The Link Between Schizotypal Traits and Conspiratorial Thinking

October 5, 2025

We've heard it all over, all around:

"And so the [evil entity, such as: US gov, mega corp, rich elite] is trying to control/manipulate everybody (and everything)!"

Why does nearly every conspiracy theory end the same way - with shadowy elites, governments, or corporations secretly manipulating everything?

And why do people experiencing schizophrenia or schizotypal traits often independently arrive at strikingly similar narratives about hidden control and persecution?

Beneath this pattern is something fundamental about how human brains work, especially when certain cognitive systems get dysregulated.

Let's break this down from multiple angles: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology.

The Hyperactive Agency Detection System

Start with evolution. Our ancestors faced a recurring problem: when something unexpected happened, like rustling grass, a snapping twig, or a sudden illness, they asked, "Is this random, or did something/someone intentionally cause it?"

Natural selection strongly favored what cognitive scientists call a "hyperactive agency detection device." Here's why: If you're a hominid on the savanna and hear rustling, you need to instantly decide whether it's wind or a leopard. The cost of a false positive (thinking wind is a predator) is minimal (you look silly, you waste some energy). But the cost of a false negative (thinking the predator is just wind) is death. So evolution built brains with a bias: when in doubt, assume there's an agent with intentions behind events.

New Threats, Same Old System

This made perfect sense for immediate physical threats. But scale it up to modern life: economic collapses, pandemics, personal misfortunes, … and this same system keeps firing. When bad things happen, your brain desperately searches for a "who" behind it all. Because here's the uncomfortable truth: if it's just chaos/the impersonal grinding of complex systems, that's terrifying and you can't do anything about it. But, if there's an agent (even a malevolent one), then that's at least something to work with, because agents can be understood, predicted, and maybe even opposed.

There's a paradoxical comfort in "someone is doing this to us" versus "the universe is indifferent and chaotic." The evidence for this bias is robust: cross-cultural studies show humans universally tend to over-attribute agency and intention to random events, from natural disasters to economic patterns.

The Hyperactive Agency Detection System:

Situation: A bad thing happens.
- Response: "An agent intentionally caused this."

Pattern Detection and the Dopamine System

Now let's layer in neurobiology. Your brain's dopaminergic system (particularly pathways from the ventral tegmental area projecting to the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex) functions essentially as a pattern-detection machine. When you spot a pattern, when disparate pieces suddenly click together, you get a dopamine hit. That "Aha!" moment feels good because that neural circuit is rewarding you for finding structure in noise.

This system works beautifully most of the time. It's how we learn, how we navigate the world, how we predict what happens next. But … it can misfire.

Here's where schizophrenia and schizotypal conditions become relevant. There's substantial evidence of dysregulated dopamine signaling in schizophrenia (particularly in the mesolimbic pathway). The leading model suggests inappropriate "salience attribution", which means that your brain tags things as meaningful and important when they're actually random or irrelevant.

[See: Aberrant Salience Hypothesis - delusions arise from the brain incorrectly assigning disproportionate importance (salience) to neutral events or stimuli.]

Imagine your pattern-detection system with the sensitivity turned way up. Suddenly everything seems connected. Random coincidences feel pregnant with significance. Unrelated events seem to form coherent narratives. And critically, these connections feel true with profound certainty, because the same neural circuits that normally reward you for genuine insights are firing, just inappropriately.

And what's the ultimate pattern? Not just isolated connections, but a grand unified narrative with intentional actors orchestrating everything. The conspiracy theory becomes the mega-pattern that explains it all.

The evidence here comes from multiple sources: neuroimaging studies showing altered dopamine synthesis capacity in schizophrenia, pharmacological evidence that dopamine agonists can induce paranoid symptoms, and psychological experiments showing that manipulating dopamine affects pattern perception. But we should be careful: dopamine is doing a lot of different things in the brain, and the story is more complex than just "too much dopamine equals conspiracy thinking." There are likely issues with dopamine receptor density, timing of release, and interactions with other neurotransmitter systems.

The Pattern Detection System:

Situation: A bad thing happens. Other things also happen.
- Response: "Aha! I see the hidden connections! (I can explain everything.)"

Humans evolved in small groups - likely 30 to 150 individuals based on anthropological evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherers and archaeological data. In these environments, the main threats often came from other groups of humans. Competition for resources, territory, and mates meant that tribal thinking (sharp distinctions between in-group vs out-group) was adaptive.

We're exquisitely attuned to thinking in terms of us versus them. And when you're feeling powerless, marginalized, or like social systems aren't working for you (which is increasingly common experiences in our unequal, atomized societies), the brain reaches for that ancient tribal template: "powerful them" conspiring against "powerless us." (See: power/dominance narratives in social ideologies; asymmetric zero-sum bias.)

Notice the pattern in who the villains are: governments, corporations, wealthy elites. These are entities with actual power. This isn't coincidental. There's a kernel of legitimate observation that power structures often do work against the interests of ordinary people. Historical examples abound: tobacco companies concealing cancer research, pharmaceutical companies suppressing drug safety data, intelligence agencies conducting unethical experiments (MKUltra wasn't a theory, it was real).

But conspiracy theories take this legitimate observation and hyperextend it into intentional, coordinated, almost supernatural levels of control. The psychological research here shows that feelings of powerlessness and social marginalization predict conspiracy belief. People who feel they lack control over their lives are significantly more likely to endorse conspiracy theories.

The "Us vs Them / In-Group vs Out-Group / Tribal Thinking" System:

Situation: A bad thing happens.
- Response: "The powerful out-group is against us. They caused this."

