Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality

Conspiracist beliefs are widespread and potentially hazardous. A growing body of research suggests that cognitive biases may play a role in endorsement of conspiracy theories. The current research examines the novel hypothesis that individuals who are biased towards inferring intentional explanations for ambiguous actions are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories, which portray events as the exclusive product of intentional agency. Study 1 replicated a previously observed relationship between conspiracist ideation and individual differences in anthropomorphisation. Studies 2 and 3 report a relationship between conspiracism and inferences of intentionality for imagined ambiguous events. Additionally, Study 3 again found conspiracist ideation to be predicted by individual differences in anthropomorphism. Contrary to expectations, however, the relationship was not mediated by the intentionality bias. The findings are discussed in terms of a domain-general intentionality bias making conspiracy theories appear particularly plausible. Alternative explanations are suggested for the association between conspiracism and anthropomorphism

Shame and Guilt Situational Identification in Subclinical Primary Psychopaths

International audienc

Employee Well-Being Under Corporate Psychopath Leaders

This chapter reports on twenty-one in-depth interviews in the UK and USA with corporateemployees who were currently working or had previously worked with a toxic leader in theform of a corporate psychopath. This is thus a chapter that is concerned with the impact onwell-being of working with a corporate psychopath. Corporate psychopathy was definedusing a measure of psychopathy involving proto-typical characteristics such as lying,cheating, egocentricity, emotional unresponsiveness and grandiosity. A contribution of thechapter is that it answers the call for research which links the destructive leadership literaturewith employee well-being. Research participants in both countries reported that their wellbeing was affected by psychopathic leadership, with reports of stress-related illnesses anddepression, including suicidal thoughts. The chapter concludes that corporate psychopaths, inboth the UK and USA, appear to have a similar protocol for achieving their objectives andachieve similar results. This protocol involves using loud, regular, public bullying combinedwith threats of violence to create a fearful, cowed and compliant workforce who can the moreeasily be manipulated and controlled by the abusive corporate psychopath. Researchparticipants in both the USA and UK suffered from severely reduced well-being because ofthis common experience