Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time? It seems not.

Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time? Joseph Uscinski et al. PLoS July 20, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270429

Abstract: The public is convinced that beliefs in conspiracy theories are increasing, and many scholars, journalists, and policymakers agree. Given the associations between conspiracy theories and many non-normative tendencies, lawmakers have called for policies to address these increases. However, little evidence has been provided to demonstrate that beliefs in conspiracy theories have, in fact, increased over time. We address this evidentiary gap. Study 1 investigates change in the proportion of Americans believing 46 conspiracy theories; our observations in some instances span half a century. Study 2 examines change in the proportion of individuals across six European countries believing six conspiracy theories. Study 3 traces beliefs about which groups are conspiring against “us,” while Study 4 tracks generalized conspiracy thinking in the U.S. from 2012 to 2021. In no instance do we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism, however operationalized. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our findings.

Conclusion

Numerous cross-sectional polls show that large numbers of people believe conspiracy theories, and online conspiracy theory content is plentiful. Perhaps because of this, many scholars, journalists, and policymakers are concerned that conspiracism is increasing. However, little systematic evidence demonstrating such increases has been produced. As one journalist at Vox put it, “there’s no hard evidence that conspiracy theories are circulating more widely today than ever before. But…it has certainly seemed like average Americans have bought into them more and more” [40].

The lack of systematic evidence owes to the fact that conspiracy theories became the subject of a sustained research program only around 2010. Regardless, claims about increases in conspiracy theory beliefs must be both testable and falsifiable if they are to be taken seriously. Minimally, hypothesized increases should be detectable using standard methods (such as, but not limited to, polling). If such hypotheses cannot be substantiated with supportive evidence, they should be appropriately qualified, refined to match the available evidence, or abandoned.

Across four studies––including four distinct operationalizations of conspiracism, temporal comparisons spanning between seven months and 55 years, and tens of thousands of observations from seven nations––we find only scant evidence that conspiracism, however operationalized, has increased. Although beliefs in 13 out of 52 conspiracy theories significantly increased over time (including those in both Study 1 and Study 2), these increases do not constitute sufficient evidence against the null hypothesis. In fact, we identified more decreases than increases, and the decreases were larger in magnitude than the increases. That only a quarter of the conspiracy theories we examined found more support over time––none of which involve the COVID-19 pandemic or QAnon––contradicts common wisdom.

The baseline levels of conspiracism we observe are concerning and social scientists should continue efforts at correcting them [e.g., 41]. By the same token, our finding that conspiracy theory beliefs are generally not increasing has implications for public discourse. Claims that beliefs in conspiracy theories are on the rise suggest that a new factor is to blame, or that a meaningful change in an old factor has occurred. In this vein, social media has––perhaps erroneously––taken much of the blame for supposed increases in conspiracy theory beliefs [CBS 7], which has implications for policies regarding content moderation and access.

However, we do not observe supporting evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories or generalized conspiracy thinking have increased during the Internet/social media era. Instead, our findings comport with arguments that the Internet may be less hospitable to conspiracy theories than is often assumed [42]. Our findings also comport with studies demonstrating that online conspiracy theories, “infodemics,” and echo chambers may not be as widespread [43–45] or influential as sometimes claimed [46], and are reflective of studies arguing that people are not engaging with or sharing conspiracy theories online as much as sometimes assumed [47–49]. Finally, the patterns we observe align with a broad literature on conspiracy theory beliefs showing that people are unlikely to believe a conspiracy theory unless they are both 1) already disposed to believe conspiracy theories generally, and 2) inclined towards the content of that particular conspiracy theory or the source from which it emanates [39,50,51]. In other words, online conspiracy theories might not persuade as much as reinforce existing views. Our findings are more congruent with the latter process than the former.

That said, our investigation is not without limitations. We are limited to the conspiracy theories polled on previously, and we cannot make claims about conspiracy theories we did not investigate. Still, we expect that we are more likely to observe growth in the types of ideas that researchers thought worthwhile to ask the public about than those they chose to ignore. We acknowledge that the many claims about increases in conspiracism are often vague and could mean numerous things. We have therefore tested several operationalizations of conspiracism in our four studies, but future research should continue testing for increases in other ways as well. We further acknowledge that no single study can poll in all political contexts. Some beliefs not included in Study 2 could be increasing in the six European countries polled; moreover, conspiracy theory beliefs could be increasing in some countries not accounted for here. We note that most polling of conspiracy theory beliefs has taken place in the U.S. during the last decade––efforts to comprehensively measure conspiracy theory beliefs with national polls across the globe are only slowly emerging [e.g., 52]. More work outside the U.S. is needed to test our central hypothesis more comprehensively.

