Abstract
One way to cope with crises is by attributing their ultimate causes to malevolent conspiracies. As crises are rarely simple, and may involve an interplay between multiple, co-occurring threats, we suggest that conspiracy thinking mainly occurs among individuals who experience conditions of threat complexity – such as socioeconomic vulnerability paired with a sense of helplessness in society, and who are also sufficiently paranoid to infer a conspiracy. In the present study, we focused on financial strain and disempowerment, as two relevant threats which were both dramatically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and hypothesized a three-way interaction between financial strain, disempowerment and paranoia in predicting conspiracy thinking. This hypothesis was supported in both cross-national ( N = 64,130) and longitudinal data ( N = 11,159), collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications of the results for understanding the tendency to reduce multiple threats to a single cause are discussed.