Loneliness trajectories over three decades are associated with conspiracist worldviews in midlife
Following the same people for over three decades, we found that trajectories of loneliness beginning in adolescence predict conspiracist worldviews in midlife — conspiracy belief has developmental roots, not just situational triggers.
The paper, in plain language
A question almost no dataset can answer
Most conspiracy research measures belief and its correlates at one moment in adulthood. We could go further because Norwegian cohort data followed the same individuals from their teenage years into their fifties. That design lets us ask whether the roots of a conspiratorial worldview are visible decades before the worldview itself.
What we found
They are. People whose loneliness was persistently high from adolescence onward were more likely to hold conspiracist worldviews in midlife. The pattern fits a theoretical story in which chronic exclusion teaches a lesson about the world — that it is a place where others operate against you, behind your back — which conspiracy narratives later confirm and organise.
Why it matters
The finding relocates part of the misinformation problem. If conspiracy belief were only a failure of information hygiene, fact-checking would be the remedy; if it partly grows from decades of social disconnection, then adolescent belonging becomes misinformation policy. Debunking still matters — but it arrives late in a process that starts in the school corridor.
Bierwiaczonek, K., Fluit, S.*, von Soest, T., Hornsey, M., & Kunst, J.R. (2024). Loneliness trajectories over three decades are associated with conspiracist worldviews in midlife. Nature Communications. 15, 3629 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47113-x