We implore caution in making sweeping inferences from our findings. Our study should not be used to make claims about, or to excuse the behavior of, political elites who weaponize conspiracy theories. Moreover, trends in the coverage of conspiracy theories by news outlets or in the rhetorical use of conspiracy theories by political elites fall outside the purview of our investigation, as do the use of conspiracy theories by fake news purveyors, though we recommend that researchers continue to consider these topics.

Questions regarding the growth in conspiracy theory beliefs are important, with far-reaching normative and empirical implications for our understanding of political culture, free speech, Internet regulation, and radicalization. That we observe little supportive evidence for such growth, however operationalized, should give scholars, journalists, and policymakers pause. This is not to dismiss the availability of conspiracy theories online, the large numbers of people who believe in some conspiracy theories, or the potential consequences of those beliefs; nor is it to preclude the possibility of increases in the future, in ways not tested here, or in other socio-political contexts. It may be that conspiracy theories have been a constant, but that scholars, policymakers, and journalists are only recently beginning to pay appropriate attention to them. Thus, our findings offer both good and bad news: good, in that conspiracy theory beliefs are not increasing across the board; bad, in that conspiracy theories may be a more persistent and ubiquitous feature of human society than is desirable. Scholars still have much to discover about the psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs, as well as the role that elite communication and the information environment play in promoting those beliefs. In the meantime, we recommend caution in sounding alarms regarding the “golden age” of conspiracy theories and the degeneration of society into a “post-truth” era.

The ideomotor principle holds that anticipating the sensory consequences of a movement triggers an associated motor response; paper thinks it is time to generalize this principle

Ideomotor learning: Time to generalize a longstanding principle. Birte Moeller, Roland Pfister. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, July 22 2022, 104782. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104782

Highlights

• The ideomotor principle is a bedrock of contemporary approaches to action control

• Ideomotor (IM)-learning traditionally focuses on action-effect associations

• We apply the concept of common coding of action and perception to IM-learning

• The same mechanism should result in action-action and stimulus-stimulus learning

• This extension connects and integrates various approaches to human action control

Abstract: The ideomotor principle holds that anticipating the sensory consequences of a movement triggers an associated motor response. Even though this framework dates back to the 19th century, it continues to lie at the heart of many contemporary approaches to human action control. Here we specifically focus on the ideomotor learning mechanism that has to precede action initiation via effect anticipation. Traditional approaches to this learning mechanism focused on establishing novel action-effect (or response-effect) associations. Here we apply the theoretical concept of common coding for action and perception to argue that the same learning principle should result in response-response and stimulus-stimulus associations just as well. Generalizing ideomotor learning in such a way results in a powerful and general framework of ideomotor action control, and it allows for integrating the two seemingly separate fields of ideomotor approaches and hierarchical learning.

Keywords: ideomotor learningaction controlresponse-response associationstimulus-stimulus association

Big discounting... On their fertile days, women are more likely to opt for smaller now than for larger larger later rewards, be it money, food, or sex

Discounting for Money, Food, and Sex, over the Menstrual Cycle. Benjamin T. Vincent, Mariola Sztwiertnia, Rebecca Koomen & Jasmine G. Warren. Evolutionary Psychological Science, Jul 25 2022. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00334-z

Abstract: Sexual desire, physical activity, economic choices and other behaviours fluctuate over the menstrual cycle. However, we have an incomplete understanding of how preferences for smaller sooner or larger later rewards (known as delay discounting) change over the menstrual cycle. In this pre-registered, cross-sectional study, Bayesian linear and quadratic binomial regression analyses provide compelling evidence that delay discounting does change over the menstrual cycle. Data from 203 naturally cycling women show increased discounting (preference for more immediate rewards) mid-cycle, which is at least partially driven by changes in fertility. This study provides evidence for a robust and broad-spectrum increase in delay discounting (Cohen’s h ranging from 0.1 to 0.4) around the fertile point in the menstrual cycle across multiple commodities (money, food, and sex). We also show, for the first time, that discounting changes over the menstrual cycle in a pseudo-control group of 99 women on hormonal contraception. Interestingly, such women increase their discounting of sex toward the end of the menstrual phase — possibly reflecting a prioritisation of bonding-related sexual activity before menstrual onset.

Discussion

The present study aimed to address three questions. Firstly, we explored whether cycle phase (EF, LF, LP) influences delay discounting across the food, sex, and money commodities in NC women (see Fig. 1). Secondly, by assessing non-linear trends over the cycle for both NC and HC women, we found evidence for a quadratic trend for all commodities and both groups (see Fig. 2). For the NC group, immediate choices increased from the EF to the LF (when most fertile) and then decreased to the LP across all commodities. The same pattern occurred for the HC group for money and food; however, the opposite pattern was shown for sex. Thirdly, we explored whether change in discounting across the cycle could (at least partially) be explained by changes in fertility. This does seem to be the case, as NC women showed a linear increase in immediate choices across all commodities as a function of fertility (see Fig. 3).

