Conspiracy Beliefs As a Response to Adverse Societal Conditions: The Role of Low State Resilience, Low Societal Freedom, and High Cultural Tightness.

Conspiracy beliefs are mostly described as individual maladaptive tendencies. Extending this approach, we highlight the role of macro-level deficits that induce conspiracy beliefs especially during crises. Multimodal data showed that lower resilience and stricter cultural norms of a state and restricted societal freedoms of citizens predicted higher conspiracy beliefs.