People who feel out of control of their lives are more likely to believe in conspiracies

From Boing Boing

Like you, I know some people who are really hampered by an irrational belief that the people around them are judging them; I've long thought that these beliefs were linked to a sense that their lives were out of their control, and that this turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the more paranoid compulsions they expressed, the more their lives were made worse.

A study by Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky from the University of Texas found a correlation between a belief in superstitions and conspiracies and a sense of helplessness about your own life and your ability to steer it. Their clever experiment goes a long way toward explaining the rise of conspiracies like birtherism and the co-occurrence of the collapse of industry and good waged work for the people who embraced it.

It's a kind of macrocosm of the addict's control freakish lashing out, where the more out of control their life is, the more they seek to control the behavior of others.

So a lack of control not only affects our perceptions, but our actions too. What happens if you restore control? Will that reduce one’s propensity for seeing false patterns? To find out, Whitson and Galinsky asked volunteers to remember events where they had control or lacked it, and tested their tendency for see shapes in snowy images, and for believing conspiracy theories. This time, however, some of the volunteers were given a chance just before the tasks to complete a questionnaire on a value that was very important to them.

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