The results summarised in Fig. 1 are in line with those of Lucas and Koff (2017). Similar to Lucas and Koff’s (2017) results, the probability of choosing immediate rewards increased from the EF to the LF, followed by a drop again in the LP; however, in contrast to their findings, they remained somewhat elevated compared to the EF phase. Our results go further, however, in that we show this pattern of behaviour generalises across all the commodities tested — money, food, and sex. The present findings did contradict the finding of lower preference for immediate monetary rewards near ovulation (Smith et al., 2014). Although they used hormonal assays to determine cycle phase which is more robust than the count-back method used in the present study, the authors only took measures on 2 days. The findings of the present study match those of Lucas and Koff (2017) which measured day of cycle at multiple timepoints.

Discounting for money, food, and sex changes over the menstrual cycle for NC women, with more immediate choices being made on average around the most fertile LF phase (see Fig. 2), is in line with the ovulatory shift hypothesis. NC individuals would theoretically be expected to optimise resources and immediate choices when conception is at a higher risk (da Matta et al., 2013; Gildersleeve et al., 2014). Additionally, there was support that some of the variation in discounting behaviour in NC women over the menstrual cycle can be attributed to fertility (see Fig. 3). Women who are NC are, on average, more likely to choose immediate rewards at more fertile points in their cycle. NC women should choose immediate rewards at peak fertility, especially sex, as they would be anticipating offspring. Biologically, we know that hormone levels during this point lead to increased impulsivity which is consistent with this result (Diekhof, 2015). The finding of preference for food increasing with fertility contradicts those by Fessler (2003) who reported a decrease in calorie consumption with fertility. However, this could be the result of the present study utilising discounting measures which represent a preference and do not necessarily translate to behaviour. For medium-/high-fertility levels, NC women are more likely to choose immediate lower-quality sex than HC women. This inspires the hypothesis that because HC bodies are more hormonally similar to pregnancy than NC bodies, perhaps higher-quality sex may be preferred as a method of partner bonding over an immediate but low-quality opportunity for intercourse and conception.

Interestingly, HC women discount more for money and food, only matched by NC women at peak fertility. The rise and fall of immediate choices for money and food were even more exaggerated compared to NC women. Most hormonal contraceptives function through simulating pregnancy. Therefore, HC individuals would need resources for offspring. Again, biologically this is plausible as HC hormone levels are most similar to the fertile point of the cycle. The exception to the above was discounting of sex by HC women. The probability of choosing immediate low-quality sex over delayed high-quality sex seemed to be approximately stable but with an increase toward the end of the menstrual cycle. This could be noise that may disappear in a study with more participants or using a longitudinal design. If not, a speculative hypothesis (to be tested in a future study) would be that it represents a desire to have sex before the next menstrual period begins. Given that there is no risk of conception to HC individuals, they may be opportunistically choosing intercourse later in the cycle (LP) to avoid having intercourse during menstruation. Vaginal intercourse during menstruation has medical implications, including an increased risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and endometriosis (Mazokopakis & Samonis, 2018). Another plausible explanation for this result could be that HC can lead to increased libido as it improves PMS and studies have shown increased female-initiated activity later in the pill cycle (LP; Guillebaud, 2017). The quadratic trends seen within the HC group were unexpected, and although hypotheses can be speculated, there is a need for future research to consider the mechanisms underlying these findings, and whether HC type has a role.

Additionally, not comparing different types of HC is problematic as the different types have varying hormonal effects (Hampson, 2020). Further studies should include an HC sample when investigating the menstrual cycle and account for the type and duration of contraceptive use. Both the present study and Lucas and Koff (2017) used cross-sectional designs which is problematic as menstrual cycles vary between females and as such a within-subject design would be beneficial for future research. While the Cohen’s h effect sizes are “small”, this should be interpreted with extreme caution — they are entirely unlike Cohen’s d effect sizes, taking no account of the difference normalised by the degree of variance, nor the sample size. As such, in the context of delay discounting, a change from ~ 7.5 to ~ 20% immediate low-quality over delayed high-quality sex choices (see Fig. 1, top right) could be considered as a behaviourally meaningful change. We do not make strong claims based on our data about the exact shape of this change over the menstrual cycle, nor about the location of the peak of immediate choices. The present study used quadratic regression which has been used before in tracking how variables change over the menstrual cycle (Kuukasjärvi et al., 2004). Future research should continue with this non-linear form of analysis over days (not categorical phases) to encompass changes across the menstrual cycle phases as other analyses may fail to capture its cyclical nature.

