Introduction

The spread of different kinds of misinformation and conspiracy beliefs around the world is frequently considered as a serious factor of social, political and health behaviour. Conspiracy belief is a type of unfounded belief (Lobato et al., 2014). Conspiracy beliefs can be defined as unverified and relatively implausible claims (Brotherton & French, 2014) that involve the presence of several actors operating covertly to achieve hidden illegal or even malicious goals (van Prooijen & Acker, 2015). Epidemics and pandemics, which pose an existential threat to humans, proved to be a significant source of conspiracy ideas. People under their influence no longer trusted the authorities of time, rejected the anti-epidemic measures, and even perceived the anti-epidemic measures themselves as a threat directed against them (Bierwiaczonek et al., 2022). Conspiracy interpretations occurred also during the SARS (Keil & Ali, 2006), MERS, and Zika epidemics (Klofstad et al., 2019). Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic was the cause of a rapid rise in conspiracy beliefs (Teličák & Halama, 2022). The rise of conspiracy beliefs leads to higher prejudice (Dhanani & Franz, 2020) or negative intergroup dynamics (Oleksy et al., 2021), and worsen health-related attitudes (Kroke & Ruthig, 2022).

In the search for psychological factors related to the propensity for conspiracy beliefs, previous research showed that relevant psychological variables are cognitive mechanisms (Ballová Mikušková, 2018), personality traits as Big Five (Lobato et al., 2014) or Dark Triad (Kay, 2021; see further), psychopathology (Teličák & Halama, 2021), uncertainty management processes and the need for control (Šrol et al., 2021) and even sociodemographic variables (van Prooijen, 2017).

In this study, we focus on the socially aversive personality factors of propensity to conspiracy beliefs. The concept of socially aversive traits was described in the Dark Triad model (Paulhus & Williams, 2002). This concept includes narcissism, which is characterized by constant attention seeking, egocentrism, and exploitation in interpersonal relationships (Ackerman et al., 2011); subclinical psychopathy, which is characterized by high impulsivity and low empathy and anxiety (Sellbom, 2011); and machiavellianism, which is characterized by a negative image of others and a tendency to mislead, lie, and manipulate (Monaghan et al., 2016). The concept of the dark triad has been lately expanded to Dark Tetrad, including another socially aversive trait, everyday sadism (Paulhus, 2014), i.e., a general preference for cruelty and violence (Buckels et al., 2013). The Dark Tetrad expands the repertoire of socially aversive traits and allows for a more comprehensive examination of socially maladaptive personality traits.

Many studies tried to relate the Dark Triad or Dark Tetrad traits with conspiracy beliefs. Narcissism has been proved to be a positive predictor of conspiracy beliefs (Cichocka et al., 2016; Golec de et al., 2018; Teličák and Halama, 2020; Kay, 2021), although there are small number of studies that showed no effect of narcissism on higher propensity to believe in conspiracies (e.g. March & Springer, 2019). Cichocka et al. (2016) hypothesised that a narcissistic personality may be more prone to conspiratorial beliefs because of a tendency toward paranoid beliefs, as narcissistic personality is overly concerned with how they are perceived by others. Another reason why a narcissistic personality can be prone to conspiracy beliefs is their need to maintain a positive impression of themselves and their group (Douglas et al., 2017).

Machiavellianism, characterized by manipulativeness and strategic orientation (Jones & Paulhus, 2014), has been also found as a predictor of conspiracy beliefs (March & Springer, 2019; Teličák & Halama, 2020; Kay, 2021). The reason can be based on the assumption that machiavellians have low trust in the environment and, at the same time, a higher need for control, what is compensated by conspiracy beliefs (Douglas et al., 2017; Kay, 2021). The positive relationship between psychopathy and conspiracy beliefs has been noted in some studies (March & Springer, 2019; Halama & Teličák, 2022). March and Springer (2019) explain this by higher levels of callousness and egocentricity, and Kay (2020) by higher levels of antisociality. Again, not all results confirmed this effect (Teličák & Halama, 2020).

