Whoa!! Fascinating!!

“This was one of those research findings that the press got hold of and framed in an unintended way,” she says. This particular piece of research was led by her PhD student Ricky Green, who was interested in how people’s early childhood experiences with their caregivers, which is always said to affect relationships later in life, might affect their propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. Given the link between insecure attachment styles and maladaptive relationship strategies, she and Green wondered if there was a link between these beliefs and attachment anxiety.

“He found there was. People who are securely attached tend not to believe anywhere near as much as people who are insecurely or anxiously attached.” The underlying reason appears to be that people who are anxiously attached tend to “catastrophize problems more.” In other words, when they look around at what’s happening, they see threats rather than things as they are, in turn making them prone to thinking the worst of every situation. For Douglas and Green this was an exciting finding because it might open the way to get at the underlying mechanism of these beliefs.