World War II Blues: The Long–lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma

World War II Blues: The Long–lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma. Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel, Erdal Tekin & Belgi Turan. NBER Working Paper 30284. Jul 2022. DOI 10.3386/w30284

Abstract: There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is also on the rise. We examine the causal impact of early life exposure to warfare on long–term mental health, using novel data on the amount of bombs dropped in German cities by Allied Air Forces during World War II (WWII) and German Socioeconomic Panel. Our identification strategy leverages a generalized difference-in-differences design, exploiting the plausibly exogenous variation in the bombing intensity suffered by German cities during the war as a quasi-experiment. We find that cohorts younger than age five at the onset of WWII or those born during the war are in significantly worse mental health later in life when they are between ages late 50s and 70s. Specifically, an increase of one-standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual’s long–term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.8 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our analysis also reveals that this impact is most pronounced among the youngest children including those who might have been in-utero at some point during the war. Our investigation further suggests that measures capturing the extent of destruction in healthcare infrastructure, the increase in the capacity burden of the healthcare system, and wealth loss during WWII exacerbate the adverse impact of bombing exposure on long–term mental health, while the size of war relief funds transferred to municipalities following the war has a mitigating impact. Our findings are robust across a variety of empirical checks and specifications. With the mental health impact of childhood exposure to warfare persisting well into the late stages of life, the global burden of mental illness may be aggravated for many years to come. Our findings imply that prioritizing children and a long–term horizon in public health planning and response may be critical to mitigating the adverse mental health consequences of exposure to armed conflict.

Belgian lottery players & the number 19: Another victim of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Number 19: Another Victim of the COVID-19 Pandemic? Patrick Roger, Catherine D’Hondt, Daria Plotkina & Arvid Hoffmann. Journal of Gambling Studies, Juil 19 2022. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10899-022-10145-3

Abstract: Conscious selection is the mental process by which lottery players select numbers nonrandomly. In this paper, we show that the number 19, which has been heard, read, seen, and googled countless times since March 2020, has become significantly less popular among Belgian lottery players after the World Health Organization named the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 “COVID-19”. We argue that the reduced popularity of the number 19 is due to its negative association with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study triangulates evidence from field data from the Belgian National Lottery and survey data from a nationally representative sample of 500 Belgian individuals. The field data indicate that the number 19 has been played significantly less frequently since March 2020. However, a potential limitation of the field data is that an unknown proportion of players selects numbers randomly through the “Quick Pick” computer system. The survey data do not suffer from this limitation and reinforce our previous findings by showing that priming an increase in the salience of COVID-19 prior to the players’ selection of lottery numbers reduces their preference for the number 19. The effect of priming is concentrated amongst those with high superstitious beliefs, further supporting our explanation for the reduced popularity of the number 19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion

The number 19 has been heard/read/seen/googled countless times since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. This study used Belgium as the testing ground for a natural experiment investigating whether the global pandemic has influenced the popularity of the number 19 among lottery players. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the popularity of the number 19 in the context of lotteries, we triangulated evidence from field and survey data. Specifically, using Belgian National Lottery data, we analyzed a sample of 836 draws over the period March 2017 to February 2021. This sample included data on both Euromillions and the Lotto and allowed us to define the first three years as the benchmark period and the last year as the COVID period. To accurately measure the popularity of a given number in the lottery data, we built a popularity index that was inferred from the actual proportion of winners among a subset of ranks. The main advantage of this methodology was that it enabled us to identify any potential shift in conscious selection between the two periods.

Relying on nonparametric permutation tests, our univariate results led us to reject the null hypothesis of unchanged popularity of the number 19 between the two periods. Specifically, we found that 19 is the only number with a significant decline in popularity during the COVID period. Next, we ran regression models to control for potentially confounding effects that could impact the proportion of winners at a given draw. These multivariate findings confirmed a significant decline in the popularity of the number 19 since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To complement our results from the field study that used data obtained from the Belgian lottery games, we performed a survey study in the same country. The advantage of this approach was twofold. First, the survey study allowed us to vary the extent to which participants were exposed to information about COVID-19. Second, the survey study allowed us to measure the strength of participants’ superstitious beliefs, which is recognized as an important factor explaining lottery players’ choice of numbers (e.g., Simon (1998), Farrell et al. (2000), Wang et al. (2016), Polin et al. (2021)). The survey data thus allowed us to check for an interaction effect between the strength of players’ superstitious beliefs and the extent to which our experimental manipulation affected their number preferences.

Using ordinal logistic regression to determine the extent to which priming with the salience of COVID-19 impacts the survey participants’ selection of the number 19 in the two consecutive Lotto tickets, we found evidence that COVID-19 priming significantly reduces the probability that players will select the number 19, which fully supports the results from the field study. Importantly, the effect of COVID-19 priming is still significant when controlling for participants’ socio-demographic variables. Of particular interest, the findings reveal that the effect of COVID-19 priming is moderated by participants’ superstitious beliefs, being concentrated amongst individuals with high levels of superstitious beliefs.

