Why Even Rational People Believe Conspiracy Theories

1. Michael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), p.2. Quotation from an article by Daniel Loxton, “QAnon Is Just a Warmed Over Witch Panic—and It’s Also Very Dangerous.” Skeptic 24, no. 4 (2020).

2. Shermer includes results of a survey conducted in 2021 by the Skeptic Research Center in conjunction with social scientists to poll 3,139 randomly selected Americans on their attitudes about and belief in 29 different conspiracy theories. Similar to many other independently run surveys over many years, the results showed alarming levels of belief in a number of thoroughly debunked and extremely implausible conspiracy theories (including a couple of theories that the researchers invented and included in the survey!)

3. Michael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

4. See also my previous post Spirituality, Wellness, and Conspiracy Beliefs.

5. Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 47. Citing: Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 5, 83.

6. Eric Oliver, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and expert in conspiracy theories, and Thomas Wood, associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, also found that the power of conspiracy theories is not limited to the politically naïve. “Even highly engaged or ideological segments of the population can be swayed by the power of these narratives, particularly when they coincide with their other political views.”[Oliver JE, Wood TJ. Conspiracy theories and the paranoid style(s) of mass opinion. American Journal of Political Science 2014; 58:952-966]. Such individuals may still make “attributions to unseen forces” or find “Manichean narratives” [explained below] intuitively compelling. “In fact, many predominant belief systems in the United States, be they Christian narratives about God and Satan or left-wing narratives about neoliberalism, draw heavily upon the idea of unseen, intentional forces shaping contemporary events.”

[The term Manichean, as Oliver and Wood explain, is borrowed from early Persian religion, which placed particular emphasis on a contest between forces of light and darkness. In this context, a Manichean worldview is adopted when a person believes that political events are the consequence of a contest between good people and malevolent people, rather than between self-interested actors possessed of different perspectives and priorities.]

7. Proxy conspiracism: Believers in a particular conspiracy theory likely often haven’t carefully thought through the evidence in each case but nevertheless believe it because “it’s just the sort of thing those people would do”—such as the belief that Hilary Clinton and leaders of the Democratic Party were operating satanic pedophile rings, or the less bizarre but unsubstantiated belief that the L.A. Police Department had planted evidence to accuse O.J. Simpson of murdering his his-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, which led the jury to acquit Simpson.

8. Shermer, Conspiracy, p. xi-xii.

9. COGNITIVE BIAS AND HABITS OF THOUGHT:

-- Motivated reasoning—actively looking for reasons why one is right and rejecting facts and research that don't fit one’s beliefs (cherry-picking evidence, etc.). In similar vein: confirmation bias—the tendency to notice and accept information that agrees with or reinforces existing beliefs, and to overlook or question information that complicates or conflicts with those beliefs [The News Literacy Project]

As the physicist and science educator Jim Al-Khalili puts it: “Conspiracy theories are the polar opposite of scientific theories, in that they seek to assimilate whatever evidence there is against them and interpret it in a way that supports rather than repudiates their core idea, thus making them unfalsifiable.” [Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020): Ch 10].

-- Attribution bias— the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations: tending to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind" of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces that influence the person (simplypsychology.org).

-- Hindsight bias—The belief that an event is more predictable after it becomes known then it was before it became known.

-- Excessive pattern detection, or what Shermer calls “patternicity”—The tendency to find patterns in meaningless noise.

-- Hyperactive agency detection or what Shermer calls "agenticity” —the tendency to ascribe agency (deliberate intention) to an event where none exists; the belief that there are hidden intentional agents controlling events.

The prehistoric environment in which humans evolved their cognitive proclivities was a dangerous one in which being more than a little paranoid was essential to survival from predators and enemies. In that environment it would have been adaptive to err on the side of over-identifying patterns and agency behind events.

-- Cognitive dissonance—mental discomfort experienced by a person when two of their actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, or when an outcome they strongly believed would happen and may have taken action to prepare for fails to materialize (for example, the belief that President Trump would be re-elected in a landslide and would arrest a secret cabal of thousands of pedophiles among Democratic party leaders and elites). In such situations, people tend to try hard to make their contradictory actions or ideas feel consistent. Not infrequently, people double-down on their beliefs rather than accept that these are inconsistent.

-- Proportionality bias—when there is an imbalance or mismatch between the size or importance of an event and that of its purported cause. This may create cognitive dissonance. For example, President John F. Kennedy, the handsome and articulate leader of the free world, the most powerful person on the planet, must have been killed as a result of an elaborate and powerful conspiracy involving such interests as the FBI, CIA, KGB, the Cubans, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex, or even Vice President Lyndon Johnson, not merely by a loan mentally unstable person like Lee Harvey Oswald. And Princess Diana, one of the most famous and glamorous people on the planet, must surely have been killed in a plot by the MI6 intelligence agency and could not merely have died because of drunk driving, speeding and no seat belt.

