The relationship between epistemic stance, mentalizing, paranoid distress and conspiracy mentality: an empirical investigation.

Epistemic stance, comprising epistemic trust, mistrust, and credulity, and the closely related construct of mentalizing have been related to paranoid ideation and conspiracy mentality. All phenomena are common in the general population and may become clinically and societally relevant at an extreme expression by influencing an individual's positioning towards socially transmitted information possibly as far as complete social detachment or attachment to extremist views. Herein, an individual's experienced distress may play an important role, which has however largely been neglected in empirical research.