Overall, although there could be unobserved variables affecting the results, the results of both studies provide converging evidence that is consistent with our theoretical explanation that an increased salience of the number 19 due to the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with an increase in the availability of negative feelings or memories associated with this number, which is associated with a decline in the popularity of the number 19 in games of chance. The strong consistency between both studies is also evident from the substantial correlation between the overall preferences for specific numbers in the survey data and the field data. Furthermore, building upon the findings from the survey study showing that the difference in choice frequency for the number 19 between primed and unprimed players is mainly driven by the choices of superstitious players, we hypothesize that the actual decline in the popularity of the number 19 during the Covid period as observed in the field study is likewise most likely driven by the preferences of superstitious people, who are more likely to select numbers themselves when playing Euromillions/Lotto (as opposed to using the Quick Pick system to randomly select numbers for them). Finally, based on a textual analysis of the responses provided by the survey participants regarding their associations with the number 19 which only incidentally mentioned COVID-19, we conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic might mainly generate a subconscious aversion to the number 19, which could lead people to select it less frequently when playing games of chance.

Our results have various implications for public policy, raising several questions. First, the existence of conscious selection in lottery games indicates that people can take decisions that are not based on economic objectives. In particular, playing popular numbers leads to paying an overvalued effective price.Footnote20 However, the distribution of numbers actually chosen by lottery players remains unknown to the general public. Researchers have used various methods to estimate this distribution (e.g., Farrell et al. 2000; Roger and Broihanne 2007) or obtained real data for some draws (e.g., Simon 1998; Polin et al. 2021). At a time where open data policies develop in various countries,Footnote21 an important policy question is transparency around games of chance. Should players be able to know, after each draw, the aggregate distribution of choices (like Fig. 7)? Should players have free access to the entire set of combinations chosen by players at the preceding draw (like Fig. 8)? The well-being of players who bet unconsciously on popular numbers (for reasons that are not linked to religious considerations, superstitious beliefs, etc.) would be enhanced by such measures if they change their number selection based on this information.

Second, our results raise another, and even more important, question linked to education about probability theory. Economic decisions under risk and uncertainty require estimations of probability distributions. For at least four decades, it is well-known that people have a distorted understanding of probabilities (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). This distortion seems to be related to intelligence/cognitive ability (Choi et al., 2022). Moreover, since probability distortion is already present at a young age (Steelandt et al., 2013), learning elementary probability theory through games of chance in the first years of school might be beneficial for improving people’s future decision processes. In extreme cases, understanding what a uniform distribution is and what independent events are could potentially save lives. For example, in 2005, the number 53 did not show up in the Italian lottery for almost two years. As a result, some people had completely unreasonable reactions about this number, falling prey to the gambler’s fallacy (e.g., Suetens et al. 2016). In an article published just after the number 53 was finally drawn,Footnote22 newspaper The Guardian reported that “Four died in 53-related incidents. A woman drowned herself in the sea off Tuscany leaving a note admitting that she had spent her family’s savings on the number. A man from Signa near Florence shot his wife and son before killing himself. A man was arrested in Sicily this week for beating his wife out of frustration at debts incurred by his 53 habit.”

Another insightful illustration of the need for a better understanding of probability theory in the general population is the case of saliva Covid tests for children. The analysis of a number of different tests by Kivelä et al. (2021) shows that the average specificity of these tests is 99%. In France, these tests were used on a systematic basis in schools when the prevalence of the disease was close to 0.5% in children. Bayes’ theorem tells us that getting a positive test means a probability of being really positive of only one third.Footnote23 In other words, two thirds of positive tests were false positive that may have contributed to  potentially unjustified school closures.

To a broader extent, illustrating conscious selection for children would be easy and might also make them develop their critical thinking skills, a crucial skill for real-problem solving that is not included in standard IQ tests (Halpern and Dunn, 2021). For example, following Kahneman and Tversky (1974), a classroom could be divided in two groups, each group being exposed to a draw of a wheel of fortune (numbered from 1 to 10). Then, the two groups are asked a given question (e.g., estimating the weight of a pet shown on a picture). The comparison of the resulting estimates in the two groups would show that these estimates are related to the number drawn on the wheel of fortune, which is completely irrelevant information to the task at hand.

