Injustice Without Evidence: The Unique Role of Conspiracy Theories in Social Justice Research

When an angry crowd of Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021, it was clear that they were motivated by a deeply felt sense of injustice. Indeed, several of the topics traditionally studied in social justice research appeared to be driving the rioters, including perceived distributive injustice (i.e., a belief that the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election was unfair) and procedural injustice (i.e., a belief that the election results were achieved through unfair procedures). A closer look reveals, however, that these traditional conceptualizations of social justice are insufficient to fully comprehend the rioters’ feelings and actions: They were substantially motivated by conspiracy theories, broadly defined as explanatory beliefs that a group of actors collude in secret to pursue malevolent goals (for overviews, see Butter & Knight, 2020; Douglas et al., 2019; Van Prooijen, 2018a, 2020; Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018). In fact, many of the rioters were part of the so-called Qanon movement that promulgates a set of conspiracy theories alleging that President Trump is fighting a secret war against an evil Democratic “deep-state”, and that includes accusations of satanic rituals and sexual abuse of children among prominent members of the Democratic party.

In the present contribution, I propose that such conspiracy theories are narratives that necessarily contain justice judgments, as they involve attributions of blame and accusations of unethical, deceptive, or criminal behavior. But, an additional property of conspiracy theories is that they are mental simulations of events that might, or might not, actually have occurred. While actual corruption and conspiracies do occur, in politics (e.g., Watergate; the Iran-contra scandal), business (e.g., the Volkswagen Diesel scandal), the media (e.g., the BBC misleading Princess Diana to give an interview), and many other settings, also without any evidence of true malpractice people experience a genuine sense of injustice through conspiratorial accusations. Conspiracy theories may include convicted beliefs in falsehoods such as that the corona virus is a bioweapon, that climate change is a hoax, or that the Earth is flat. Instead, conspiracy theories are largely based on group allegiances: The mere existence of an outgroup that one distrusts or despises is enough for people to make unfounded assumptions of severely unethical behavior taking place in secret (Van Prooijen, 2020). In the following, I first describe more specifically how justice judgments are related with conspiracy theories. After that, I will illuminate what psychological processes stimulate belief in evidence-free conspiracy theories, and how this gives conspiracy beliefs a unique place in social justice research.

The narrative structure of conspiracy theories suggests a close relationship with judgments of injustice. Specifically, any conspiracy theory contains five critical ingredients (Van Prooijen & Van Vugt, 2018; Van Prooijen, 2018a). These include (1) patterns: Assumptions of cause-and-effect relationships between stimuli; (2) agency: Assumptions that the events that one seeks to explain were caused on purpose, by intentional and deliberate actors; (3) groups: Conspiracies by definition consist of multiple actors that form a coalition and coordinate their actions; (4) threat: The assumed conspiracy intends to cause harm or at least is deceptive; and (5) secrecy: The assumed conspiracy acts in the shadows, making conspiracy theories difficult to invalidate. The link with judgments of injustice is underscored particularly by the notions that the assumed conspirators are deliberate (agency) and harmful or deceptive (threat). As such, conspiracy theories assign moral responsibility to a group of actors for assumed malpractice, and hence include judgments of moral wrongness and/or blame (e.g., Alicke, 2000; Malle, 2021). Many conspiracy theories assume severe criminal behavior on part of the conspirators, which would lead to long prison sentences if they were held legally accountable. Moreover, conspiracy beliefs predict a range of emotions commonly associated with justice judgments (for overviews, see Butter & Knight, 2020; Douglas et al., 2019; Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018).

The level of injustice that is assumed to take place arguably is more severe in some conspiracy theories than others. Some conspiracy theories describe unambiguously criminal behavior such as murder (e.g., conspiracy theories that the corona virus was spread deliberately to kill elderly people; or, that the 9/11 terrorist strikes were an inside job of the US government), sexual abuse (e.g., Qanon), or fraud (e.g., conspiracy theories that climate change is a hoax by scientists to acquire government funding). Other conspiracy theories may not accuse the perpetrators of causing direct physical or financial harm to members of the community (e.g., beliefs that the moon landings were filmed in a TV studio; beliefs that the government hides evidence for the existence of intelligent alien life). Still, also the latter conspiracy theories include judgments of injustice, as they explicitly imply that the assumed conspirators are dishonest, and deliberately mislead the community to pursue a secret agenda.

