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I tried to explain just this to a friend who is a chronic conspiracy theorist. My suggestion to him was that his brain was detecting signal even where there was
by phs318u 10y ago
I tried to explain just this to a friend who is a chronic conspiracy theorist. My suggestion to him was that his brain was detecting signal even where there was none, and seeing patterns in random events - which everyone is prone to do from time to time - though in his case the sensitivity is dialled way, way up.
- extra88 10y agoYou might call it "paranoidolia."
- VLM 10y agoReligious experiences work the same way. For the sake of politeness we'll assume I'm referring to dead historical religions.
- fallous 10y agoYeah, this is the impetus for things like sympathetic magic and other misapplications of correlation (or causation).
- fallous 10y agoI'm inclined, via intuition rather than data, to think that things like paranoia, conspiracy thinking, etc are akin to auto-immune responses like asthma where the absence of real threats causes the system to become hyper-sensitive and attack itself or things that aren't truly threatening.