Take 563 European adults, hand them a 24-item questionnaire measuring how much offensive, disagreeing, heterodox, and socially divisive speech they’d tolerate, and sort the results by shared response patterns rather than averages. That’s the design behind Distinct profiles of free speech support and their demographic, ideological, and epistemic characteristics, published in Personality and Individual Differences by Nejc Plohl of the University of Maribor, Slovenia, with Dean Korošak and Boris Podobnik, and covered Oct 15, 2026 by PsyPost. Three groups fell out of the data: conditional tolerance (56.7%), low tolerance (20.1%), and broad tolerance (23.3%) — free speech absolutism in practice, the group that said yes to nearly everything, offensive speech included. That group skewed male, more educated, less conservative. It also carried the highest conspiracy-theory belief and the lowest trust in science, politics, and journalism of the three — and no stronger commitment to democratic values than anyone else. Thomas Hobbes diagnosed this exact mechanism in 1651, three and a half centuries before anyone ran a latent profile analysis: strip away trust in a common authority to arbitrate truth, and people don’t become more free. They fall back on private judgment — which is, in his Leviathan, the precise condition that dissolves a commonwealth into a state of war.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether support for unrestricted speech tracks with democratic commitment, or with conspiracy belief and distrust of institutions
Who ran it?	Nejc Plohl (University of Maribor), Dean Korošak, Boris Podobnik
Where and when?	Personality and Individual Differences; covered Oct 15, 2026 by PsyPost
Sample	563 European adults, 24-item measure of tolerance for offensive, disagreeing, heterodox, and socially divisive speech
Core finding	Latent profile analysis found three groups: conditional tolerance (56.7%), low tolerance (20.1%), broad tolerance (23.3%)
Who’s in “broad tolerance”	Male, more educated, less conservative, highest conspiracy ideation, lowest institutional trust — not higher pro-democratic commitment
What Hobbes already argued	In Leviathan (1651), once a common power trusted to judge right and wrong is gone, each person reverts to private judgment — the condition that dissolves the commonwealth into a state of war

The Quick Version

A 2026 study of 563 Europeans found that the people most willing to tolerate any speech — offensive, divisive, heterodox, all of it — aren’t distinguished by stronger democratic conviction. They’re distinguished by higher conspiracy belief and lower trust in science, politics, and journalism. Hobbes named the structure of that swap in 1651: once you stop trusting a common authority to settle what’s true, you don’t get more freedom. You get everyone judging for themselves, which he considered the seed of civil war.

What the Study Actually Found

Most free-speech research asks one question at a time: do you support hate speech laws, yes or no. Plohl’s team asked four kinds of tolerance at once — offensive speech, disagreeing speech, heterodox (unorthodox, contrarian) speech, and socially divisive speech — and then looked for people who answered all four the same way. That’s what latent profile analysis does: it doesn’t average your answers, it finds the hidden subgroups whose whole response pattern looks alike.

Three patterns showed up. The largest, conditional tolerance (56.7%), was comfortable with offensive speech and disagreement but noticeably less comfortable extending the same latitude to heterodox or socially divisive claims — tolerance with limits, in other words, just not evenly distributed limits. Low tolerance (20.1%) was wary across the board, especially of offensive speech and basic disagreement. Broad tolerance (23.3%) said yes almost everywhere, with no real daylight between “someone disagrees with me” and “someone is pushing a claim most people consider dangerous or false.”

Here’s the part that should slow you down. The three groups didn’t just differ by how permissive they were. They differed on who they were and what they believed. Broad tolerance leaned male, more educated, less conservative — and separately, it carried the highest belief in conspiracy theories and the lowest trust in science, politics, and journalism of the three groups. Low tolerance ran the other way: more women, slightly more conservative. Age didn’t distinguish any of the groups. And the variable you’d expect to explain broad tolerance — a stronger personal commitment to democratic norms, the idea that free expression matters because democracy needs it — didn’t separate the groups at all. The people most willing to defend anyone’s right to say anything weren’t more devoted to democratic principle. They were more convinced the institutions around them can’t be trusted to get anything right.

What Did Hobbes Mean by Private Judgment?