The notion that conspiracy theories consist of judgments of injustice suggests that they are conceptually different from distrust. Feelings of distrust—while empirically related with justice judgments (Van den Bos et al., 1998)—are not justice judgments per se, as they do not necessarily include judgments or moral wrongness or attributions of blame. Instead, distrust refers to a generalized feeling that one prefers to avoid vulnerability toward a particular actor or group (Spadaro et al., 2020), and one can easily distrust an individual or group without concrete accusations of unethical behavior. While certainly there are parallels between institutional distrust and conspiracy theories, for instance, in their effects on social relationships (Van Prooijen et al., 2022), these two constructs are empirically and conceptually distinct (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; Pummerer et al., 2021).

One unique property of conspiracy theories is that they are mental simulations in which people “connect dots” in order to construct a coherent—and often spectacular—narrative of injustice that might, or might not, have occurred. Put differently, conspiracy theories are a set of assumptions how stimuli might be interrelated, to explain events such as election outcomes, terrorist strikes, a pandemic, and so forth. These assumptions may be mistaken, however, and many common conspiracy theories indeed are quite evidence-free (e.g., Qanon; Flat Earth beliefs; beliefs that climate change is a hoax; and so on). Sometimes it even happens that clearly fictional narratives turn into conspiracy theories that people truly believe: For instance, some people nowadays believe the conspiracy theory described in the novel “the Da Vinci Code” (Newheiser et al., 2011; see also Van Prooijen et al., 2021).

These issues are related to the secrecy ingredient of conspiracy theories: The conspiracy that is assumed to commit unethical behavior operates out of plain sight, and its existence or actions therefore have not been established with certainty. Scientific definitions do not assume conspiracy theories to be false per se: They are about unproven allegations of collusion. If an actual conspiracy gets exposed (e.g., the FIFA corruption scandal), it is not a “theory” anymore but an example of actual conspiracy formation. This implies that conspiracy theories are narratives constructed under conditions of informational uncertainty, and are based on people’s unproven assumptions of unethical behaviors that are covered up. These assumptions can be based on a vast range of stimuli that may include factual or plausible information, but also one’s own imagination, intuition, or falsehoods that perceivers encounter in personal conversations, on social media, and the Internet.

The notion that conspiracy theories are unproven, and often evidence-free, hold implications for the contribution of this emerging research field to social justice research more broadly. Specifically, the insight that people can experience a true sense of injustice based on imaginary events expands on many “traditional” studies that have focused on justice judgments based their appraisals of realistic events. For instance, the field of distributive justice has discovered that through social comparison people may evaluate the outcomes they get out of social exchanges (e.g., salaries) as fair or unfair, to the extent that they elicit feelings of relative deprivation (Stouffer et al., 1949; for an overview, see Smith et al., 2012) or inequity (Adams, 1965). Likewise, the field of procedural justice has emphasized that the fairness of decision-making procedures weight more heavily on their sense of justice than the outcomes of a decision-making process (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Thibaut & Walker, 1975), and that people care about receiving “voice” in decision-making procedures (Folger, 1977; Lind et al., 1990). Other domains of justice focus on the perceived fairness of punishment (Carlsmith & Darley, 2008; Van Prooijen, 2018b), justice-based responses to innocent victims (Lerner, 1980; see also Hafer & Bégue, 2005), or moral judgments and moral conviction across situations (Graham et al., 2009; Skitka, 2010). Most studies in these research domains focused on how people form justice judgments in the context of realistic everyday life situations, involving actual resource distributions and decision-making procedures, and truly existing decision-making authorities, offenders, victims, morally relevant situations, and so on.

While conspiracy theories reflect a deep-rooted and genuinely felt sense of injustice, they often are based on events that are highly unlikely to have taken place, or even demonstrably did not take place. Many US citizens continue to believe that the 2020 presidential elections were stolen, despite that all court trials challenging the election result were dismissed due to a lack of evidence, and recounts in multiple battleground states did not change the results. Other conspiracy theories rely even less on reality or facts. Some conspiracy theories attribute severely unethical behavior to authorities that are unlikely to actually exist: For instance, a common belief among members of extremist groups is the existence of an evil and secret world government, and that known political leaders are merely string puppets of this hidden powerful organization (Bartlett & Miller, 2010).

