Flat Earthers Redux: Subjective Belief, Science, and Reality

View of Moon Limb with Earth on the Horizon, NASA (1969)

Source: Public Domain

Back in 2017, I was interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País Semanal about Flat Earthers, based on my first blog post about flat earthers, "Flat Earthers: Belief, Skepticism, and Denialism." The El País Semanal article was never published, but here's the full interview nonetheless (the questions have been lightly edited for clarity):

► Although ‘Flat Earthers’ have existed for decades, recently there has been a rise in the number of stories and voices that defend this idea. What are the possible explanations for this, according to psychology?

What do you think is the role of the Internet (as an anonymous, instant way of communicating with an unlimited amount of peers) in the dissemination and settlement of ideas such as that of the Earth being flat?

It’s hard to know whether there are really more “flat earthers” today, but the internet certainly seems to have played a role in popularizing fringe beliefs like this one. Whereas typical in-person social discourse makes it difficult to maintain unconventional beliefs in the face of ridicule, anonymous online communication through social media and forums like Reddit and 4chan affords people easy access to like-minded individuals around the world who can rally around beliefs that most of us might find ridiculous. In addition, the internet business model based on monetization of “hits” has created an online environment in which headlines have become more sensationalized and objective news lies alongside, and has become conflated with, subjective opinion. MSNBC and Fox News tell opposing sides of any given story, leaving viewers with the sense that truth is subjective. That kind of epistemological shift then paves the way for sites like Infowars to be treated by some as an equally reliable source of information.

Flat earth theories have also been popularized in recent years by a few outspoken celebrities, perhaps most prominently NBA basketball player Kyrie Irving, who claimed to believe that the world is flat. In 2016, the rapper B.o.B. did the same, making headlines over a Twitter exchange with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the subject. That we would even consider calling the back-and-forth over Twitter between a musician who dropped out of the 9th grade and an astrophysicist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University a “debate” is a good illustration of what the democratization of opinion has done to the concept of truth and expertise in the age of the internet.

What this all boils down to is that the “evidence” to support suspicions about a second gunman in the JFK assassination, controlled demolition on 9/11, abductions by space aliens, or a flat earth is just a click away. Psychologically, there are many cognitive biases that bias this search for evidence, the most notable being “confirmation bias” which describes how we’re likely to discard information that contradicts our intuitions in favor of information that supports them. With thousands of Google hits on any given subject, that means that we can easily skip over weighing the evidence objectively by instead cherry-picking online information that helps us to dig in our heels with respect to pre-existing beliefs.

► Does the belief in the flatness of Earth have to do with delusional/illusory perception or is it more like a healthy expression of skepticism (or something in between)?

Flat earth theories are supported, in part, by our own subjective experience, which is often a powerful guide in our personal search for truth. Unless we’ve been into outer space, most of us see the Earth by standing upon it, where our perspective suggests a flat horizon. And even airplane flights often don’t get us high enough to appreciate the curvature of the Earth. So, that’s where many flat earthers start. But this is an example — one of many — of how our subjective perception doesn’t always reflect objective reality and can get us into real trouble. “Trust in your own personal truth” is a mantra that seems to be popular these days, but that can be disastrous advice — just think of the person high on drugs who thinks they can fly or the man who entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria with a rifle in 2016 because he had to “investigate” whether it was a front for a Hillary Clinton-affiliated child pornography ring.

“Skepticism” is a term with which flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists might identify, but often they’re not being merely skeptical of evidence, but outright rejecting of facts. Research has shown that belief in one conspiracy theory predicts belief in others¹ (even when they are contradictory²) — this highlights how conspiracy theorists aren’t really skeptics but have a pervasive mistrust of conventional belief that draws them in a different direction altogether. So, it’s really less about skepticism as it is about “denialism,” which when you consider the role of the internet is a byproduct of what I like to call “confirmation bias on steroids.”

Keep in mind that flat earthers don’t just question or deny that the Earth is flat, which by itself doesn’t sound so crazy and in any event has little practical consequence in our daily lives. The real denialism is over the wealth of evidence that we have to support that the Earth is round, from basic terrestrial observations to astronomical data, to actual photographic evidence from outer space. Rejecting all that, flat earthers move beyond denialism into actually believing in a global conspiracy involving not only NASA, but all the countries of the world that have space programs themselves (to what end, it’s not clear). Understanding that the die-hard flat earthers are really “round earth conspiracy theorists” helps us to appreciate that their beliefs have little to do with healthy skepticism.

► Psychologically speaking, is there a difference between believing the Earth is flat (a scientifically proven fact) and believing other conspiracy theories like 9-11 being caused by the American Government (that have not been, or maybe can't be, proven or disproven). From the point of view of psychology, is disbelief in empiric facts the same as disbelief in unproven theories?

Spirituality Essential Reads

Addressing Religion and Spirituality in Therapy

The Psychology of Rumi's Poetry

Psychologically, we know that it can be normal to believe things that aren’t true, especially when we’re blindly following our personal experience. The human brain doesn’t inherently think scientifically, much less rationally or logically, and we’re all vulnerable to false beliefs. With this in mind, the belief in things that are scientifically “proven” or “not proven” isn’t so much a psychological distinction, as an epistemological one related to the definition of science as a way of searching for knowledge and truth based on repeated observations that control for subjective bias. As such, our best safeguard against the kind of built-in cognitive biases that might lead to false beliefs is better science education (and more objective journalism).

When evidence in the form of objective data is lacking, we have a natural tendency to fill that gap with myths and fantasies. Myths can be an important source of meaning in the face of uncertainty but can get us into trouble when substituted for facts based on good evidence.

► Some people claim that you can only find groundbreakers amongst those who deny commonly accepted facts. What is your opinion on that?

It’s certainly true that some commonly accepted beliefs turn out to be completely wrong and that “thinking outside the box” can lead to breakthroughs in science. Of course, it’s also worth reminding ourselves that some of the true groundbreakers in science — like Pythagoras, Kepler, and Copernicus to name a few — helped us move beyond once commonly accepted beliefs such as the Earth being flat or being situated at the center of the universe. So, modern Flat Earth theories are hardly ground-breaking — on the contrary, they’re regressive.

After winning the Nobel Prize in physics, my college roommate Adam Riess — now the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University — was inundated with emails from people who wanted to share their own theories about his research. Without exception, he told me, their theories were nonsense. Note that Dr. Riess’ discovery about the expansion of the universe didn’t start with a theory, it started with collecting data that defied conventional scientific wisdom. When he didn’t believe the results detected by the Hubble Space Telescope, he repeated his observations again and again. When the findings wouldn’t go away, he had to change the theory to match the data — that kind of slogging through the scientific method is what got him the Nobel Prize.

For more on Flat Earthers, see my other blog posts:

► Flat Earthers: Belief, Skepticism, and Denialism
► Flat Earthers: Conspiracy Thinking on a Global Scale
► Behind the Curve: The Science Fiction of Flat Earthers