If you believe that Princess Diana was assassinated, you almost certainly do not also believe that she is secretly still alive.
That may sound obvious, but there are parts of the academy where it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. In 2012, a much-cited paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science seemed to show that people willing to reject the official story of Di's death—that she had been killed in a car accident—weren't very choosy about which alternative they embraced: "the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered." When the authors asked for opinions about the contradictory rumors surrounding the demise of Osama bin Laden, they got comparable results. So strong was the correlation, they concluded, that it seemed fair to say that "any conspiracy theory that stands in opposition to the official narrative will gain some degree of endorsement from someone who holds a conspiracist worldview, even if it directly contradicts other conspiracy theories that they also find credible." Or as they put it more pithily later in the paper: "Believing that Osama bin Laden is still alive is apparently no obstacle to believing that he has been dead for years."
