Dispositional mindfulness, conspiracy mentality, and generic conspiracy beliefs: Preliminary empirical evidence of a mediational model

Abstract

An increasing amount of literature on dispositional mindfulness has focused on several positive outcomes, such as psychological well-being, stress reduction, improved quality of life, and reduced levels of stereotypes and prejudices. At the same time, recently, a large corpus of studies focused on antecedents and potential negative consequences of conspiracy beliefs, which increasingly affect our societies. However, no previous study explored the relationships between people's dispositional mindfulness and their adherence to conspiracy beliefs. The current research conducted on 299 Italian participants contributes to filling this gap, hypothesizing that higher dispositional mindfulness would be associated with lower adherence to generic conspiracy beliefs, via lower levels of conspiracy mentality. Thus, a mediational path model was tested. The results confirmed the expectations, showing that the more people reported higher dispositional mindfulness, the less they reported conspiracy mentality, which in turn was associated with lower levels of adherence to generic conspiracy beliefs. This study provided a preliminary empirical basis for future research and interventions, proposing itself to be a relevant first step in investigating mindfulness-based interventions as preventive tools to counteract the increasing conspiracy beliefs in our contemporary societies.