Increased contact between members of different racial groups is often conceptualized as an antidote to racism (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Some studies, however, find that people living in racially diverse areas report higher levels of racism than those living in homogenous enclaves (Putnam, 2007). Further, increased immigration and racial diversity within nations has been associated with a number of divisive geopolitical trends, such as the British exit from the European Union and the rise of White nationalism in America (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). One simple yet understudied reason for this paradox might be that with increasing racial diversity comes increased negative as well as positive contact (Barlow et al., 2012; Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). Until recently, negative contact was largely ignored in the literature on intergroup contact, in part because the practical focus was on identifying what types of contact could best be harnessed to reduce prejudice (Allport, 1954). Recently, however, there has been more of an effort to capture the real-life complexity of intergroup contact, which includes a mixture of positive, neutral, and negative experiences. This trend heralds a fundamental shift in the presumed brief of contact researchaway from identifying predictors of prejudice reduction and toward an examination of how contact experiences relate to feelings toward out-groups "in the wild." The nascent field of research on negative contact embraces the theoretical and empirical separability of positive and negative contact experiences but has not yet recognized that this approach also necessitates deep engagement with the separability of the positive and 844269P SSXXX10.

While a great deal is known about the individual difference factors associated with conspiracy beliefs, much less is known about the country-level factors that shape people's willingness to believe conspiracy theories. In the current article we discuss the possibility that willingness to believe conspiracy theories might be shaped by the perception (and reality) of poor economic performance at the national level. To test this notion, we surveyed 6723 participants from 36 countries. In line with predictions, propensity to believe conspiracy theories was negatively associated with perceptions of current and future national economic vitality. Furthermore, countries with higher GDP per capita tended to have lower belief in conspiracy theories. The data suggest that conspiracy beliefs are not just caused by intrapsychic factors but are also shaped by difficult economic circumstances for which distrust might have a rational basis.

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