There is lack of research that studied the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and sadism. Kay (2021) suggested that individuals with higher sadism scores are more likely to believe in conspiracies, because individuals with higher sadism scores are more prone to fatalism and distrust, leading to harming others, which may subsequently lead to higher levels of conspiracy beliefs. However, this was not confirmed in the research of Halama and Teličák (2022), who found no relationship between sadism and conspiracy beliefs.

Overall, existing research showed that relationships between dark tetrad traits and conspiracy beliefs has been found in the many previous studies, although the null findings also occur in certain number of studies. One of the reasons for incoherent results can be different sociodemographic variables related to research samples. Although the research, which would directly study moderating effect of sociodemographic variable on the relationship between personality traits and conspiracy beliefs is missing, we assume such characteristics could be a factors here. One of them could be political orientation or political attitudes, which were already proved as moderator in the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and other variables (Miller et al., 2016). For instance, political preferences could influence what media sources are considered as reliable and through this way, they could reduce or amplify the correlations. Also, sociodemographic variables related to social position as education, income or minority/majority status can play a certain role. These variables were shown to have the relationship with conspiracy beliefs (Telicák & Halama, 2021; van Prooijen, 2017). Having lower social position can increase feelings of powerlessness and/or lack of control, which may lead to higher acceptance of conspiracy (Šrol et al., 2021) and modify the effect od personality traits.

The present study

In our study we studied whether research sample can play a role in the way how Dark Tetrad traits predict conspiracy beliefs. We decided to run the analyses in three independent samples, namely university students, social network users and participants recruited through the panel of a research agency. Our goal is to find out whether the possible relations are comparable across different samples and whether the show stable pattern regardless specific sample. Our assumptions based on the previous results was that especially machiavellianism and narcissism will be positive predictors of conspiracy beliefs. In our study, we used two variables to measure conspiracies: general conspiracy mentality as defined in Bruder et al. (2013), and specific conspiracies related to COVID-19 disease. These two indicators of conspiracy inclination show several differences. Comparison of measures focused on specific conspiracy theories and conspiracy mentality showed that the conspiracy mentality is characterized by greater stability, lower susceptibility to manipulation, less skewed distribution, and reduced contamination from other ideological content (Imhoff et al., (2022). This can have consequences for empirical research, as these two variables can show somewhat different results in empirical studies. In our study, we decided to include both these variables in order to have more complex image of the conspiracy preferences.

Method

Sample

Three independent samples were used in the study. The first sample consisted of 804 university students (73.9% women) from middle-size Slovak university with mean age 24.18 (SD = 6.68). The students were invited through group e-mail and those who participated were involved in lottery with possibility to win the small prize (purchase voucher). The second sample (N = 498, 61.2% women) consisted of Facebook users. The mean age of this sample was 37.91 years (SD = 14.10). The third sample came from an online panel of a research agency (N = 600, 49% women). Participants from this sample were compensated for their participation. The mean age of this sample was 49.44 years (SD = 16.17). The data from participants was collected during the autumn and winter of 2021/2022. The other descriptive data of these three independent samples is provided in the Table 1. All participants were informed about the purpose of the study, and agreed-upon informed consent.

Table 1 Descriptive analysis of the samples
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Measures

The Short Dark Tetrad Scale (SD4) was used to measure socially aversive personality traits (Paulhus et al., 2021). It contains 28 items with answers on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. The scale includes four dimensions: Machiavellianism (e.g. “Strategically avoid conflict”), Narcissism (e.g. “I am persuasive”), Psychopathy (e.g. “Payback must be nasty”) and Sadism (e.g. “Can hurt with words”). The scale was translated into Slovak language by authors using expert consensus way of translation. The original version of the scale showed good reliability and validity. The internal consistencies of the dimensions in current Slovak samples are presented in Table 2.

The Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ) was used to measure conspiracy beliefs (Bruder et al., 2013) and it contains 5 items with answers on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (e.g. “I think that there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions”). The scale was translated into Slovak by Ballová Mikušková (2018). The original version of the scale showed good reliability and validity. The internal consistency coefficients of the scale in current samples are presented in Table 2.

The COVID-19 Unfounded Beliefs Scale was used to measure unfounded beliefs about COVID-19 (Teličák & Halama, 2022). The scale was developed in Slovak language and it contains three dimensions, however, we used only the conspiracy dimension to measure which contains 6 items related to conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 with answers on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (e.g. „The COVID-19 pandemic was planned to accelerate migration”). The scale in original study (Teličák & Halama, 2022) showed good reliability and validity. The internal consistency coefficients of the conspiracy dimension in current samples are presented in Table 2.