Our results add to the literature on number preferences and on the interaction between emotions, preferences, and decision-making. One limitation of this study was that it does not provide insights into whether the observed change in the popularity of the number 19 is permanent or transitory. There are several arguments supporting the hypothesis that the effect may be transitory. First, the COVID-19 pandemic should eventually come to an end and/or be replaced by another worldwide topic of concern. Chun and Turk-Browne (2007) show that the limited capacity of human memory indicates that attention determines what is encoded by memory. Moreover, Roy et al. (2005) and Kress and Aue (2017) report that biased memories are the result of an optimism bias, making it likely that the negative association between the number 19 and bad memories will weaken over time. At the time of this writing (September 2021), there is also anecdotal evidence that the media and people in everyday life have begun to shorten “COVID-19” to “COVID”. In the future, this change in terminology in the popular press could lead to a (partial) disconnect in the public’s mind between the number 19 and any bad memories or feelings associated with COVID-19. Google searches for the number 19 already provide tangible evidence of such an evolution (https://trends.google.com). For example, Google searches for the number 19 halved from May to October 2021, after a sharp increase in March 2020 (followed by a decrease until June 2020 and a period of stability for almost one year, until April 2021).

This study paves the way for further research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on number preferences, emotions, and associated decision-making. First, future research should address the aforementioned question whether the decline in the popularity of the number 19 is temporary or permanent. Second, it would also be of interest to investigate whether other games of chance (e.g., sport betting) or other types of decision-making involving a selection of numbers have been similarly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, research using data from other countries that were impacted by the COVID pandemic in different respects than Belgium (e.g., because they are more geographically isolated or have less developed health systems) would provide additional insights into the interaction between emotions and decision-making.

Rolf Degen summarizing... Borderline personality disorder has become a kind of fetish diagnosis in the world of psychotherapy, but it is as intangible as a soap bubble

Gutiérrez, F., Aluja, A., Ruiz Rodríguez, J., Peri, J. M., Gárriz, M., Garcia, L. F., Sorrel, M. A., Sureda, B., Vall, G., Ferrer, M., & Calvo, N. (2022). Borderline, where are you? A psychometric approach to the personality domains in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11). Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, Jul 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/per0000592

Abstract: The inclusion of the borderline pattern in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11) dimensional classification of personality disorders (PDs) has caused controversy. Unease about leaving out these clinically challenging patients seems to conflict with the need of an evidence-based and credible diagnostic system. However, the accommodation of borderline within the new diagnostic system has not yet been studied in depth. To this end, we examine in a sample of 1799 general population and clinical subjects the joint structure of the five initial ICD-11 domains and the borderline pattern. Regression and item-level factor analyses reveal that borderline criteria do not form a separate construct and are indissociable from negative affectivity. Furthermore, borderline adds nothing to the remaining domains when it comes to predict PD severity. The borderline pattern appears as largely superfluous and even misguiding, unless their criteria are properly integrated within the structure of personality pathology. 

Moderate beer consumption and metabolic health: A comprehensive review from the lipoprotein perspective

Moderate beer consumption and metabolic health: A comprehensive review from the lipoprotein perspective. Elena M.Grao-Cruces et al. Journal of Functional Foods, Volume 95, August 2022, 105188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jff.2022.105188

Highlights

• Moderate beer consumption modulates cardiovascular health parameters.

• Moderate beer consumption modulates the blood lipid profile.

• Beer components and matrix are essential for its properties.

• It is not clear whether alcohol or phenols are the main responsible of beer effects.

Abstract: Beer intake is part of our society lifestyle but still a controversial topic due to the lack of consensus regarding its effects on our health. Regarding cardiovascular disease, research needs to consider the amount consumed but also drinking thresholds, frequency of drinking, age and gender of consumers, lifestyle, or non-alcoholic components of beers. Nevertheless, epidemiological evidence points to healthy effects of low or moderate beer consumption and even a protective action for cardiovascular risk and diabetes, discouraging heavy intakes without any exception. Beer components include alcohol and phenolics, both of which alter high- or low-density-lipoprotein levels and their oxidation status in blood. This review aims to highlight the importance of the metabolic mechanism by which beer components may influence lipid profile in terms of quantity and functionality, modulating cardiovascular risk. This is a major challenge for our society in light of the remarkable impact of cardiovascular diseases in all-cause mortality.

4. Conclusions

The purpose of the current review was to focus on the composition of beers, which are very popular drinks, as the source of metabolites, including alcohol, phenols and melanoidins, which influence our cardiovascular health. Many data demonstrate so far that low to moderate beer intake exerts a beneficial effect in terms of cardiovascular risk. This study provides a new understanding regarding the molecular profile involved in beer components healthy effects. Circulating lipids in blood may alter their levels or oxidation status, anticipating cardioprotective microenvironments. What is more, populations of high-density or low-density lipoproteins may exert different functions in our cardiovascular health after beer intake, in order to diminish cardiovascular risk. Nevertheless, further research is needed to elucidate the complex mechanisms underlying beer components behavior to contribute to reduce cardiovascular disease mortality. However, it is important to highlight that the benefits of beer intake does not outweigh the risks, the WHO discourages of any alcohol consumption.

