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When Life Feels Rigged, Conspiracy Theories Start to Make Sense
In A Nutshell
- People who’ve faced more hardship over their lifetime, from illness to violence to financial ruin, tend to see the world as fundamentally unfair, and that outlook is linked to stronger belief in conspiracy theories.
- Victims of violent crime reported a stronger sense of injustice than non-victims, a difference statistically linked to greater conspiracy thinking.
- In a controlled experiment, reading an article describing society as increasingly unfair temporarily raised participants’ conspiracy beliefs compared to reading a “things are getting fairer” version.
- Not everyone who suffers turns to conspiracy theories; researchers say how a person interprets their hardship, not the hardship itself, appears to matter most.
A bad breakup. A serious illness. Financial struggles. Most people face at least one of these hardships over a lifetime, and a series of new studies suggests those painful experiences may be linked to how people see the world, particularly whether they come to view it as fundamentally unfair. That outlook, in turn, was associated with stronger conspiracy beliefs.
Psychologists at the University of Nottingham and the University of Cumbria conducted three studies involving 1,284 participants, published in the British Journal of Psychology, to investigate why some people are drawn to conspiracy theories. What they found cuts to something surprisingly personal: it’s not just being part of a historically oppressed group that fuels conspiratorial thinking. Ordinary, individual hardships that leave a person feeling like life isn’t fair appear to do the same thing, by feeding a deep, settled sense that the world itself is unjust. When life deals repeated blows, people may begin to feel bad outcomes aren’t random and that someone, somewhere, must be responsible.
A Lifetime of Hardship Is Linked to Believing the World Is Rigged
Researchers have long known that groups facing discrimination or historical oppression sometimes develop higher rates of conspiracy thinking. This new work explores whether private suffering, unrelated to social identity, produces the same effect.
To test this, the team used a checklist covering 35 types of adversity spanning a person’s life: serious accidents, bereavement, financial struggles, domestic violence, divorce, natural disasters, and more. Participants tallied how many events they had experienced from childhood through adulthood, and researchers examined whether piling up more of these experiences was connected to seeing the world as stacked against ordinary people.
Study 1, with 275 participants recruited online, found that greater lifetime hardship was associated with a stronger sense that the world is unfair, which in turn was associated with higher conspiracy thinking, the general tendency to interpret events as the product of secret plots by powerful groups. Recent financial hardship during the UK’s cost-of-living crisis showed the same pattern: people struggling economically in the past six months were more likely to feel the world was unjust and, through that sense of injustice, more likely to see conspiracies at work.
Violent Crime Victims Report Stronger Conspiracy Beliefs
Study 2 took a more controlled approach with 471 participants recruited, 458 included in the final sample, comparing people who had experienced violent crime against those who had never been crime victims. Researchers deliberately narrowed who could take part so the comparison stayed clean, letting them zero in on personal adversity rather than adversity tied to identity (more on that trade-off below in Paper Notes).
Victims of violent crime reported meaningfully higher perceptions of injustice than non-victims. Violent victimization was indirectly associated with stronger conspiracy beliefs: victims felt the world was more unfair, and that difference was statistically linked to stronger conspiracy thinking, even after researchers accounted for age, gender, and education level.
Reading About an Unfair Society Boosted Conspiracy Beliefs
Perhaps the most revealing finding came from Study 3, which involved 538 participants in a direct experiment. Participants read one of two articles about British society, one claiming the country was becoming fairer and more equal, the other declaring it was becoming increasingly unfair, each with evidence to match.
Participants in the “unfair society” group reported stronger belief in conspiracy theories than those who read the positive article, both in general conspiratorial thinking and in specific beliefs about political elites secretly controlling events. It’s the first time researchers have shown this link through a controlled experiment rather than a survey, evidence that reading about an unjust society can temporarily raise reported conspiracy beliefs.
However, the study’s main prediction did not pan out. Researchers had guessed that people with tougher life histories would react more strongly to reading the unfair-society article, but that turned out not to be the case.
Study 3 also tracked trust in institutions like parliament, courts, schools, and businesses. Lifetime adversity was linked, through feelings of injustice and political conspiracy beliefs, to lower confidence in those institutions, suggesting hardship may, for some people, chip away at trust in the systems meant to protect them. The researchers describe this as an early signal worth digging into further, not a settled conclusion.
Interpretation, Not Hardship Alone, Predicts Conspiracy Belief
Researchers note that not everyone who suffers embraces conspiracy theories. What matters most is not the hardship itself, but how a person interprets it. Those who see their suffering as evidence that life is fundamentally rigged seem most vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking. Researchers suggest, as a direction for future work, that people who find meaning in adversity or draw on flexible coping strategies may be more insulated from that pull, though this remains untested.
Researchers raise the possibility that helping people process difficult experiences and rebuild meaning might reduce conspiracy theories’ appeal, though this study did not test whether such approaches work. They also caution that pushing people to simply “reframe” genuine systemic injustice would be inappropriate; in those cases, legitimate political channels or restorative justice may be more constructive.
Across all three studies, one pattern holds: when life feels relentlessly unfair, perceived injustice appears to be a key pathway toward conspiratorial thinking, though suffering alone doesn’t determine how a person makes sense of the world.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a peer-reviewed psychology study and is intended for general informational purposes. It is not a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or legal advice. Anyone experiencing distress related to trauma, victimization, or mental health should consult a qualified professional.
Paper Notes
Limitations
The researchers acknowledge several important limitations. All three studies relied primarily on self-reported data, and because the key measures of injustice and conspiracy belief were collected at the same time, the direction of cause and effect cannot be fully established from Studies 1 and 2. It remains possible that people who already believe in conspiracies are more likely to interpret their hardships as unjust, rather than the reverse. The researchers call for future longitudinal studies that track people over time to untangle this. Additionally, the adversity measure used in Studies 1 and 3 counted total life events without capturing how severely each event affected the individual, something the researchers acknowledge as a shortcoming, since two people can experience the same event very differently. Study 2’s eligibility restrictions (white, cisgender, heterosexual, UK-based, employed participants) were intentional for methodological reasons but limit how widely the findings can be applied. Finally, minor adaptations were made to the adversity checklist for online administration, which excluded two items specific to childhood abuse; the researchers note this as a limitation given existing research connecting childhood adversity to conspiracy beliefs.
Funding and Disclosures
This research was supported by the British Academy, Grant Number SRG23/230720, awarded to Daniel Jolley and Laura E. R. Blackie. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Publication Details
Authors: Daniel Jolley (School of Psychology, University of Nottingham), Anna Maughan (Institute of Health, University of Cumbria), and Laura E. R. Blackie (School of Psychology, University of Nottingham) | Paper Title: “The world is an unjust place: The impact of lifetime adversity on belief in conspiracy theories” | Journal: British Journal of Psychology (online first; Br J Psychol. 2026;00:1–22) | DOI: 10.1111/bjop.70101 | Received: September 23, 2025 | Accepted: July 6, 2026 | Pre-registration documents, data, and materials are publicly available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/b7ym4/