Statistical procedures

We used the statistical software SPSS-23, Jamovi 2.2.2 and R-Studio to process the research data. To assess the internal consistency of the scales and individual dimensions, we used Cronbach alpha and McDonalds omega coefficients. We tested the structure of the measured variables using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) by using the R-Studio by the library “lavaan”. The relationships between Dark tetrad, and conspiracy beliefs (for three samples separately) were examined by robust regression analysis by calculation using the R-Studio, the “robust”, “dplyr” and “car” packages. Gender, age, and education were included in the regression equation as predictors together with dark tetrad. We used skewness, kurtosis and QQ-plots as a reference framework for evaluating the regression analysis assumptions. The prevalence of multicollinearity among predictors was assessed by estimating the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) coefficients. The descriptive analysis of the measured variables is presented in Table 2. The robust regression analysis was performed due to violation of normality assumptions evident from the QQ-plots. The structural validity of the measures was estimated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In SD4, we estimated four-factor model with correlated factors. In two other measures, single-factor model was estimated. All models were estimated in total sample. The results are presented in Table 3. Data file and codes for analyses performed in the study are publicly available at https://osf.io/agke6/?view_only=f45ba5e822c84aa380971f5462a1b586.

Table 2 Descriptive analysis of methods
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Table 3 The parameters of the measurement model variables estimated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)
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Results

Table 4 presents the results of the correlation analysis between all variables for each individual sample as well as the entire sample. The results of the robust regression analysis are shown in Table 5. The regression analysis was realized separately for all three groups (university students, social network users, and participants from research agency panel). In all cases, VIF coefficients fell within the favorable range of 1.02 to 2.00. The results in the group of university students showed that all demographic variables: gender, age, and education predicted conspiracy mentality but only gender predicted conspiracies related to COVID-19. Women, less educated and older students showed higher conspiracy mentality and women showed higher tendency to agree with COVID-19 conspiracies. Concerning the Dark Tetrad, narcissism positively predicted COVID-19 conspiracy and machiavellianism positively predict conspiracy mentality. The percentage of explained variance was generally low: 1% for COVID-19 conspiracy and 5% for general conspiracy.

The results in social network users showed similar pattern for demographic predictors: women, less educated and older students had the higher conspiracy mentality. However, no demographic variable showed an effect on COVID-19 conspiracy. From the Dark tetrad dimensions, psychopathy showed positive effect on conspiracy mentality, however, its effect for COVID-19 conspiracy was positive but only marginally significant. The percentage of explained variance was only 1% for COVID-19 conspiracies and 18% for conspiracy mentality.

Concerning respondents from the panel of a research agency, low education predicted higher conspiracy mentality as well as acceptance of COVID-19 conspiracy, and being a woman predicted higher COVID-19 conspiracy but not conspiracy mentality. In this case, machiavellianism showed positive effect on both conspiracy variables. From other dark tetrad traits, psychopathy was positive predictor of COVID-19 conspiracy acceptance, but not of conspiracy mentality. The amount of explained variance was 12% for COVID-19 conspiracies and 10% for conspiracy mentality.

Table 4 Correlation matrix of the variables for the individual subsamples and for whole sample (Spearman´s correlations)
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Table 5 Results of robust regression analysis (standardized β)
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Discussion

The aim of the study was to test whether the dark tetrad traits predict conspiracy beliefs (COVID-19 and general) in the Slovak population consistently across different samples. Analyses were conducted on three independent samples, namely university students, social network users, and participants recruited through a research agency’s panel. Our goal was to find out whether the possible relationships between the different samples are comparable and whether they show stable patterns regardless of the particular sample. In general, the results were inconsistent and analyses provided different findings for individual research samples.

