Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

Why people who believe in one conspiracy are prone to

believe others
Aug 15, 2012 |By Michael Shermer

Brian Taylor

On Wednesday, May 16, I spent several hours on a hot bus in

a neon desert called Las Vegas with a merry band of British
conspiracists during their journey around the Southwest in
search of UFOs, aliens, Area 51 and government cover-ups, all
for a BBC documentary. One woman regaled me with a tale
about orange balls of energy hovering around her car on
Interstate 405 in California, which were subsequently chased
away by black ops helicopters. A man challenged me to
explain the source of a green laser beam that followed him
around the English countryside one evening.

Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers

because there is always a receptive audience. A recent
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary that I
participated in called Conspiracy Rising, for example, featured
theories behind the deaths of JFK and Princess Diana, UFOs,
Area 51 and 9/11, as if there were a common thread running
throughout. According to radio host and conspiracy monger
Alex Jones, also appearing in the film, “The military-industrial
complex killed John F. Kennedy” and “I can prove that there's
a private banking cartel setting up a world government
because they admit they are” and “No matter how you look at
9/11 there was no Islamic terrorist connection—the hijackers
were clearly U.S. government assets who were set up as
patsies like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Such examples, along with others in my years on the

conspiracy beat, are emblematic of a trend I have detected that
people who believe in one such theory tend to believe in many
other equally improbable and often contradictory cabals. This
observation has recently been confirmed empirically by University of Kent psychologists Michael J.
Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in
Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality
Science this past January. The authors begin by defining a conspiracy theory as “a proposed plot by
powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal”
that is “notoriously resistant to falsification … with new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize
each new piece of disconfirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy
could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.”
With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given
event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network
known as a monological belief system.”

This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy
theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess]
Diana's death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory … that the
moon landing was a hoax … and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect
continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana
faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.

The authors suggest there is a higher-order process at work that they call global coherence that overrules
local contradictions: “Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would
naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem
more plausible in light of that belief.” Moreover, “conspiracy advocates' distrust of official narratives
may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any
contradictions between them.” Thus, they assert, “the more that participants believe that a person at the
centre of a death-related conspiracy theory, such as Princess Diana or Osama [bin] Laden, is still alive,
the more they also tend to believe that the same person was killed, so long as the alleged manner of
death involves deception by officialdom.

As Alex Jones proclaimed in Conspiracy Rising: “No one is safe, do you understand that? Pure evil is
running wild everywhere at the highest levels.”

On his Infowars.com Web site, Jones headlines his page with “Because There Is a War on for Your
Mind.” True enough, which is why science and reason must always prevail over fear and irrationality,
and conspiracy mongering traffics in the latter at the expense of the former.
Moon Landing Faked!!!—Why People Believe in
Conspiracy Theories
New psychological research helps explain why some see intricate government conspiracies behind
events like 9/11 or the Boston bombing
Apr 30, 2013 |By Sander van der Linden
NASA

Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government

hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax?
And what about the Boston Marathon bombing…an
“inside job” perhaps?

In the book “The Empire of Conspiracy,” Timothy Melley

explains that conspiracy theories have traditionally been
regarded by many social scientists as “the implausible
visions of a lunatic fringe,” often inspired by what the late
historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid
style of American politics.” Influenced by this view, many
scholars have come to think of conspiracy theories as
paranoid and delusional, and for a long time psychologists
have had little to contribute other than to affirm the psychopathological nature of conspiracy thinking,
given that conspiricist delusions are commonly associated with (schizotype) paranoia.

Yet, such pathological explanations have proven to be widely insufficient because conspiracy theories
are not just the implausible visions of a paranoid minority. For example, a national poll released just this
month reports that 37 percent of Americans believe that global warming is a hoax, 21 percent think that
the US government is covering up evidence of alien existence and 28 percent believe a secret elite power
with a globalist agenda is conspiring to rule the world. Only hours after the recent Boston marathon
bombing, numerous conspiracy theories were floated ranging from a possible ‘inside job’ to YouTube
videos claiming that the entire event was a hoax.