-- Monological thinking—the tendency to believe in a unitary, or all-encompassing belief system. People who believe in one such conspiracy theory tend to give credence to many other equally improbable and sometimes even contradictory theories. Once someone believes that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy,” this 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.” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 67. Citing: Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas, and Robbie M. Sutton, “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 3, no. 6 (January 25, 2012), 767–773]

-- Oversimplification of complex problems—"a conspiracy theory is an explanation of the world that makes sense, is relatively simple, and accounts for a great many goings on in the world that, at first glance, may seem chaotic, random, and inexplicable. For instance, the economy is not this crazy patchwork of supply and demand laws, market forces, interest rate changes, tax policies, business cycles, boom-and-bust fluctuations, recessions and upswings, bull and bear markets, and the like. Instead, it is a conspiracy of a handful of powerful people variously identified as the Illuminati, the Bilderberger group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds—or, more recently, the one-percenters—somehow determining economic outcomes.” Similarly, “politics is not this messy process of campaigns, primaries, the general election, the Electoral College, district gerrymandering, lobbying, voting, and the like. It’s all run by a secret cabal of cigarette-smoking, backroom-dealing, shady characters being bribed by corporate interests and other forces that determine the outcome of elections.” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p.69]. Such theories may also reduce the existential anxiety people have that the complex world we live in is in actuality impossible to control or predict.

People overestimate their understanding of complex problems. Conspiracy theorists fancy themselves as cleverly identifying complex patterns, but in reality they are failing to understand the true nature of complexity, which is vastly more complex than they can fathom. That complexity is why becoming a true expert or analyst (the ones dismissed by conspiracy theorists as part of the “elite”) requires many years of higher education. The oft-heard claim by conspiracy theorists that “I’ve done my research” just doesn’t cut it.

Conspiracy theory researchers Oliver and Wood explain the tendency toward oversimplification of complex problems further: “For many Americans, complicated or nuanced explanations for political events are both cognitively taxing and have limited appeal. A conspiracy narrative may provide a more accessible and convincing account of political events, especially because it may coincide with their ordinary cognitive tendencies.” Oliver JE, Wood TJ. Conspiracy theories and the paranoid style(s) of mass opinion. American Journal of Political Science 2014; 58:952-966.

-- Teleological thinking—defined as “the attribution of purpose and a final cause to natural events and entities” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 67. Citing: Wagner-Egger P, Delouvée S, Gauvrit N, Dieguez S. Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias. Curr Biol. 2018;28(16):R867-R868. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.072].

-- Transcendental thinking—believing that certain things lie beyond the practical experience of ordinary people, and cannot be discovered or understood by ordinary reasoning. A spiritual / supernatural / paranormal mindset. Transcendentalism is intuitive, and empiricism is not.

-- Locus of control—the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcome of events in their lives. People with a low internal locus of control (high external locus of control) are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

-- Anxiety reduction—"there is some measure of comfort to be drawn from the notion that life’s ills are (at least sometimes) attributable to hostile agents working in secret, because in that event, at least there is ‘theoretically’ a solution to ones suffering.” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 49. Citing: Joshua Hart and Molly Graether, “Something’s Going On Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Individual Differences 39, no. 4 (2018), 229–237]

-- “Myside” bias—tribalism. “Myside bias has been found to occur in every stage of information processing. That is, studies have shown a tendency toward biased search for evidence, biased evaluation of evidence, biased assimilation of evidence, biased memory of outcomes, and biased evidence generation.” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 81. Citing: Keith Stanovich, The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021)]. Shermer notes that “the problem is especially prevalent among highly educated and highly intelligent people who are even better at rationalizing and justifying beliefs that they hold for non-smart reasons. As Stanovich documents, you might be subject to the myside bias if you evaluate acts more favorably when they support your group, apply logical rules better when logical conclusions support your strongly held beliefs, you search or select information sources that are more likely to support your position, you de-emphasize the costs of your moral commitments, you distort the perception of risk and reward in the direction of your personal preferences, you selectively use moral principles, you selectively learn facts favorable to your political party, you resist evidence when it leads to unwanted social changes, you interpret facts favorable to your preferred group, you selectively question the scientific status of evidence.” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 81].

