Ingroup conspiratorial beliefs: re-thinking racial/ethnic minority group conspiracy in the UK and US

Research has consistently identified the tendency of minority ethnic groups to more strongly endorse universal conspiracy theories (where the general public is targeted) as well as ingroup conspiratorial beliefs (where one’s ethnic group is specifically targeted), but the relationship between these two types of conspiratorial beliefs remains largely unexplored. Across two studies, we assessed the relationship between these beliefs and race/ethnicity in a sample from the United Kingdom (n = 900 across Black, South Asian, and white ethnic/racial groups) and United States (n = 900 across Black, Hispanic, and white ethnic/racial groups). Our cross-sectional results, which take in both COVID and non-COVID conspiratorial beliefs, indicate that ethnic minority groups’ greater support for universal conspiratorial beliefs can be fully explained through their support for ingroup conspiracy theories. We also found that, across ethnicities and geographies, the socio-functional variable of lack of collective recognition most substantially mediated the relationship between ethnicity and ingroup conspiratorial belief, while the effect of institutional trust and discrimination varied. We conclude that interventions aimed at decreasing conspiratorial beliefs in ethnic communities should therefore focus on measures that address ingroup, rather than universal, conspiratorial belief and that acknowledging feelings of a lack of group recognition may be a profitable avenue to tackle inequalities associated with conspiratorial belief.