I remember, there are a lot of studies about the (supposed) psychological traits of persons who believe in "conspiricy theories". Getting to the big parts, I still have some criticism of the study

1. You use a sample of students. No matter how lage the number are, do you really believe students are representative of the entire population of "conspiricy believers"?
2. How could you messure intellectuall humility?
3. The correlation between agreeableness and belief in conspiracy theories is easily explained by the fact that you will most likely get a lot of strange looks if you confess your conspiratorial beliefs in an academic environment. I doubt that this result would be transferable to other environments such as "normal" workspaces, nights out in pubs, and the like.

Researchers Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright, discovered that there are 5 social-process levels ( they misidentify as "stages", but caterpillar-moth is stages, & reversible modes are not irreversible, as stages are ),, & that conspiricism is produced in level2.

They published a popular book, in order to get the core of their research into the understanding of people in organizations, where it could do the most good.

• Level5 - LIVING IS SELF-INHERENTLY AWESOME!!

• Level4 - WE are awesome, THEY are what we are competing against.

• Level3 - Narcissism-culture. Doctors are the exemplars of it. It took me until my mid-50's to realize that raised-by-medical-professionals syndrome IS raised-by-narcissists syndrome, even though I'd read a book identifying the entire pattern of damage in the children of such, back in the 1980's ( sometimes I'm not quick ). Dad was a medical-researcher & a doctor. That insight is spot on. You want 2 independent proofs? 1. dress professionally well, a quality suit, & walk into any 4 hospitals ( averaging the results ), & count the percentage of lower-level people, including cleaning-staff, who are upright & meeting your gaze as equally-valid humans. None is likely to be the percentage: their validity has been disallowed/negated by medical-culture. 2. record video in clinics/hospitals, in the hallways, of people interacting, leaving-out any audio: video-only, & record it so it plays-back in slow-motion. When you watch it in slow-motion, because your unconscious won't be automatically-hiding the class-establishing bodylanguage, due to the wrong-speed, you should be able to see the narcissism body-language screaming from doctors. The 1st time I became conscious of it, it was stunning, and my having never seen it, in decades, .. shaming.

• Level2 - Subject-to-narcissism's-dominion culture. Conspiricism breeds in this level.

• Level1 - gangs/inmates/nihilism culture. Mass shootings. Manufactured into inmates, manufactured into gang-members, etc. This has the motivation & the leverage to butcher the whole of the rest. Notice that there were over 600 mass-shootings in the US in 2023, and that homelessness is skyrocketing, simultaneously.. That isn't "mere coincidence". Given the political-dominion "solutions" being enacted there, the percentage of the population in Level1 is going to be significantly increasing, with all the consequences of that.

Those who are helplessly subjugated beneath narcissism's dominion, are likely to become conspiricist, exactly as Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright identified.

Actually, it's natural.

IF prohibited from being validly-human, THEN become some other kind of validity, ( "displacement" is it called, in psychology? ), and being "the conspiricist who gets information 1st" is a kind of validity that can exist in the level beneath narcissism's dominion.

Since validity's a basic & fundamental unconscious-mind need, .. this is going to happen.

Consistently.