The political right and left are, on balance, equally susceptible to conspiracy theories

Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories? Adam Enders, Christina Farhart, Joanne Miller, Joseph Uscinski, Kyle Saunders & Hugo Drochon. Political Behavior, Jul 22 2022. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09812-3

Abstract: A sizable literature tracing back to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style (1964) argues that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than Democrats and liberals. However, the evidence for this proposition is mixed. Since conspiracy theory beliefs are associated with dangerous orientations and behaviors, it is imperative that social scientists better understand the connection between conspiracy theories and political orientations. Employing 20 surveys of Americans from 2012 to 2021 (total n = 37,776), as well as surveys of 20 additional countries spanning six continents (total n = 26,416), we undertake an expansive investigation of the asymmetry thesis. First, we examine the relationship between beliefs in 52 conspiracy theories and both partisanship and ideology in the U.S.; this analysis is buttressed by an examination of beliefs in 11 conspiracy theories across 20 more countries. In our second test, we hold constant the content of the conspiracy theories investigated—manipulating only the partisanship of the theorized villains—to decipher whether those on the left or right are more likely to accuse political out-groups of conspiring. Finally, we inspect correlations between political orientations and the general predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories over the span of a decade. In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry. Instead, the strength and direction of the relationship between political orientations and conspiricism is dependent on the characteristics of the specific conspiracy beliefs employed by researchers and the socio-political context in which those ideas are considered.

Discussion and Conclusion

Are those on the political right (Republicans/conservatives) more prone to conspiracy theorizing than those on the left (Democrats/liberals)? The smattering of evidence across the literature provides conflicting answers to this question. We surmise that disagreement in the literature is substantially the product of limitations regarding both the operationalizations of conspiracy theorizing and the context––both temporal and socio-political––in which beliefs are assessed in previous work. Given the imperative of better understanding conspiracy theories and the people who believe them, we compiled a robust body of evidence for testing the asymmetry thesis. Across multiple surveys and measurement strategies, we found more evidence for partisan and ideological symmetry in conspiricism, however operationalized, than for asymmetry.

First, we found that the relationship between political orientations and beliefs in specific conspiracy theories varied considerably across 52 specific conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories containing partisan/ideological content or that have been endorsed by prominent partisan/ideological elites will find more support among those in one political camp or the other, while theories without such content or endorsements tend to be unrelated to partisanship and ideology in the U.S. We also observed considerable variability in the relationship between left–right ideology and 11 conspiracy theory beliefs across 20 additional countries spanning six continents; this variability suggests that the relationship between left–right ideology and conspiracy theory belief is also affected by the political context in which conspiracy theories are polled. To account for the potential impact of idiosyncratic factors associated with specific conspiracy theories, we next examined the relationship between beliefs in “content-controlled” conspiracy theories and political orientations. We found that both Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives engage in motivated conspiracy endorsement at similar rates, with Democrats/liberals occasionally exhibiting stronger motivations than Republicans/conservatives. Finally, we observed only inconsistent evidence for an asymmetric relationship between conspiracy thinking and either partisanship, symbolic ideology, or operational ideology across 18 polls administered between 2012 and 2021. Even though the average correlations across studies were positive, indicating a relationship with conservatism/Republicanism (owing mostly to data collected in 2016), they were negligible in magnitude and individual correlations varied in sign and statistical significance over time.

Equally important as our substantive conclusions is an exploration of why we reached them, which can shed light on existing inconsistencies in the literature. While the core inferences we make from our investigation may deviate from the conclusions of others, empirical patterns are not irreconcilable. Take, for example, the study conducted by van der Linden and colleagues (2021). They infer from a strong, positive correlation between beliefs that “climate change is a hoax” and conservatism that conservatives are inherently more conspiratorial than liberals. However, we demonstrate that such conclusions cannot be made using beliefs in a single conspiracy theory. As can be seen in Fig. 1, climate change conspiracy theories show one of the highest levels of asymmetry; therefore, exclusive examination of almost any other conspiracy theory would lead to a result less supportive of the asymmetry argument.

Van der Linden et al. (2021) also find a positive, albeit weak, correlation between conservatism and generalized conspiracy thinking. While this relationship is statistically significant, liberals still exhibit high levels of conspiracism. Indeed, even strong liberals score above the 50-point midpoint on their 101-point measure (between 60 and 65, on average), whereas strong conservatives typically score about 10 points higher (see Figs. 1b and 3b). In other words, liberals, like conservatives, are more conspiratorial than not. Moreover, van der Linden et al.’s data hail from 2016 and 2018––years in which we also observed relatively elevated levels of conspiracy thinking among conservatives. However, this was not the case in other years and samples we examined. This is exactly what we might expect of a disposition that is not inherently connected to partisanship and ideology, but which may be sporadically activated by political circumstances. We do not question the veracity of van der Linden et al.’s empirical findings or those of any other study with conclusions that disagree with ours; rather, we argue that differences largely stem from the inferences made from empirical relationships, which are frequently more general than the data allows.