Sadism did not prove to be a predictor of any of the types of conspiracy beliefs across all three research samples, which is consistent with small number of previous studies (e.g., Halama & Teličák, 2022). Narcissism positively predicts only COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, and only in the sample of university students. This results contrasts with many other studies, which found that narcissism is consistent correlates of conspiracy beliefs (e.g., Cichocka et al., 2016; Golec de Zavala & Federico, 2018; Teličák & Halama, 2020; Kay, 2021) and this is mostly explained by narcissistic tendencies toward dominance and control, which includes conspiratorial worldview. We can think of several reasons, why our results did not confirm this. The first is related to measures. Many previous studies used individual measures of narcissism or even measure of collective narcissism, which can be different from the measure used in our study. There can be also cultural influences. Slovakia is a country which has very high level of conspiracy beliefs in comparison with other European or non-European countries (e.g. Hornsey et al., 2023). This can mean that the Slovak people are exposed to strong social influence of conspiracy beliefs and this social effect can overcome the effect of personality traits such as dark tetrad. Finally, we can speculate about the sample characteristics behind this results, e.g. people from general community and social networks can be exposed to higher level of conspiracy in their social interactions in comparison to university students. Again, the social influence can overcome the effect of personality traits.

Machiavellianism has been shown to be a positive predictor of general conspiracy beliefs in university students and positively predictor of both types of conspiracy beliefs in a research agency sample. Psychopathy positively predicts exposure to general and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs in a research sample obtained through social networks. In a research sample obtained through a research agency, psychopathy positively predicts only general conspiracy beliefs. The positive relationship between psychopathy, machiavelism and conspiracy beliefs has been noted also in some other studies (March & Springer, 2019; Teličák & Halama, 2020; Kay, 2021; Halama & Teličák, 2022).

The general reason that the socially-averse personality variables represented by the dark tetrad did not prove to be consistent predictors of conspiracy beliefs across different samples can be twofold. The first one is the specificity of the individual samples. Specific characteristics of the samples can affect the strengths of the association between personality traits and belief in conspiracy theories. The samples from different sources can differ in such important variable as political attitudes (e.g. students in the university can be more liberal that general population), which were already proved to be moderator in the relations of conspiracy beliefs with other variables (Miller et al., 2016). Other factors can involve polarization toward societal phenomena (e.g. social network users more polarized, see Cinelli et al., 2022) etc. Also, the context and reward for participation can play an important role (Hauser et al., 2019), as in the research agency sample, the participants received a reward for their participation. As we did not control these variables in our research, we are not able to provide moderation analysis results, which could confirm or reject this assumption, but we recommend to control such variables in the future research. We also need to consider the sociodemographic differences between the samples. As suggested earlier in the introduction, the social position can modify the relationship between dark tetrad and conspiracies. In our case, this can be valid especially for university students’ sample, which showed the least percentage of conspiracy variance explained by dark tetrad. We hypothesise that higher social position (e.g. family, background supporting university educations) can eliminate the effect of dark tetrad on conspiracy beliefs. Also, the students sample was youngest, so this can also affect the results. On the other hand, research agency panel was a sample with the highest percentage of low-educated people as well as the oldest sample. In this sample, significant effect of Machiavellianism on both conspiracy measures, can be related to the lower social position. People in lower levels of social position (in this case, lower education) can feel more powerlessness and as a consequence, they can incline to Machiavellian world view connected to conspiracies.

Taken into account overall small regression coefficients od dark tetrad on conspiracies, we have to consider the second reason for results inconsistency across samples, i.e. general non-existence of the relationships between dark tetrad and proneness to conspiracy beliefs. Such a conclusion would not be new or unusual in psychology of conspiracy beliefs. Many studies show that Big Five personality traits are correlates of conspiracy beliefs, but recent metaanalysis showed that none of the Big five traits was significantly associated with conspiracy beliefs if effect sizes were aggregated across different studies (Goreis, & Voracek, 2019). The personality approach to conspiracy beliefs has been criticised by Raab et al. (2013), who pointed out that understanding conspiracies as a stable trait correlated with other variables is questionable and ignores the social dynamics of conspiracy diffusion and the creative or narrative quality of conspiracies. Krekó (2015) emphasised that only schizotypal personality has been proved to be a consistent, but small correlate of conspiracy beliefs. In his point of view, the conspiracy beliefs are not an outcome of individual characteristics, rather a form of collective motivated cognition, which helps to maintain collective identity.