Moreover, some conspiracy theories portray unjust events that are unlikely to actually have taken place, involving offenders and victims that are unlikely to exist. Edgar Maddison Welch was convinced that a Democratic pedophile network kept innocent children hostage in the basement of a pizza restaurant; upon violently trying to release the children, however, he discovered that the restaurant did not have a basement to begin with. Yet, the belief in organized pedophile networks among high-ranked Democrats (and the notion that Democratic elites use the word “pizza” as codeword to order children for sexual abuse) continues to be a leading theme in the Qanon movement. Finally (and arguably most disturbingly), some conspiracy theories deny the existence of actual victims. This occurs in so-called crisis-actor conspiracy theories: In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, a common conspiracy theory was that the event was staged and the murdered children never existed. This has led conspiracy theorists to harass the parents of some of the deceased children (for an overview of these and many other evidence-free conspiracy theories, see Butter & Knight, 2020).

In the following, I introduce the emerging research domain of belief in conspiracy theories in more detail, and particularly focus on the question how conspiracy theories enable deep feelings of injustice without evidence that actual injustice has occurred. I propose that two interrelated psychological processes stimulate belief in evidence-free conspiracy theories: (1) an epistemic sense-making process that is triggered by existential threats; and (2) group allegiances, in particular an evolved tendency to blame existential threats on the covert actions of hostile coalitions.

One common insight is that conspiracy theories flourish particularly in societal crisis situations such as a pandemic, a terrorist strike, a war, a revolution, a natural disaster, or the unexpected death of a celebrity (Pipes, 1997; Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2017). This insight is consistent with the Uncertainty Management Model, stating that in uncertain situations people are more concerned about perceived justice or injustice than in certain situations (Van den Bos & Lind, 2002). Central in societal crisis situations are existential threats, which is a composite term for the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that people experience when they perceive distressing events as threatening to one’s values, one’s way of life, or one’s existence. The relevance of these feelings for conspiracy theories are articulated in the Existential Threat Model of conspiracy theories (Van Prooijen, 2020), which proposes that anxiety- or uncertainty-provoking events stimulate an epistemic sense-making process that forms the basis of conspiracy thinking. Evidence for instance reveals that belief in conspiracy theories increases following threats to control (Van Prooijen & Acker, 2015; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), threats to the status quo (Jolley et al., 2018), impactful and negative societal events (Van Prooijen & Van Dijk, 2014), experiences of social exclusion (Poon et al., 2020), relative deprivation and discrimination (Crocker et al., 1999; Van Prooijen et al., 2018b), feelings of uncertainty (Newheiser et al., 2011; Van Prooijen & Jostmann, 2013) and attitudinal ambivalence (van Harreveld et al., 2014).

The notion that feelings of existential threat stimulates epistemic sense-making processes is consistent with broader models about the role of stress in human psychology. These models have illuminated that stress stimulates not only specific appraisals, but also a broader search for meaning that people for instance may find in religion or spirituality (Park, 2010). Of importance for the present purposes, the epistemic sense-making processes following existential threats are based on a vigilant mindset that is especially prone to overestimate other’s hostile intent, which is consistent with social justice theories about self-interest and blame. Having incomplete information about other’s actions is already sufficient to increase the “myth of self-interest”, meaning that people “fill in the blanks” by overrating the extent to which others act in their self-interest (Vuolevi & Van Lange, 2010). Moreover, the Culpable Control Model proposes that harmful events stimulate an information processing style that is focused on ascribing moral responsibility and blame (Alicke, 2000). Here, I propose that these epistemic sense-making processes following existential threats are susceptible to biased automatic mental processes and motivated reasoning, which jointly promote a distorted perception of reality.

The above section has illuminated how existential threat instigates biased mental processes that enable people to accept a distorted perception of reality, and that through motivated reasoning they maintain (and may even get more convicted of) that alternative reality. Here, I argue that one critical ingredient is missing in the processes described so far: The role of group allegiances. Conspiracies by definition consist of multiple hostile people coordinating their actions (i.e., “lone wolfs” do exist, but are not a conspiracy). These groups can be diverse and may be corporate (e.g., pharmaceutical companies in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories) and governmental (e.g., the US government hiding evidence for the existence of alien life); also, they may pertain to stigmatized minority groups in society (e.g., “Eurabia” conspiracy theories, asserting there is a Muslim conspiracy to Islamize Europe).

