The 'Dark Triad' of Alienation: System Aversion, Political Distrust and Conspiracy Beliefs

Dataset for the paper "The 'Dark Triad' of Alienation: System Aversion, Political Distrust and Conspiracy Beliefs". We refer readers to a full display of regression results   The "poly-crises" era of our time manifests itself in a syndrome of psychological negativity that merges individuals' (1) system aversion, (2) political distrust and (3) conspiracy beliefs into a--so far undocumented--"dark triad" of alienation. To examine this phenomenon, we focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as the group of countries that entered the "poly-crises" era under the additional burden of their problem-loaded communist legacy. Thus, the "dark triad" of alienation is most visible and, hence, best to study in the CEE region. To do so, we use data from round 10 of the European Social Survey to examine individuals' political distrust as a mediating force that translates their system aversion into conspiracy beliefs. The analyses largely confirm this assumption, albeit with country-specific nuances. As a more inward-directed manifestation of psychological negativity, personal frustration associates significantly and positively with each of the three triad elements, yet not strongly enough to consider personal frustration as an integral element of the triad writ large, whose three manifestations reflect an outward-directed form of psychological negativity. These results replicate, although on lower base levels of the "dark triad" and with somewhat weaker effect sizes inside, throughout the other European regions beyond the CEE.