorial narratives did not emerge as we had predicted,” Miani told PsyPost. “We preregistered the hypothesis that people higher in conspiracism would ‘fill the gaps’ of an ambiguous film with conspiratorial interpretations, and we ran two studies with two different conspiracy-belief scales. In both, the expected link between conspiracism and conspiratorial narrative content simply wasn’t there.”

To understand what was happening, the scientists combined the data from both studies, yielding a total sample of 385 participants. They decided to look closer at the specific words the participants used, rather than the overall narrative structure. They utilized a custom dictionary of conspiracy-related terms, such as deception, government, and elite, to see if participants were using the vocabulary of conspiracies even if they were not writing full conspiracy theories.

This detailed analysis revealed that participants with higher levels of conspiratorial thinking did indeed use more conspiracy-related words. “When we asked them to interpret an ambiguous event (in our case, the apocalyptic thriller ‘Leave the World Behind’), people with a stronger conspiracy mentality tend to use language that aligns with that found on conspiracy websites (using words such as ‘deception’, ‘government’, ‘world’),” Miani said.

But Miani noted that the effect is specific to vocabulary. “There’s a caveat: they did not actually construct a conspiratorial narrative as a coherent story in which a malevolent elite secretly orchestrates harm against the public,” he said. “Instead, conspiracy mentality seems to be associated with word choice.”

The participants also displayed a linguistic trait the researchers call megalalia, which is the disproportionate use of highly sophisticated words within an otherwise simple text. The authors suggest this might be an attempt to sound more authoritative or uniquely intelligent.

To measure how advanced the participants’ vocabulary was, the researchers used a novel method to calculate lexical sophistication. They programmed an artificial intelligence to estimate the age of acquisition for thousands of Italian words, acting on the principle that words learned later in life are generally perceived as more complex. When applying this metric to the essays, they found that participants with higher conspiratorial tendencies actually had a lower overall level of lexical sophistication, despite their habit of occasionally dropping in unusually large words.

Additionally, these participants tended to write sentences with greater syntactic complexity, meaning their sentence structures were more complicated and layered. This combination of complex grammar and specific, suspicion-laden vocabulary suggests that a conspiratorial mindset shapes the stylistic building blocks of a person’s writing.

Miani emphasized how to view these results in context. “The main practical takeaway is that there are measurable individual differences in language use tied to conspiracy mentality, but they are small and operate at the lexical word-choice level rather than at the level of structured narratives,” Miani said. “The associations we found were modest.”

The scientists compared these findings to what is typically seen in online spaces dedicated to conspiracy theories. In naturalistic online environments, conspiracy-related texts tend to be much longer and feature a scattered structure that jumps between unrelated topics. This fragmented style is often used to overwhelm readers with supposed evidence in order to persuade them.

In the laboratory setting, however, the participants did not write longer essays, nor did they show the scattered structure typical of online forums. The researchers think this difference highlights the role of the environment in shaping how people express their beliefs. Online, people are actively trying to recruit others to their way of thinking.

“When interpreting an ambiguous event like the film we showed them, participants higher in conspiracism did not write conspiratorial narratives as we had expected. Instead, they used vocabulary that aligns with the language found on conspiracy websites,” Miani said. “It’s also worth noting the setting matters: this was a lab study for course credit, where participants likely had little motivation to persuade anyone, unlike people posting on conspiracy forums online.”

Miani also cautioned against taking the lack of story-based findings out of context. “I would flag that ‘no association with conspiratorial narratives’ should not be read as ‘conspiracism has no relationship to language’,” Miani said. “It does relate to language; it just shows up in word choice rather than in fully built narratives. And this association must be interpreted in light of our limitations.”

Another limitation is the reliance on artificial intelligence to score the essays for conspiratorial narratives. Large language models might only recognize a conspiracy theory if the text is highly structured and logically connected. If a participant expressed their beliefs in a fragmented or disorganized way, the artificial intelligence might have missed the conspiratorial intent. The simple dictionary method, which only counted specific words, bypassed this issue and successfully identified the underlying worldview.

Future research should explore how conspiracy theories are built in group settings rather than by isolated individuals. The authors propose that complex conspiracy theories might not spring fully formed from a single person’s mind. Instead, they might develop cumulatively as many different people exchange ideas, share specific vocabulary words, and slowly build a shared narrative over time.

“If our result[s] are replicated in different settings, it raises an interesting question: who is actually creating the conspiracy theories we see circulating online?” Miani said. This line of inquiry represents the next phase for the research team.

Scientists might investigate whether the most prominent online conspiracy theories are written by genuine believers or by actors intentionally spreading misinformation for political or financial gain. Understanding the difference between organic belief and strategic manipulation could help society better address the spread of false information.

The study, “Leave the world(view) behind, but keep the words: The effect of conspiracism on writing,” was authored by Alessandro Miani, Ines Adornetti, Daniela Altavilla, Valentina Deriu, Alessandra Chiera, and Francesco Ferretti.