The thread from conspiracist mentality to negative affectivity could be extended to include various aspects of emotional instability (i.e. proneness toward psychological stress and susceptibility to unpleasant emotions, like anxiety and depression) and neuroticism (Swami, Furnham 2012; Swami et al. 2013; Lobato et al. 2014). The accentuated experience of negative emotions and attenuated engagement in analytical mental processes can be easily regarded as two sides of the same story. To put it simply, tuning in on our fears and anxieties could tune out our abilities for fact-checking and rational thinking. In fact, past research has demonstrated that stronger conspiracist thinkers tend to exhibit more uncritical receptiveness for unorthodox, unconventional or unusual ideas, main hallmarks of the Big Five personality trait of openness to experience […]. Some studies of conspiracy mentality, however, substitute the link with general open-mindedness with a more particular type of openness toward peculiarity, eccentricity and oddity […].
That said, […] some caution is warranted regarding the correlation between conspiracy mentality and openness to experience. Namely, the findings have not been consistently replicated […].
In line with the findings on eccentricity and conspiracy mentality, it has also been demonstrated that the odd beliefs of some conspiratorial thinkers encompass ideas of reference, magical thinking, paranormal beliefs and schizotypy […].
– ‘Personality traits, cognitive styles and worldviews associated with beliefs in conspiracy theories’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 157
[…] People who tend to reject conspiracy theories also tend to perform better on probabilistic tasks […]. More broadly, tests of mathematical and verbal reasoning ability show that conspiracy sceptics tend to score higher than conspiracy believers […]. This trend appears to extend to people’s intellectual self-image as well: When asked to rate their own intelligencem people with stronger conspiracy beliefs tend to rate themselves as less intelligent […].
– Ibid., p. 160