Across more than 1,200 participants, Nottingham researchers report that adversity tracked conspiracy belief via perceptions that the world is unfair — and tested the link experimentally.
Adversity is common and conspiracy belief is not, which is the problem any account connecting the two has to solve. A paper in the British Journal of Psychology proposes that the connecting variable is not the hardship but what the hardship teaches a person about how the world works.
The lead author, Dr Daniel Jolley of the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham, put the puzzle first. “Many people experience significant adversity during their lives, yet most do not become conspiracy believers,” he said. “Our findings suggest it isn’t hardship alone that matters, but how those experiences shape the way people see the world.”
The work, carried out with Dr Laura Blackie and in collaboration with the University of Cumbria, comprises three studies and more than 1,200 participants.
Correlational, then experimental
The first study asked about adverse life events — serious illness or injury, bereavement, financial difficulties, relationship breakdown, violence — and found that people reporting more of them were more likely to see the world as unjust. Those perceptions in turn were linked to stronger conspiracy beliefs.
The second narrowed to a specific form of adversity. People who had experienced violent victimisation reported stronger perceptions of injustice than those who had never been a crime victim, and those perceptions were again associated with stronger conspiracy beliefs — a relationship that held after accounting for influential demographic factors.
The third study is the one that does the structural work, because it manipulated the proposed mechanism rather than measuring it. Participants told that society was becoming more unfair reported stronger conspiracy beliefs than those told it was becoming fairer.
That design matters. The first two studies could be read in either causal direction, since a person inclined to think institutions conspire against them has an obvious reason to perceive the world as unjust. An experiment that shifts the perception of fairness and observes a shift in conspiracy belief puts at least one arrow in a definite direction.
Why the pathway is plausible
Conspiracy theories share a common structure: outcomes are not accidents, powerful actors are arranging them, and the arrangement is hidden. A person who has concluded from experience that the world distributes outcomes unfairly already accepts the first half of that structure, and the theory supplies an agent to blame.
There is a coherence to it that is worth stating without endorsement. If bad things have happened to you that you did not deserve, an explanation in which someone caused them is in one sense more orderly than an explanation in which they simply happened. The study’s framing is that adversity does not produce belief directly but alters the interpretive lens through which later information is read.
Greater adversity was also linked, through the same perceptions of injustice, to lower trust in institutions alongside higher endorsement of political conspiracy beliefs. Those two travel together in much of the literature, and the direction of influence between them is not something this study resolves.
The authors’ own caveat
Blackie was explicit about the limits of the overall picture.
“While our findings do not establish causality,” she said, the results “point to an important pathway through which adversity may shape how people view society”.
That caveat applies to the full chain rather than to every link. The experimental study provides evidence that perceived unfairness can move conspiracy belief; it does not show that lifetime adversity causes the perception of unfairness, which remains the correlational part of the model and the part where reverse causation and common causes are hardest to exclude.
A manipulation study also establishes a short-term effect in a controlled setting. Being told that society is becoming more unfair and reporting stronger conspiracy beliefs minutes later is not the same phenomenon as a decade of hardship reshaping someone’s worldview, even if the first is offered as a model of the second.
What the release does not report
The page gives the sample size and nothing else statistical: no effect sizes, no confidence intervals, no indication of how large the experimental difference was. For a mediation model — which is what this is — those numbers are the result, since mediation analyses routinely produce statistically detectable but small indirect effects, and a reader cannot tell from the release whether perceived injustice accounts for much of the adversity–conspiracy relationship or a sliver of it.
The measures are also self-reported throughout, including the adversity history, which is retrospective. People who currently view the world as unjust may recall and report past adversity differently from people who do not, and that alone could generate part of the association in studies one and two.
What follows, and what does not
The applied reading the authors gesture toward is that interventions aimed at conspiracy belief might work better by addressing perceived injustice than by correcting specific claims, and the logic is reasonable: if the belief rests on a general conviction that the world is unfair, rebutting one theory leaves that conviction intact and available for the next one.
Whether that works is untested here. It is a hypothesis generated by the model, and the gap between demonstrating a pathway and successfully intervening on it is wide.
One misreading should be headed off. A finding that adversity predicts conspiracy belief through perceived injustice is not a finding that people who hold conspiracy beliefs are simply reacting emotionally to hardship, nor that perceptions of unfairness are mistaken. Whether any particular perception of injustice is accurate is a separate question that the study does not address, and in a sample reporting bereavement, financial difficulty and violent victimisation, a good deal of the unfairness being perceived is real.
The research was funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme. The paper was published on 5 August 2026.
Notes
- Jolley, D., Blackie, L. “The world is an unjust place: The impact of lifetime adversity on belief in conspiracy theories.” British Journal of Psychology, 2026. DOI: 10.1111/bjop.70101.
- University of Nottingham. “Why life’s hardships may make conspiracy theories more appealing.” EurekAlert!, 4 August 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138583.