作者：Jia-Yan Mao, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Shen-Long Yang and Yong-Yu Guo

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have endorsed conspiracy theories about foreign governments yet shown increased trust and support for their own government. Whether there is a potential correlation between these social phenomena and the psychological mechanisms behind them is still unclear. Integrating insights from the existential threat model of conspiracy theories and system justification theory, two experimental studies were conducted to investigate whether belief in out-group conspiracy theories can play a mediating role in the effects of system threat on people’s sys- tem justification beliefs against the background of the pandemic. The results show that system threat positively predicts individuals’ system-justifying belief, and belief in out-group conspiracy theories mediated this relationship.

Keywords

COVID-19, system threat, conspiracy theories, system-justifying belief

链接：System Threat during a Pandemic: How Conspiracy Theories Help to Justify the System .pdf

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