Despite the magnitude of data we employ, our study is not without limitations, and we wish to emphasize that ours should not be the final word on this topic. Although our data spans a decade, it was collected over the course of only three U.S. presidential administrations. As political culture changes so, too, might the relationship between political orientations and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, measures of general conspiracy thinking (to our knowledge) were not deployed on national surveys until 2012 and specific conspiracy beliefs were only intermittently polled in the past 70 years, severely limiting how much we can know about conspiracy theorizing in the past. We encourage researchers to track multiple operationalizations of conspiracy theorizing into the future so that we may better understand their political dynamics and consequences.

We also recognize that, while an investigation of the asymmetry thesis across 21 countries constitutes a robust test, the more tests the asymmetry thesis undergoes the more confident we can be about its (lack of) veracity. We encourage an examination of more conspiracy theory beliefs across socio-political contexts, especially those that are closely tethered to each country’s political culture. We also recommend more robust examinations of the asymmetry thesis in regions that have been understudied, such as South America, Africa, and Asia. Even though we included countries from each of these continents, very little is known about the basic nature and scope of conspiracy theorizing outside of North America and Europe.

In a similar vein, conspiracy theories differ not only in who believes them, where, and when, but in their consequences and dangers. As such, it may be useful for researchers to consider categorizing conspiracy beliefs by various attributes, such as their consequences, just as they do for political attitudes (e.g., issue attitudes, affective versus ideological attitudes, etc.)––perhaps the asymmetry thesis finds stronger evidence among certain “classes” of conspiracy theories. Recent events in American politics are suggestive of this possibility. Donald Trump and his allies in government and media fostered election fraud conspiracy theory beliefs to the point of the violent intimidation of elected representatives attempting to certify the 2020 election. In this way, election fraud conspiracy theories––at least under the particular circumstances that Trump and colleagues nurtured––are of more consequence than, for example, conspiracy theories regarding the moon landing or lizard people. While forecasting which conspiracy theories will result in tangible consequences and when is surely difficult, we nevertheless note that symmetry of tendency to believe in conspiracy theories need not equal symmetry in consequence of conspiracy theories, along political lines or otherwise.

Finally, we believe it is critical that work on beliefs, like that presented here, be reconciled with related research examining political asymmetries in the tendency to interact with or “spread” conspiracy theories on social media. Related work by Guess, Nagler and Tucker (2019), Garrett and Bond (2021), and Grinberg et al. (2019), for example, finds evidence for minor asymmetries in the extent to which Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives share misinformation or distinguish between fake and true news stories online. By fusing social media data with survey data researchers can gain greater leverage over questions about the conditions under which online behaviors are reflective of, or even impact, beliefs and offline behaviors. For now, we simply note that findings of asymmetries online may not generalize to the broader population, as politically active social media users are not representative of average Americans when it comes to various political and psychological characteristics (Lawson & Kakkar, 2021). Just as social media data can be fused with survey data, so, too, can top-down data on conspiratorial rhetorical strategies employed by political elites. Few studies of this sort have been undertaken, particularly in the U.S. (see Oliver & Rahn, 2016 for an example), but they are sorely needed––especially to test earlier studies on the rhetoric of conspiratorial elites (Adorno, 2000; Lowenthal & Guterman, 1948).

The last five years have witnessed Republican elites in government and media (most notably Donald Trump) utilizing conspiracy theories in a way unprecedented in the last half century of American politics, and with severe, deleterious consequences for democratic institutions. This alone has encouraged renewed conjecture about an asymmetry in conspiracy theory beliefs. However, elites are an imperfect reflection of the public––they have different goals, incentives, and knowledge about politics. Moreover, elite rhetoric rarely changes predispositions, such as conspiracy thinking, so much as it activates predispositions and connects them to salient political choices (Leeper & Slothuus, 2014). In other words, while Republican elites may have recently activated conspiratorial predispositions among supporters in the mass public––where they exist––in a way that Democratic elites did not, they are unlikely to be able to cause once non-conspiratorial supporters to become highly conspiratorial.

That we find little difference in conspiracy theorizing between the right and left among the mass public does not indicate that there are no differences between partisan elites on this score, nor does it imply that there will not be asymmetries in beliefs in specific conspiracy theories at any given point in time. Specific conspiracy theories can find more support among one partisan/ideological side than the other even though partisan/ideological motivated reasoning and conspiratorial predispositions operate, on balance, in a symmetric fashion. Likewise, the content of those theories and the way they are deployed, particularly by elites, can result in asymmetrical consequences, such as political violence and the undermining of democratic institutions. We encourage future work to integrate the conspiratorial rhetoric of elites with studies of mass beliefs and investigate elite conspiratorial rhetoric from actors including and beyond Donald Trump.