He then suggested that this co‐occurrence was “difficult to explain using the laws of probabilities.” In place of these laws, he implicated the United States. Speaking the day after her diagnosis, Hugo Chavez, then President of Venezuela, noted that several other leftist Latin American leaders had also recently been afflicted by cancer, including the President of Paraguay (Fernando Lugo), the President (Dilma Rousseff) and former President (Lula de Silva) of Brazil, not to mention Chavez himself (who was later to die of the disease, while de Kirchner turned out to be misdiagnosed). In January 2012, the Argentinian President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner was diagnosed with cancer. We discuss the implications of these findings for previous, mixed findings in the literature and for the relation between conspiracy thinking and other cognitive processes. occurring in isolation) crucially, they were independently increased by a manipulation of causal perception. Study 4 ( N = 211) showed that conspiracy explanations for human tragedies were favored when they comprised part of a cluster of similar events (vs. Study 3 ( N = 214) showed that preference for conspiracy explanations was associated with the perception that a focal event (e.g., the death of a journalist) was causally connected to similar, recent events. In Study 2 ( N = 216), this effect held adjusting for correlates including magical and non‐analytical thinking. Study 1 ( N = 195) showed that conspiracy belief was related to the causal interpretation of real‐life, spurious correlations (e.g., between chocolate consumption and Nobel prizes). Four studies indicate that conspiracy belief is driven by readiness to draw implausible causal connections even when events are not random, but instead conform to an objective pattern. Previous research indicates that conspiracy thinking is informed by the psychological imposition of order and meaning on the environment, including the perception of causal relations between random events.
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