Pushing MAGA conspiracies kills your date game: study

President Donald Trump encourages his followers to believe in discredited conspiracy theories, from opposing COVID-19 vaccines to claiming former President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. While these beliefs help Trump personally, a new study reveals that the MAGA true believers who follow his lead could wind up paying dearly in their private lives.

A scientific team led by University of Kent psychology researcher Ricky Green recently published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin about how men and women of all political persuasions react to conspiracy theories when dating online.

“Political orientation again shaped the responses, but not quite in the symmetrical way the researchers expected,” PsyPost’s Karina Petrova wrote when covering the study. “Liberal participants continued to be relatively harsh toward the implausible left-wing narrative. Conservative participants, conversely, remained generally non-judgmental across all profile variations.”

Researchers studied more than 1,600 people through four experiments. In the first two, they created fake profiles on the dating website Tinder that featured right-wing conspiracy theories — namely, anti-vaccine and election denier conspiracy theories. They found that profiles which promoted those beliefs were rated as less honest, less intelligent and less kind; by contrast, there was no pronounced negative reaction to profiles that either lacked this content or denounced it. The outliers here, of course, were fellow true believers: Participants who already identified as conservatives were more inclined to date people who shared MAGA views. Otherwise, however, the profiles were judged much more harshly.

Two other experiments approached the subject but from the left. When researchers included debunked left-wing conspiracy theories (particularly, that oil companies secretly colluded to pick the US president), those profiles likewise received significantly negative reactions. At the same time, a left-wing opinion that users deemed plausible — oil companies colluding to fix prices — met with the opposite response: Those profile users were rated as slightly more intelligent than normal. Finally, when a mock dating app allowed users to swipe on profiles containing conspiracy theories that were either left-wing (oil companies), right-wing (2020 election) or neutral (opposing GMOS), profiles with the neutral and right-wing conspiracy theories were rejected and labeled narcissistic more often than the left-wing ones, although they still received a negative response.

In short, liberals rejected conservatives at much higher rates than conservatives rejected liberals — and, in general, MAGA conspiracy theories were a bigger turn off than neutral or left-wing conspiracy theories.

“Disclosing conspiracy beliefs in online dating profiles undermines impressions of warmth, intelligence, and trustworthiness, which are important for online dating success,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Right-wing conspiracy beliefs were particularly stigmatized, with liberals being harsher in their judgments and conservatives showing greater leniency. In some cases, conservatives even preferred profiles sharing right-wing conspiracy beliefs, highlighting the role of political attitudes in shaping these perceptions. The plausibility of the conspiracy theory also shapes judgments, with implausible theories eliciting stronger negative reactions.”

They added, “Overall, our findings emphasize the stigmatizing nature of conspiracy theories in the online dating context. Future research could examine the role of visual cues and other factors that might influence people’s perceptions of conspiracy theories in online dating.”

In addition to this study, there is also anecdotal evidence that supporting Trump kills one’s dating chances. Earlier this year it was revealed that “Love is Blind,” a reality TV show in which men and women are challenged to fall in love while getting to know each other without meeting in person, edited out more than one occasion in which women screened out men for backing Trump.

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