The Schizophrenia Connection

In clinical schizophrenia, you often see "ideas of reference" and persecutory delusions. "Ideas of reference" are the belief that random events have special meaning directed personally at you. Someone might believe that television programs are sending them coded messages, or that strangers' conversations are secretly about them. (Then the "persecutory delusions" can accelerate the paranoia of others' intentions, and thus personal threats, risks, and dangers abound.)

The neurobiology likely involves not just dopamine dysregulation, but also problems with what neuroscientists call the "salience network" — brain regions including the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that determine what's important and deserves attention. There may also be dysfunction in the default mode network (involved in self-referential thinking and narrative construction) and reduced top-down control from the prefrontal cortex that normally provides reality-testing.

Your brain essentially generates too much "This matters! This is connected! This is about ME!" signal without adequate regulatory checks saying "Hold on, let's test this against reality."

The Schizotypal Spectrum

Here's what's important though: we all exist on a spectrum. Schizotypal traits are distributed throughout the general population. These are mild versions of schizophrenia-like experiences, such as magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, or suspiciousness. Most people with schizotypal traits never develop full schizophrenia. But under stress, sleep deprivation, or social isolation (all of which became more common during, say, a global pandemic), even neurotypical individuals can shift toward more paranoid, hyper-pattern-detecting cognition.

The experimental evidence for this is fairly strong: studies showed that inducing feelings of lack of control causes people to see patterns in random noise and detect conspiracies in ambiguous scenarios. Other research demonstrates that sleep deprivation increases paranoid thinking in healthy individuals.

The Hyperactive Salience System:

Situation: A bad thing happens. Other things also happen.
- Response: "Aha! I see the hidden connections! (Everything is relevant.)"

The Control Paradox

Why is it always about control? Why do conspiracy theories invariably feature powerful entities orchestrating events?

Loss of control is one of the most fundamental psychological stressors for humans. The classic learned helplessness experiments showed that controllability is often more important than the stressor itself. Animals given control over when shocks occurred showed dramatically less stress pathology than animals receiving identical shocks with no control. Furthermore, if the animals were only given a signal a minute before the shocks would occur they still showed dramatically less stress pathology. So even just a simple form of knowledge/awareness about the "bad thing" can genuinely improve reaction intensity/impact. (See: Martin Seligman with dogs, later refined with rats and humans.)

Humans, with our massive prefrontal cortex constantly trying to predict and model our environment, are even more sensitive to control. When life feels out of control (economically, socially, politically) and you can't figure out why, conspiracy theories offer a paradoxical restoration of meaning.

"Yes, powerful forces are controlling everything, BUT at least now I understand how it works. I've figured it out. I'm one of the enlightened few who sees the truth."

There's an actual increase in perceived control through "seeing through" the conspiracy. You've transformed from a helpless victim of random chaos into someone who understands the hidden rules of the game. The research on this mechanism is suggestive but not yet definitive—we have correlational evidence that conspiracy believers report feeling more informed and having special knowledge, but we lack direct experimental evidence that this belief measurably reduces stress or increases feelings of control. This is an area that needs more rigorous testing.

Synthesis: Why This Pattern Emerges

So here's the synthesis, with transparency about certainty levels:

Very confident: Humans have evolutionary biases toward agency detection, dopaminergic systems that reward pattern recognition, tribal us-versus-them psychology, and fundamental needs for control and meaning.

Confident: These systems can become dysregulated in conditions like schizophrenia, leading to excessive pattern detection and persecutory beliefs, but these same tendencies exist on a spectrum in the general population.

Moderately confident: The specific narrative of "powerful entities controlling everything" emerges almost inevitably given how human brains are constructed, combining agency detection, pattern recognition, tribal thinking, and need for control.

Less confident but plausible: The act of believing you've uncovered a conspiracy provides genuine psychological relief from the aversive state of meaninglessness, which reinforces the belief and motivates sharing it with others. This needs more direct experimental validation.

The conspiracy theory ending in "powerful entities controlling everything" isn't arbitrary; it's the intersection of multiple cognitive systems all pulling in the same direction.

Agency detection says "Someone must be causing this."
Pattern detection says "I see how it all fits together."
Tribal psychology says "It's powerful outsiders versus us."
And the need for control says "At least I understand what's really happening."

The Broader Implications

Here's what should concern us: the environmental factors that push people toward conspiratorial thinking (e.g., economic inequality, social fragmentation, political powerlessness, information overload, social isolation) are all increasing in modern societies. We're essentially creating perfect conditions for this type of thinking to flourish.

And unlike addressing schizophrenia (where we have treatments, albeit imperfect ones), addressing the social conditions that make conspiratorial thinking attractive is a much harder problem. You can't prescribe medication for feeling powerless in a system that genuinely doesn't work in your interest.

The irony is that while specific conspiracy theories are usually false, the general feeling they respond to often has substantial truth to it. For example: powerful entities often do act against ordinary people's interests; important information is often hidden; and systems are often rigged.

The challenge is responding to legitimate grievances without tipping into unfalsifiable, all-encompassing conspiracy narratives that become impervious to evidence.

We need more research on several fronts: better understanding of how environmental stressors interact with schizotypal traits, experimental tests of whether conspiracy beliefs actually provide psychological relief, and crucially, interventions that might address legitimate feelings of powerlessness without feeding conspiratorial thinking.

The pattern is clear. The mechanisms are increasingly understood, though many details remain uncertain. The solutions? Those are much harder to come by.