Such group allegiances help explain why existential threats do not lead to conspiracy theories all the time, or among all citizens. When the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, it not only stimulated many conspiracy theories alleging that the attacks were an ‘inside job’ by the US government: In the months after the attacks, then-President George W. Bush also had the highest approval ratings ever recorded for a US president. Accordingly, feeling out of control may stimulate conspiracy theories in some situations (Van Prooijen & Acker, 2015; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), but it may also increase people’s support for the government in other situations (Kay et al., 2008). Moreover, while motivated reasoning processes may reinforce conspiracy theories, System Justification Theory describes how similar motivated reasoning processes may lead disadvantaged people to see the political system that they live in as fair (Jost et al., 2004).

The existential threat model asserts that distressing societal events stimulate conspiracy theories only when people can blame the events on the secret actions of a salient antagonistic outgroup (Van Prooijen, 2020). As such, many conspiracy theories blame distressing societal events on groups that perceivers considered to be hostile to begin with, for example, due to ideological differences or prejudice. Accordingly, conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks are more common among Democrats (given that there was a Republican administration in office when it happened), while conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate are more common among Republicans (Uscinski et al., 2016). A similar process can be seen after election loss (for a theoretical framework, see Uscinski & Parent, 2014): Following the 2016 US presidential election result, a common conspiracy theory among Democrats was that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians and Wikileaks to win the elections; but following the 2020 US presidential election result, a common conspiracy theory among Republicans was that Democrats had stolen the elections through foul play.

This contribution sought to illuminate that conspiracy theories include justice judgments, as conspiratorial narratives ascribe blame and make assumptions of unethical behavior committed by other groups. A particularly interesting quality of conspiracy theories is that they enable people to genuinely experience a strong sense of injustice without evidence that any malpractice actually or even plausibly took place. What drives people’s belief in such evidence-free conspiracy theories? Here, I have proposed two complementary processes to answer this question. First, existential threats instigate biased mental processes, increasing the likelihood that people accept distorted views of reality in which they assign blame in unrealistic ways. Once people have accepted such an alternative reality, subsequent motivated reasoning processes allow them to justify, and therefore maintain or even amplify these views. Second, group allegiances promote evidence-free conspiracy theories. As part of an evolutionary heritage of an ancestral past—where false-negatives in gauging the likelihood of deadly intergroup conflict were especially costly—group allegiances shape how people perceive, interpret, and remember facts to support a narrative that highlights the deceptive and immoral qualities of competing outgroups. These processes increase people’s susceptibility to evidence-free conspiracy theories particularly when they perceive how a valued ingroup is in conflict with an outgroup.

The insights discussed here have two broad theoretical implications for the study of social justice. First, while many prior social justice studies have examined justice judgments as emotional responses to, or subjective appraisals of, more realistic events, the literature on conspiracy theories clarifies that people also may form severe judgments of injustice through (sometimes far-fetched) assumptions of events unlikely to have taken place. This suggests relatively complex psychological dynamics, and introduces difficult challenges to modify such beliefs. For instance, while existing authorities may increase feelings of procedural justice among followers by using decision-making procedures that includes a range of procedural justice criteria (Leventhal, 1980), mitigating unfounded beliefs that authorities run an organized network to perform satanic rituals or sexually molest children is quite another issue. Second, group allegiances are a justice cue in and of itself. While it has been widely recognized that group allegiances are important to understand a range of justice judgments, which are closely coupled with social identity concerns (e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992), the field of conspiracy theories suggests that the mere existence of an antagonistic outgroup is sufficient for people to draw inferences of severe injustices being covered up by that group—also without concrete evidence that members of the outgroup actually have behaved unfairly. Together, these two implications give conspiracy theories a unique place in social justice research.

The link between conspiracy theories and social justice judgments is also reflected in the effects of conspiracy theories on human beliefs and behaviors. In particular, many responses to “traditional” conceptualizations of social justice and conspiracy theories converge. For instance, procedural justice judgments have been associated with a range of human responses such as trust in authorities, positive and negative emotions, protest behaviors, deference to rules, and so on (Tyler & Lind, 1992). Moreover, both perceived procedural injustice, and strong moral convictions, are associated with radicalization and disregard for the rule of law (Van den Bos, 2018; Skitka, 2010). Similar responses have been observed among people who believe conspiracy theories: Conspiracy beliefs predict distrust (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; Pummerer et al., 2021), collective action (particularly non-normative forms of collective action, such as vandalizing, attacking police officers, harassing people online, and so on; see Imhoff et al., 2021; Rottweiler & Gill, 2020), a willingness to commit minor forms of crime (Jolley et al., 2019), extremism, populism, and radicalization (Bartlett & Miller, 2010; Krouwel et al., 2017; Silva et al., 2017; Van Prooijen et al., 2015), and a range of human emotions (for overviews, see Douglas et al., 2019; Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018). Such convergence supports one of the basic premises of this contribution, namely that conspiracy theories necessarily include judgments of injustice.

