"Fake news", Trump supporters and lateral thinker demonstrations: The political disputes of the past few years have given the impression that belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise worldwide - also thanks to the Internet and social media.

But scientists disagree.

At least the authors of a study published in the journal Plos One on Wednesday assume that belief in conspiracy stories has not increased.

The question of whether the world is living in a "post-truth" era can be answered in the negative.

For their recently published work, the researchers asked citizens about their belief in conspiracy theories in four sub-studies and used findings from previous surveys.

From the answers, they calculated the "American Conspiracy Thinking Scale" - a value that is intended to reflect the tendency to conspiratorial thinking.

A reassuring finding

In the first study, they asked people in the US about their attitudes towards 55 conspiracy topics over different periods of time – from those related to QAnon and Covid-19 to the assassination of US President Kennedy to those about aliens and UFOs.

Some of the data goes back to 1966.

In the second sub-study, opinions on six conspiracy theories in European countries were collected from 2016 to 2018.

Another sub-study looked at which groups – from Freemasons to governments to international organizations – were most frequently seen as “conspirators” in the USA between 2012 and 2020.

In the fourth study, the researchers evaluated eight surveys between 2012 and 2021.

In it, respondents rated four general statements that indicate their propensity to believe in conspiracies, such as "The people who really 'govern' the country are unknown to voters."

According to the study, none of these four studies provide convincing evidence that belief in conspiracy theories has recently increased.

A reassuring finding, also from the point of view of German experts: "There doesn't seem to be any reason to panic," explains the Münster media psychologist Lena Frischlich.

Frischlich and other German experts rate the results of the study as plausible, but point out that it has some methodological weaknesses and that the long-term data are far too imprecise to draw such comparisons.

For example, communication scientist Philipp Müller criticized the fact that the second study compared responses from 2016 and 2018 – a period that is so short that an increase in the belief in conspiracies could hardly have been expected.

German experts also only follow the all-clear given by the authors of the study to a limited extent.

For Müller, for example, it is clear that social media have given conspiracy theorists and their stories more visibility, greater networking and greater participation in demonstrations.

But that doesn't mean that more and more people believe such stories over time.

And Frischlich says studies show that people who believe in conspiracy theories are less willing to participate in the democratic process and more likely to advocate violence.

"So that's definitely something to take seriously."

From the point of view of the German scientists, more research should be carried out into why and with whom conspiracy theories fall on fertile ground.

In addition, it would be appropriate to reflect on the causes of the alienation from democratic thinking, which is evidently growing in parts of the western population.