In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued that in the state of nature — before any common power is trusted to arbitrate disputes — every person is left to judge good and evil for themselves. He called this private judgment, and treated it as the seed of the state of war: without an authority both sides accept as the measure of right and wrong, disagreement has no peaceful end point, only escalation.

Hobbes didn’t think private judgment was some fringe failure mode. He thought it was the default — the condition people live in whenever a common, trusted authority isn’t holding. In Chapter 29 of Leviathan, cataloguing what weakens a commonwealth from the inside, he names the belief that “every private man is judge of good and evil actions” as one of the diseases that distracts and weakens it. That belief is true, he concedes, in the state of nature, where there’s no civil law yet to measure by. But once a sovereign exists and people keep reverting to their own private judgment anyway — deciding for themselves which commands to obey and which to override — the commonwealth starts coming apart from the inside, man by man, each one his own final court of appeal.

The deeper mechanism, laid out earlier in Chapter 13, is what makes private judgment dangerous rather than just inconvenient. Hobbes thought people are rough equals in ability, which means nobody has an obvious, self-evident claim to being right more often than anyone else. Without a mutually trusted referee, that rough equality doesn’t produce agreement — it produces permanent, unresolvable contest, since everyone has equally good private reason to think their own judgment is the sound one. That’s his famous “war of every man against every man.” It isn’t constant violence. It’s the condition where violence is always one disagreement away, because nothing above the individual’s own judgment is left to settle the question first.

Why Would Free Speech Absolutism Track Distrust Instead of Democratic Conviction?

1. If you don’t trust institutions to sort true from false, you stop wanting them to try. Restrictions on speech — hate speech law, platform moderation, fact-checking regimes — all assume some institution is competent and fair enough to draw the line. Lose that trust, and the restriction looks less like protection and more like someone unreliable grabbing power to decide what you’re allowed to hear.
2. Conspiracy belief and institutional distrust are close to the same variable wearing two names. Believing official accounts are generally unreliable and distrusting the institutions that produce those accounts aren’t separate facts about a person — they’re two measurements of roughly the same orientation. It tracks that the study found them traveling together inside the broad tolerance profile.
3. Unconditional tolerance doesn’t require belief in democracy’s value — it just requires disbelief in the referee. You can defend everyone’s right to say anything for principled, small-d democratic reasons. You can also defend it because you’ve concluded no authority deserves the power to stop anyone. Both produce the identical survey answer. This study is evidence the second reason is doing real, independent work, not just riding along with the first.
4. Hobbes’s “private judgment” and this study’s broad tolerance profile may be the same posture measured three centuries apart. Hobbes’s private judge trusts nothing above their own reasoning to settle a dispute. The broad tolerance respondent extends that same posture to speech specifically: nothing above their own reasoning, not an institution, should get to decide what counts as too dangerous or too false to say.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

This isn’t “a seventeenth-century political theorist predicted a 2026 psychology paper.” Hobbes’s specific claim was narrower than that, and narrower is why it holds up: once people stop trusting a common authority to arbitrate right and wrong, they don’t settle into calm independence. They fall back on judging everything themselves, and that fallback is structurally unstable — it’s the mechanism his whole argument for the sovereign was built to prevent. Plohl’s team wasn’t testing Hobbes. They were testing whether free-speech attitudes cluster into coherent profiles and what predicts each one. But the profile that rejected every institutional guardrail on speech is also the profile that trusted science, politics, and journalism the least — which is a demographic and psychological snapshot of exactly the posture Hobbes called private judgment, four hundred years before anyone had a word like “institutional trust” to measure it with a scale.

It connects to Tocqueville’s finding that loving democracy barely predicts resistance to backsliding — commitment to specific institutions did the real work, not the abstract ideal. Same shape here: abstract commitment to free expression as a democratic good didn’t separate the tolerance profiles. Distrust of specific institutions did. It also sits close to La Boétie’s argument that people volunteer into submission to authority they admire — the mirror case, where trust (misplaced, in La Boétie’s telling) produces submission. Here it’s absence of trust producing its opposite: refusal to accept any authority’s line on what speech should be allowed.

