People who endure more hardship over the course of their lives may be more likely to believe conspiracy theories—not because adversity automatically produces distrust, but because it can alter how people interpret fairness, justice and the social world, according to new research from psychologists at the University of Nottingham and the University of Cumbria.
The study, involving more than 1,200 participants across three investigations, identified a possible psychological pathway linking difficult life experiences with conspiracy beliefs. Participants who reported greater lifetime adversity were more likely to view society and the world as fundamentally unjust. Those perceptions of injustice, in turn, were associated with stronger endorsement of conspiracy theories. The findings suggest that the critical factor may not be hardship itself, but the meaning people attach to it.
Conspiracy theories typically explain important events through the secret actions of powerful groups. They can be attractive because they offer a coherent narrative in situations that otherwise feel confusing, threatening or uncontrollable. The researchers argue that when people experience repeated setbacks—such as serious illness, bereavement, financial problems, relationship breakdown or violence—they may become more attentive to unfairness and more receptive to explanations that identify hidden agents responsible for it.
In the first study, the researchers measured participants’ exposure to adverse events across their lifetimes and assessed their beliefs about justice and conspiracy theories. A cumulative adversity score was used to capture the overall burden of difficult experiences rather than focusing on a single traumatic event. Participants with higher scores tended to report stronger beliefs that the world was unjust. Statistical analyses indicated that perceived injustice helped account for the association between adversity and conspiracy thinking, although the design could not establish that adversity directly caused those beliefs.
The second study examined violent victimisation more specifically. People who had experienced violent crime were compared with participants who reported never having been victims of crime. Those who had experienced violence expressed stronger perceptions of injustice and were also more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs. The relationship remained after the researchers considered demographic variables that can influence both victimisation risk and political or social attitudes. This pattern suggests that experiences involving direct harm may have particularly powerful consequences for people’s broader assumptions about how society operates.
The third study provided experimental evidence for the role of perceived fairness. Participants were led to think about information portraying society as becoming either more unfair or more fair. Those exposed to the unfairness condition subsequently reported stronger conspiracy beliefs than those encouraged to consider a more positive picture of social fairness. Although a brief experimental manipulation cannot reproduce the complexity of real-life trauma, the result supports the idea that changes in perceived justice can influence receptivity to conspiratorial explanations.
The researchers also investigated the consequences for institutional trust. Greater adversity was associated with stronger perceptions of injustice, which were linked to greater endorsement of political conspiracy theories. Those political conspiracy beliefs were then associated with lower trust in public institutions. This sequence is important because conspiracy theories may not merely reflect existing distrust; they can also reinforce a cycle in which institutions are viewed as fundamentally deceptive, illegitimate or controlled by hidden interests.
The findings do not mean that people who experience hardship will inevitably become conspiracy believers. Most people face adversity without adopting such explanations, and individual responses are shaped by many factors, including social support, personality, political identity, access to reliable information and previous experiences with institutions. The researchers also caution that much of the evidence is correlational. Even where the fairness manipulation produced differences in conspiracy beliefs, the broader links among adversity, injustice and distrust may involve additional psychological and social processes.
Dr Daniel Jolley, the study’s lead author from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology, said that hardship alone does not explain why some people become more receptive to conspiracy theories. Instead, adversity may matter when it changes a person’s understanding of how the world works. If repeated experiences of harm are interpreted as evidence that society is rigged or that justice is impossible, conspiracy theories may provide an emotionally satisfying explanation by assigning responsibility and making apparently random suffering seem intentional.
Dr Laura Blackie, a co-author from the same school, said the results connect psychological research on trauma and worldview with research on social trust. Acute trauma can damage people’s assumptions about safety, control and meaning; the new findings suggest that perceptions of societal unfairness may be another consequence with wider political effects. The researchers say future studies should follow people over time to determine how these beliefs develop, identify factors that protect against conspiracy thinking and test whether interventions that restore a sense of fairness can strengthen institutional trust. The work was funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme and published in the British Journal of Psychology.
Subject of Research: People
Article Title: The world is an unjust place: The impact of lifetime adversity on belief in conspiracy theories
News Publication Date: 5-Aug-2026
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.70101
References: British Journal of Psychology
Keywords: lifetime adversity, conspiracy theories, perceived injustice, fairness, violent victimisation, political conspiracy beliefs, institutional trust, psychology, social justice, trauma
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