Evidence-free conspiracy theories also elicit a set of unique responses, however, that can be understood only when taking the alternative reality that believers have accepted into account. For instance, belief in conspiracy theories predict a range of beliefs and behaviors that hurt perceivers’ own health. Conspiracy theories about vaccines lower vaccination intentions (Jolley & Douglas, 2014), and conspiracy beliefs about the Covid-19 pandemic decreases physical distancing (Pummerer et al., 2021). Studies in South Africa have revealed that AIDS conspiracy beliefs (e.g., beliefs that AIDS has been deliberately created by humans) substantially lower condom use among both men and women (Grebe & Nattrass, 2012). Moreover, conspiracy theories undermine social policy by calling the validity of scientific knowledge into question. People who believe that climate change is a hoax—fabricated by scientists to acquire research funding—are unlikely to support policy to reduce global warming, or to reduce their own carbon footprints (Van der Linden, 2015). Finally, conspiracy beliefs stimulate forms of radical action that are not easily explained by traditional conceptualizations of social justice: For example, conspiracy beliefs that link the Covid-19 pandemic to 5G radiation predicts justification of destroying telecommunication masts (Jolley & Paterson, 2020).

Conspiracy theories also raise new challenges for interventions designed to increase feelings of fairness among the public. Feelings of injustice caused by truly occurring events are commonly addressed through tailored behavioral interventions, which may include changes in how outcomes are distributed (e.g., reducing inequality), attention for procedural justice criteria in decision-making, punishment of norm violators, compensation or other forms of justice restoration for victims, and so on. While these interventions may help reducing conspiracy theories in some settings (e.g., Van Prooijen, 2019), it is likely that evidence-free conspiracy theories also require different tools. In a polarized social setting characterized by strong intergroup conflict, members of competing outgroups may continue to elicit conspiracy theories despite their best efforts to be fair. Debunking falsehoods contributes to reducing conspiracy theories (Orosz et al., 2016), as does shifting people’s motivations to a concern for accuracy (Pennycook et al., 2021). Moreover, interventions to break down rigid intergroup allegiances, and increase reconciliation, may reduce conspiracy theories (Van Prooijen, 2020).

At the same time, it should be noted that research on effective interventions to reduce belief in evidence-free conspiracy theories is still in its infancy (Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018). Moreover, some possible interventions may raise new social, moral, and practical dilemmas. For instance, it is very well possible that recent initiatives from social media companies (e.g., Twitter; Facebook) to remove misinformation and “fake news” from their forums is effective in reducing the spread of evidence-free conspiracy theories. Yet, such interventions do raise important new questions, such as who gets to decide what type of information is or is not allowed in public discourse, what the criteria are for classifying information as “false”, and what the implications are for citizens’ basic constitutional rights (e.g., freedom of speech). Indeed, history has shown many examples of organized misconduct by legitimate authorities that would seem implausible at first, yet turned out true (e.g., the Snowden surveillance revelations). These dilemmas suggest many intriguing novel hypotheses for social justice researchers to explore.

To conclude, this contribution was designed to highlight how the emerging research domain of belief in conspiracy theories fits into social justice research. Conspiracy theories necessarily contain justice judgments, as they involve attributions of moral responsibility, blame, and accusations of unethical, and often criminal conduct. Moreover, conspiracy theories underscore that people’s own imagination can promote justice appraisals: Many conspiracy beliefs are based on an alternative reality that consists of falsehoods, enabling a genuine sense of injustice about events that might not have taken place, authorities that might not exist, and so on. Far-fetched conspiracy theories can have a real impact on society, however, as underscored by events such as the Capitol Hill riots, anti-lockdown protests, anti-vaccination campaigns on social media, electorally successful populist movements around the world, death threats of public figures, and so on. These issues suggest that the field of conspiracy theories raises a set of complex new questions that require extensive attention of social justice researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers.