Doomsday Believers No Longer Fringe: Study Suggests They're A Third Of America

From climate change to the rise of AI to the Rapture, more adults think we’re currently living in end times.

Between 29% and 39% of Americans believe they are currently living in the end times. That is not a fringe position held by a handful of doomsday cults. It cuts across Evangelical congregations, climate activist circles, Silicon Valley boardrooms, and rural prepper communities alike. And according to a new study, it may be one of the most consequential and least examined forces in how the public responds to the biggest threats facing the planet.

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Irvine surveyed more than 1,400 religiously diverse Americans and found that apocalyptic thinking is neither a fringe preoccupation nor a purely spiritual abstraction. It is a measurable psychological force, and the specific flavor of someone’s end-of-world belief predicts how they perceive and respond to threats like climate change, nuclear war, economic collapse, and artificial intelligence with surprising consistency.

The study, led by psychologist Matthew Billet and co-authored by Cindel White, Azim Shariff, and Ara Norenzayan, is among the first to build a formal framework around end-of-world beliefs as a psychological construct. Its findings complicate the familiar story that risk behavior is primarily a matter of politics or religion.

Apocalypse Belief Isn’t One Thing

Before the researchers could measure anything, they had to grapple with a basic problem: apocalyptic belief looks wildly different from person to person. A Pentecostal pastor awaiting the Rapture, a climate scientist watching ice sheets disappear, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur warning about rogue AI might all believe catastrophe is coming, but for completely different reasons, with completely different feelings about it, and with very different ideas about what anyone can do.

To capture that range, the team built a 25-item scale measuring five distinct dimensions of end-of-world belief: how imminent the end feels, whether humans or God will cause it, how much personal control a person feels over its outcome, and whether the end is viewed as something dreadful or, perhaps surprisingly, something to welcome. These dimensions turned out to be psychologically distinct from related traits like general pessimism, fatalism, or anxiety about death, suggesting apocalyptic belief functions as its own way of making sense of the world.

National polling has put the share of Americans who believe they are currently living in the end times somewhere between 29% and 39%, and the study’s own sample landed squarely in that range. Apocalyptic thinking also crosses the lines that divide Americans on nearly everything else. Evangelical Christians, secular doomsday preppers, atomic scientists maintaining the Doomsday Clock, and climate activists warning of environmental collapse all hold versions of it, even if the specifics look nothing alike.

How Apocalypse Predictions Are Linked To Risk Behavior

The main survey, conducted in mid-2025, drew from six religious groups: Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and people with no religious affiliation. Participants were randomly assigned to answer questions about one of five categories of global risk, ranging from economic threats and environmental disasters to geopolitical conflict, societal breakdown, and technological dangers like AI and disinformation. They reported how seriously they took the threat, how much of it they were willing to accept, and whether they would support extreme measures to address it, including devoting 10% of U.S. GDP to the problem, instituting martial law, or overthrowing the current government entirely.

When the researchers compared doomsday beliefs against every other variable in the model, including political orientation, cultural worldviews, personal experience with risk, and community norms, apocalyptic belief consistently came out near the top. It accounted for roughly 15% of the variation in how severely people perceived global threats and about 16% of the variation in how much risk they were willing to tolerate. Political conservatism, by comparison, explained less than 6% of the variation in end-of-world beliefs themselves.

The Specific Belief Is What Drives the Difference

Not all apocalyptic thinking points in the same direction, and that is where things get genuinely interesting. People who believed humans were responsible for bringing about the end, pointing to climate change, nuclear weapons, or runaway technology, were more likely to see global threats as urgent and severe. People who believed God or supernatural forces controlled the end times were significantly less likely to support extreme action to address those same threats. Those who felt some personal stake in how events unfold, and who viewed the end with something closer to acceptance than terror, were more willing to both tolerate risk and push for drastic responses to it.

One finding stumped the researchers themselves. People who believed the end of the world would ultimately be a good thing still tended to support extreme action to prevent existential threats. If someone thinks the apocalypse is a welcome event, why work so hard to stop it? The team checked whether this was simply a sign of ideological extremism at work, but accounting for religious fundamentalism and conspiratorial thinking did not change the result. It remains, for now, unexplained.

Religious group also shaped the picture in ways that went beyond how devout someone was. Evangelical Protestants scored the highest among Christian groups on perceived closeness to the end, belief in divine causality, and positive emotional valence toward the apocalypse. Muslim participants scored the highest across all five dimensions on average. Nonreligious participants scored the lowest on perceived closeness and divine causality, though they were roughly in line with everyone else on the belief that humans could cause a global catastrophe.

Younger participants tended to hold stronger apocalyptic beliefs than older ones across most groups. The exceptions were Evangelical Protestants, where belief did not decline with age, and Muslims, where it appeared to increase.

The study cannot say whether apocalyptic beliefs actually cause changes in risk behavior, or whether some deeper trait produces both. And because all participants came from Abrahamic religious traditions in the U.S. and Canada, it is an open question how the findings would hold across other cultures, particularly those with cyclical rather than linear views of time and history.

What the researchers are willing to say is that the stakes here are concrete. Beliefs that a COVID-19 vaccine represented the Mark of the Beast fueled vaccine hesitancy in some religious communities. Climate dread has been linked to declining willingness among young people to have children. At a moment when the world’s most serious problems demand coordinated responses across deep cultural and religious divides, knowing what drives some people toward action and others toward passivity may be one of the more useful things psychology can offer.

Belief in the end of the world turns out to be a serious variable, not a sideshow.

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Paper Notes

Limitations

The study’s design is observational, meaning causation cannot be established. Researchers cannot determine whether apocalyptic beliefs drive risk attitudes, or whether some underlying factor produces both. The measure captures what people believe at a given moment, but not how often those beliefs surface or how much their intensity shifts across different situations. All participants were drawn from Abrahamic religious traditions or no religion, and all were recruited in the United States or Canada, which limits how broadly the findings apply. End of world beliefs in traditions with cyclical views of time, such as those found in many Asian and Indigenous religious traditions, may function quite differently. The End of World Beliefs Scale, while well-validated in this study, may benefit from further refinement as researchers apply it across new populations and languages.

Funding and Disclosures

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant 435-2019-0359), awarded to Ara Norenzayan. No conflicts of interest are disclosed.

Publication Details

Authors: Matthew I. Billet (University of British Columbia; University of California, Irvine), Cindel J. M. White (York University), Azim Shariff (University of British Columbia), Ara Norenzayan (University of British Columbia)

Journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | Publication date: Advance online publication, March 2, 2026 | Title: “End of world beliefs are common, diverse, and predict how people perceive and respond to global risks” | DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000519 | Supplemental data and pre-registration: https://osf.io/q5b3n/