Why Conspiracy Thinking Makes Europeans Overestimate Immigrant Numbers

📊 Survey Across Ten European Countries

Innumeracy — difficulty working with numbers and giving accurate estimates about political facts — is widespread among the public. Using an online sample of respondents from 10 European countries, this study examines whether a conspiracy mindset predicts systematic misperceptions about the share of immigrants in respondents' own countries.

🧭 Main Findings

• Respondents with a stronger propensity for a conspiracy worldview tend to substantially overestimate the actual share of the immigrant population in their country.
• This relationship remains after accounting for country heterogeneity and a wide range of other factors, including cognitive ability, affective measures, and sociodemographic characteristics.

🔬 How the Relationship Was Tested

• Comparative design spanning ten European countries, enabling checks for cross-national heterogeneity.
• Refined measurements of conspiracy predisposition and of respondents' numeric estimates of immigrant shares.
• Statistical controls included cognitive, affective, and sociodemographic variables to isolate the association between conspiracy mindset and innumeracy.

⚠️ Why It Matters

• A conspiracy mentality appears to distort basic factual perceptions about politically relevant groups, not just isolated beliefs.
• These misperceptions have implications for public opinion, policy preferences, and democratic accountability, since accurate factual beliefs are a foundation for holding representatives to account.

This work contributes to understanding how broader conspiratorial dispositions shape citizens' grasp of empirical realities in Western democracies.