The usual suspects: How psychological motives and thinking styles predict the endorsement of well-known and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs.

Research on belief in conspiracy theories identified many predictors but often failed to investigate them together. In the present study, we tested how the most important predictors of beliefs in conspiracy theories explain endorsing COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 conspiracy theories and conspiracy mentality. Apart from these three measures of conspiratorial thinking, participants ( = 354) completed several measures of epistemic, existential, and social psychological motives, as well as cognitive processing variables.