On the other hand, our results showed that there are differences between conspiracy mentality and actual COVID-19 conspiracies. These two variables showed somewhat different relationship with dark tetrad and even demographic variables. Overall, the correlations and beta coefficients were higher for conspiracy mentality than for COVID-19 conspiracies (see also overall variance explained by the regression models), confirming that the conspiracy mentality is more a stable characteristic similar to personality traits whereas specific conspiracy beliefs can be manifest indicators contaminated by other factors (Imhoff et al., 2022).

Concerning sociodemographic variables, which we used as control variables in the regression equations (gender, education, age), the results again provided different findings across study samples. Women were found to be more prone to both types of conspiracy beliefs, but only in the sample of respondents from university. In the social networks sample, women are more prone to general conspiracies, and in the sample by the research agency, women are more prone to COVID-19 conspiracies. Similar findings were also found in other studies (e.g. Popoli & Longus, 2021; Teličák & Halama, 2021). However, it turns out to be necessary to reflect on the absence of differences in the belief in conspiracy beliefs between men and women, as pointed out by some studies (Swami et al., 2016). Educational level proved to be a negative predictor of both types of conspiracy beliefs in a sample of research agency respondents. Higher levels of education proved to be a protective factor against susceptibility to COVID-19 conspiracies in the other two samples of respondents. Although not valid for every conspiracy measure included in our study, the results in general correspond to previous findings that higher levels of education is protective factors against succumbing to conspiracy beliefs (van Prooijen, 2016; Prooijen, 2017). It is mainly because education increases the ability to navigate the information domain, one’s sense of control over the world, and cognitive complexity (Rindermann & Neubauer, 2004; van Prooijen, 2016; Prooijen, 2017). Our results suggest that older individuals have a higher propensity to hold general conspiracy beliefs than respondents in the social network sample and university students, which is consistent with other findings (Halama, 2019; Guess et al., 2019) ), but in opposite with other studies which do not confirm this (Šrol et al., 2021; Vijaykumar et al., 2021). The possible reasons, which could lie behind sample differences include methodological as well as cultural factors. The methodological reason relates to low regression coefficients. If assumed that the overall effect of gender on conspiracy beliefs is very small, as suggested not only by our results, the findings can be sensitive to sampling error and the differences between samples can be caused by sample bias. Cultural factors can also play an important role, for example gender inequality in societies can be possible factor, as powerlessness is related to higher conspiracy (Biddlestone et al., 2020), and in the societies with higher inequality, women can be more inclined to conspiracies.

However, we should take into account, that the effect size of age prediction is very small, not only in sense of regression coefficient but also in sense of overall variance of conspiracy measures explained by the dark tetrad and sociodemographic variables (from 0.005 to 0.18).

Limitations

The basic limitation of the research is its correlational nature. Correlation research with data collected in one-time moment could be limited in providing causal interpretation of the results. For the future it could be a more advance to use a longitudinal design which would have been more appropriate for determining semi causality. The second limitation is that we did not control for specific variables, which could be a source of the differences between the samples as political attitudes, trust in the system etc. Finally, data collection through self-report scales can lead to potential biases, including common method biases such as social desirability or acquiescence bias. Furthermore, since the model was only tested on a sample from a single country, it is essential to be cautious when interpreting the results until they are confirmed using a cross-country dataset. Another limitation can be the VIF value for psychopathy. Even though it has an acceptable value of 2, this might lead to slight distortion of results.

Conclusion

Our study investigated the relationship between dark tetrad traits and conspiracy beliefs in multiple samples of Slovak inhabitants. Results were shown to be inconsistent across samples and no consistent pattern of correlations emerged. The predictive effects of the individual dark tetrad traits were only particular, e.g. narcissism predicted COVID-19 conspiracies in the student sample, machiavellianism in students and the agency sample and psychopathy in the social network sample. The results raise a question, whether the role of the dark tetrad in conspiracy beliefs is overrated and possibly no consistent patterns of effect exists. However, cultural factor explanations are also possible, as Slovakia is country with very high level of conspiracy beliefs, which could overcome the effect of personality. Future research should include more diverse samples and datasets, with reliable control of demographic variables and other possible moderators of the relationship between dark tetrad and conspiracies.