So why is it that so many people come to believe in conspiracy theories? They can't all be paranoid
schizophrenics. New studies are providing some eye-opening insights and potential explanations.

For example, while it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory
are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories
to be negatively correlated. Yet, this is not what psychologists Micheal Wood, Karen Douglas and
Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in
England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the
conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief
that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden
cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. An important conclusion that the authors draw from
their analysis is that people don't tend to believe in a conspiracy theory because of the specifics, but
rather because of higher-order beliefs that support conspiracy-like thinking more generally. A popular
example of such higher-order beliefs is a severe “distrust of authority.” The authors go on to suggest that
conspiracism is therefore not just about belief in an individual theory, but rather an ideological lens
through which we view the world. A good case in point is Alex Jones’s recent commentary on the
Boston bombings. Jones, (one of the country’s preeminent conspiracy theorists) reminded his audience
that two of the hijacked planes on 9/11 flew out of Boston (relating one conspiracy theory to another)
and moreover, that the Boston Marathon bombing could be a response to the sudden drop in the price of
gold or part of a secret government plot to expand the Transportation Security Administration’s reach to
sporting events. Others have pointed their fingers to a ‘mystery man’ spotted on a nearby roof shortly
after the explosions. While it remains unsure whether or not credence is given to only some or all of
these (note: contradicting) conspiracy theories, there clearly is a larger underlying preference to support
conspiracy-type explanations more generally.

Interestingly, belief in conspiracy theories has recently been linked to the rejection of science. In a paper
published in Psychological Science, Stephen Lewandowsky and colleagues investigated the relation
between acceptance of science and conspiricist thinking patterns. While the authors' survey was not
representative of the general population, results suggest that (controlling for other important factors)
belief in multiple conspiracy theories significantly predicted the rejection of important scientific
conclusions, such as climate science or the fact that smoking causes lung cancer. Yet, rejection of
scientific principles is not the only possible consequence of widespread belief in conspiracy theories.
Another recent study indicates that receiving positive information about or even being merely exposed
to conspiracy theories can lead people to become disengaged from important political and societal
topics. For example, in their study, Daniel Jolley and Karen Douglas clearly show that participants who
received information that supported the idea that global warming is a hoax were less willing to engage
politically and also less willing to implement individual behavioral changes such as reducing their
carbon footprint.

These findings are alarming because they show that conspiracy theories sow public mistrust and
undermine democratic debate by diverting attention away from important scientific, political and
societal issues. There is no question as to whether the public should actively demand truthful and
transparent information from their governments and proposed explanations should be met with a healthy
amount of scepticism, yet, this is not what conspiracy theories offer. A conspiracy theory is usually
defined as an attempt to explain the ultimate cause of an important societal event as part of some sinister
plot conjured up by a secret alliance of powerful individuals and organizations. The great philosopher
Karl Popper argued that the fallacy of conspiracy theories lies in their tendency to describe every event
as 'intentional' and 'planned' thereby seriously underestimating the random nature and unintended
consequences of many political and social actions. In fact, Popper was describing a cognitive bias that
psychologists now commonly refer to as the “fundamental attribution error”: the tendency to
overestimate the actions of others as being intentional rather than the product of (random) situational
circumstances.

Since a number of studies have shown that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with feelings of
powerlessness, uncertainty and a general lack of agency and control, a likely purpose of this bias is to
help people “make sense of the world” by providing simple explanations for complex societal events —
restoring a sense of control and predictability. A good example is that of climate change: while the most
recent international scientific assessment report (receiving input from over 2500 independent scientists
from more than a 100 countries) concluded with 90 percent certainty that human-induced global
warming is occurring, the severe consequences and implications of climate change are often too
distressing and overwhelming for people to deal with, both cognitively as well as emotionally. Resorting
to easier explanations that simply discount global warming as a hoax is then of course much more
comforting and convenient psychologically. Yet, as Al Gore famously pointed out, unfortunately, the
truth is not always convenient.