Noelle-Neumann’s account of why toxicity silences moderates while giving its loudest users more room belongs in the same conversation about what happens once institutional guardrails on speech erode — not everyone gets louder when the rules thin out, and this study’s low-tolerance group, wary of nearly everything, looks a lot like Noelle-Neumann’s silenced moderates showing up in a different dataset. And Festinger’s research on fans rationalizing their idols’ bad behavior is the same cognitive terrain from another angle: once you’ve decided the mainstream account is untrustworthy, the dissonance-reducing move isn’t to update your trust. It’s to find the account that already matches what you believe and defend its right to be said.

The Gap Hobbes Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the comparison gets more interesting than a clean match.

Hobbes assumed private judgment was dangerous because it was symmetrical — everyone equally convinced of their own rightness, with no tiebreaker. He didn’t distinguish between a population evenly split into warring private judges and a population where one identifiable subgroup (male, educated, less conservative, more conspiracy-prone) disproportionately adopts the posture while most people stay inside conditional or low tolerance. That’s a more structured, less evenly distributed version of the problem than the one he modeled. His solution — a single sovereign everyone defers to — also assumed the fix was more shared authority, not better-earned authority. This study doesn’t test whether trustworthy institutions would pull the broad tolerance group back toward conditional tolerance. It only shows that distrust and unconditional tolerance travel together right now. Whether rebuilding institutional trust would shrink that 23.3% or whether the posture is closer to a fixed disposition is a question Hobbes’s framework doesn’t answer and this study didn’t set out to test either.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns.

An Abstract Questionnaire, Not Real Speech Acts

Participants rated hypothetical categories of speech — offensive, heterodox, divisive — not specific real statements in context. How someone rates “offensive speech” in the abstract and how they react to one particular offensive claim landing in their own feed aren’t guaranteed to match.

Correlational and Single Time-Point

The study measured conspiracy belief, institutional trust, and speech tolerance all at once, in the same people, at the same moment. It shows these things sit together. It doesn’t show distrust causes broad tolerance, or the reverse, or rule out some third factor driving both.

Brief Measures of Big Constructs

Political ideology and conspiracy belief were both measured with short questionnaires chosen to limit how long the survey took. That’s a reasonable tradeoff for a 24-item speech measure already asking a lot of each participant, but it means neither construct was captured with the depth a dedicated instrument would offer.

European Adults Online, Not a Global or Representative Sample

563 European adults recruited for an online study isn’t the same as a population-representative sample of any one country, let alone a claim about free-speech attitudes worldwide. The three-profile structure may not replicate identically elsewhere.

What Actually Follows From This

1. “I support free speech” and “I don’t trust anyone to tell me what’s true” aren’t the same claim, even when they produce the same survey answer. This study is a reason to ask which one is actually doing the work before assuming the principled version is the only one in the room.
2. Distrust of institutions doesn’t make someone more committed to democracy — it can just make them more willing to tolerate anything, including things that damage the democratic process they’re not especially attached to. Those are different outcomes wearing the same permissive posture.
3. Hobbes’s fix — more shared authority — isn’t obviously available or even desirable here, which is the honest limit of the parallel. His solution assumed a single trusted sovereign was achievable and good. A modern pluralist society doesn’t have that option on the table, and arguably shouldn’t want it. The diagnosis travels four centuries intact. The prescription doesn’t.

Hobbes never filled out a Likert scale, and Plohl’s team never set out to test a seventeenth-century political treatise. But put a 24-item tolerance questionnaire next to a chapter on the diseases that dissolve a commonwealth, and they’re describing the same failure of trust — one measured across 563 Europeans in 2026, one worked out by a man writing through the wreckage of the English Civil War, convinced that a world where everyone judges for themselves is not a freer world. It’s just a slower-moving one on its way to the same place.

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This post discusses a 2026 study published in Personality and Individual Differences (Plohl, Korošak & Podobnik, DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2026.114009), reported by PsyPost, and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Chapters 13 and 29. The study’s findings are correlational, based on a single online sample of 563 European adults rating abstract speech categories, and do not establish that institutional distrust causes broad tolerance for speech rather than the reverse.