Researchers in Germany claim to have shown that complementary and alternative medicine “benefit” from the increasing credence given to conspiracy theories and the associated distrust towards existing power structures.
Pia Lamberty and Professor Roland Imhoff of Institute of Psychology at the Johan Gutenberg University in Mainz, say their research shows that enthusiasm for natural health approaches is frequently associated with a “potent underlying predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories”, a trait known by psychologists as a ‘conspiracy mentality’.
Commenting on their findings, Lamberty said: ”We have identified a significant correlation. The more pronounced the conspiracy mentality of a person, the more that individual will tend to display a positive attitude towards alternative concepts and reject the use of conventional medical treatments such as vaccination and antibiotic therapy.”
Psychologists consider a so-called conspiracy mentality to be a stable personality characteristic. Individuals with a strong proclivity to believe in conspiracy theories suspect that the world is actually controlled by hidden elites. Speculatively, this could be due to a feeling that they have little or no control over what happens around them.
The Mainz researchers cite the mushrooming ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement of as an example of this type of distrust – in this case, of vaccination programmes – guiding personal choices in health, with potentially serious outcomes. Running alongside the distrust factor, say Lamberty and Imhoff, is another phenomenon; an openness to believe in treatments for which there is limited evidence of efficacy.
“In Germany, we found there was a clear-cut, remarkably close interdependence between a conspiracy mindset and the tendency to prefer alternative medical treatments”
Lamberty and Imhoff undertook several studies with the aim of analyzing the connection between belief in conspiracy theories and the preference for non-conventional medicine. They asked 392 study participants in Germany and 204 in the USA about their attitudes to a total of 37 different forms of treatment, from aromatherapy, Bach flower remedies, hypnosis, and yoga through to the use of antibiotics and blood transfusion. Among other things, the subjects were required to specify how often they used the treatment in question and how effective they considered it to be. “In Germany, we found there was a clear-cut, remarkably close interdependence between a conspiracy mindset and the tendency to prefer alternative medical treatments,” Lamberty pointed out. A similar correlation was identified in the USA, but there it was less well-defined.
The result was confirmed in two further studies. Here it was also demonstrated that the psychological link between a conspiracy mentality seen in terms of a political outlook and a preference for non-conventional medicine was based on a distrust of power structures. “Anything considered to have power and influence, such as the pharmaceutical industry, is treated as being highly dubious by conspiracy theorists,” explained Lamberty. In one of the studies, the participants had to decide about the approval of a fictitious herbal medicine against anxiety, gastritis, and mild depression. Subjects with a strong conspiracy mentality rated the fictitious drug HTP 530 as more positive and effective if it was developed by a group of patients considered powerless than by a pharmaceutical consortium.
For Pia Lamberty and Roland Imhoff the ramification of this with regard to healthcare is that this generalized distrust of power structures can influence the way that people make decisions regarding their own medical treatments. “An individual’s understanding of his or her illness and choice of treatment may thus depend on ideology-related personality traits much more than on rational considerations,” the two authors wrote in an article published in Social Psychology. A conspiracy mentality can thus actually determine what patients believe to be the real cause of their disorder, what they consider to be its initial symptoms and physiological effects, and whom or what they select for their treatment.