Conspiracy theories often emerge when people join up seemingly small, unrelated pieces of evidence and piece them together into a larger, often sinister, picture. Conspiracy theories about the Moon landing, for instance, often join up oddities from photographs to build a theory that the whole thing was a hoax.

This tendency to see meaning in randomness has led researchers to suggest that some people might process information differently, seeing meaningful information in discrepancies and becoming more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking.

There is already some evidence that belief formation plays a role in conspiracy theories. Earlier studies have suggested that people who believe in paranormal activity are more likely to see patterns in random data, and that there’s a correlation between paranormal belief and conspiracy belief. So, maybe the data processing is affecting both kinds of belief formation.

A group of researchers in Switzerland and France set out to compare people’s judgements of randomness with their belief in conspiracy theories, using three different experiments to test the question from different angles.

First, they looked just at people’s perception of randomness. They asked 107 participants (all psychology undergraduates) to look at a list of sequences made up of X and O, like XXOOX, and guess whether they were randomly generated by tossing a fair coin, or meaningful sequences like a sports team's losses and wins. They answered on a six-point scale from “not random” to “definitely random.”

There are theories about how people process randomness that suggest how people might go about a task like this, so the researchers had some idea of what people’s results should look like if they had normal assumptions about randomness. People’s abilities to judge randomness fit relatively well with what the researchers expected based on past work.

Then, participants answered political questions. Some questions assessed people’s general tendencies to believe in conspiracist thinking, while others explored people's beliefs in "real" famous conspiracy theories like the Moon landing.

These conspiracy theory tests fit together well: people who showed a high likelihood of having conspiracist thinking on the general tests were also more likely to believe in conspiracy rumors that have circulated in the real world. These results all suggested that the tests were working as they should.

However, there was no link between people’s conspiracist thinking and their ability to judge randomness. Which is probably reasonable, since imagining a conspiracy of malevolent people is quite different from guessing whether a series of letters is random or not. Attributing human intention to things might be quite a different process, so the researchers tweaked the experiment.

Seeing a human mind at work

In the second experiment, a new group of participants (again, all undergraduate psychology students) was given a task similar to the first experiment, with one difference: this time they were told to guess whether there was a human mind behind the strings of letters.

To test whether there was a difference between neutral and malevolent human intentions, the participants were split into two groups, each with slightly more than 60 people. One group was told that some letter strings were the product of fair coin tosses, and some were made up by humans. The other group was told that some were coin tosses and some were the product of cheating.

Afterwards, they were given the same political tests as in the first experiment. Once again, people’s processing of randomness didn’t match up with their beliefs in conspiracy theories. This was true whether or not they thought the human making up the letter strings was innocent or cheating.

Finally, the researchers used an online survey to get a sample from the wider population, using similar methods as in the previous experiments. This time, they used only the “cheating” question, eliminating the “innocent” one because there hadn’t been a difference between them in the previous experiment. New questions on political orientation and optimism levels were included after the randomness test. The survey got responses from 217 French-speaking participants of various ages.

The same results showed up again: conspiracy theorists weren’t more likely to assume cheating. There were other interesting links, though: pessimists were more likely to see cheating, and people with more right-wing political beliefs were ever so slightly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

Thinking on a larger scale

As always, experiments looking at only one factor don't seal the deal on the subject. In this case, conspiracy theorists might have some other quirk of belief formation that wasn't tested for in this work. This experiment looked only at low-level, partly automatic abilities: judging a string of letters could be quite different from looking at a global, complex picture made up of various people’s intentions and actions.

So, although this research indicates that there isn’t a difference in information processing at a low level, it’s possible that further research could find differences in higher cognitive processes. There are a number of different biases that could get in the way of assessing randomness and seeing a conspiracy, and those need to be tested, too.

Although the researchers didn’t find what they thought they were going to find, they do note that these negative results have echoes in other experiments. For instance, some research suggests that climate change denial has less to do with scientific literacy than ideological and cultural factors. Maybe conspiracy theories in general are caused more by what people think is right and where they see themselves belonging, and less to do with how they process information.

Psychological Science, 2015. DOI: 10.1177/0956797615598740 (About DOIs).