-- Negativity bias—“bad” is stronger than “good.” We are more sensitive to risks than benefits, losses than gains, pain than pleasure, negative feedback than positive feedback, bad events than good events, morally bad actions of others than good actions, etc. Citing Steven Pinker, Shermer notes that our risk aversion makes evolutionary sense given the threat to survival that negative effects could pose: in our evolutionary past the cost of overreacting to a threat would have been less than the risk of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction and assume the worst. A belief in negative conspiracy theories is thus a feature, not a bug, in our cognition.

-- Anomaly hunting—looking for anything unusual and seemingly unexplainable, and then fixating on that anomaly as “evidence” for one’s conspiracy theory. In most complex events, there are sure to be particular details for which there is incomplete information and which may therefore seem anomalous. But for a new theory to be compelling enough to displace an accepted one, it must explain not only the anomalies but also the convergence of evidence already explained by the accepted theory. “Anomalies do not a theory make.”

10. PERSONALITY FACTORS:

-- Low interpersonal trust—tending to have a mistrustful, paranoid attitude, assuming the worst in other people. This distrust may encompass friends, neighbors, and coworkers, not just the government and the media.

-- Ideological eccentricity—propensity toward odd ideological beliefs.

-- Excessive concern about personal safety—anxiety and insecurity beyond what is warranted by the situation.

-- Dangerous-world beliefs—beliefs that life is a fiercely competitive and violent struggle and that others are constantly threatening harm)

-- Hyperactive agency detection—the belief that there are hidden intentional agents controlling events. This is also a common cognitive bias to which we are all susceptible (discussed above). But some people are more prone to it than others, so it may be regarded as a personality factor.

-- Schizotypy—“a personality trait dimension comprising a constellation of tendencies related to schizotypal personality disorder symptomology [but broader and less severe than the disorder; and overlapping with the above-listed factors]: for example, interpersonal suspiciousness, social anxiety and isolation, and eccentric ideas and perceptions.” [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 49. Citing: Hart and Graether—see full citation above].

-- “Bullshit receptivity” —yes, this is the term used by the academic researchers [Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549–563)]. Pennycook and colleagues studied how impressed or not people were with “seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous.” They found that their Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BRS) was positively correlated with paranormal beliefs, and by some measures, with conspiracist thinking and belief in the efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine. Hart and Graether used Pennycook and colleagues’ BRS as one of their many measures of susceptibility to conspiracy theories and found that indeed it was one of the predictors of conspiracist thinking. In other words, conspiracists are more likely to read profundity into vague meaningful-sounding nonsense.

-- Less science-mindedness—the more one identifies with a scientific worldview, the less likely one is to believe in conspiracies [Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 49. Citing: Hart and Graether]. Shermer suspects that this is because the scientific mind is alert to the role of ineptitude and randomness in the unfolding of events: before attributing an act to malice first make sure it is not due to chance, randomness, accident, or incompetence.

-- Feelings of control: In a study of the relationship between loss of control and illusory pattern detection, psychologists Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky explored how people primed to feel a lack of control have a more difficult time recognizing randomness and instead attribute agency to the patterns they perceive. [Shermer, Conspiracy, pp. 48-49. Citing: Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” Science 322, no. 5898 (October 1, 2008), 115–117].

11. Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 54. [See footnote 6 for an explanation of the term Manichean]

12. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p.xii.

13. “The Intuitionism scale is a remarkable predictor of magical beliefs. Across six national surveys and a wide array of notions, the results follow a regular pattern: the higher a participant’s Intuitionism score, the more likely that person will believe in supernatural or paranormal phenomena. The Intuitionism scale not only predicts a belief in God or life’s purpose, it also predicts a belief in horoscopes or ghosts. It also predicts whether Americans use alternative medicine, and if they are drawn to apocalyptic prophecies. And it predicts explicit measures of intuitive thought, such as whether Americans value ‘their heart over their head’ or ‘if they accept their own intuitions over the advice of a doctor.’ In short, this scale is a robust predictor of how much Americans rely on their intuitions when making sense of reality.” [Oliver and Wood, Enchanted America, p.11]

14. See also my previous post Spirituality, Wellness, and Conspiracy Beliefs, which cites the research of Oliver and Wood, and others.

15. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

I wish Shermer had said more about the role of social media algorithms, and the share and retweet buttons designed to enhance virality. And, in particular, Facebook’s irresponsible prioritization of profits over safeguards to prevent harms from those algorithms. As Jonathan Haidt points out in his article in The Atlantic:

“Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. […] Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

16. See the points about Oversimplification of complex problems in Footnote 9.

17. Shermer, Conspiracy, p. 77. Quotation from: Dez Vylenz, director, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, documentary film, Shadowsnake Films, 2003.

18. And yet, so deeply counter to everything science tells us.