4 ms·

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Here's what the science says

12 points by Anon84 3y ago

skymast 3y ago
It helps when all of these conspiracy theories get proved true day after day. So, there's that. The real question is, why are people so close minded and sure of their world view not to believe in conspiracy theories.
- throwaway8877 3y ago
  The problem is not that some of the suspicions of wrongdoing turn to be true, the problem is believing something that is clearly utter nonsense and has been debunked constantly. Even worse, many of these are pushed by malicious state actors.
  - drekipus 3y ago
    I just heard a good podcast on this last night by Ezra Klein (NY Times) with guest C.T Nguyen. Even the utterly nonsense can become a way to simplify the world and hold it all in your head, like a videogame. The attraction comes not from the plausibility of it but rather, the simplicity after a few challenging obstacles of understanding. IE: flat earth become a rather easy way to simplify global politics and ruling classes. It's not obviously absurd, as there's a few steps in reaching this "enlightenment"
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  All of them? How many unfounded ideas are you exposed to daily? They're all true? If I had to guess I think that they're almost never proven true.
illuminant 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074621
recursivedoubts 3y ago
> The results strongly supported a tripartite motivational model of conspiratorial ideation. This model posits that conspiratorial thinking is driven by three key needs: understanding one’s environment (epistemic), feeling secure and safe (existential), and maintaining a superior image of oneself and one’s ingroup (social). ok, yeah, cool, so what am I supposed to call this if i want to avoid being epistemically, existentially and socially bad? https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-conference https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-c... want to make sure that i'm not a conspiracy theorist, sounds bad
bigdict 3y ago
Because they suspect they may be true.
- atoav 3y ago
  Really? Isn't the point that differenciates conspiracy narratives from actual falsifiable theories that those believing those stories have to choose to ignore (or explain away) arguments that would destroy the believe? I think the more likely explaination is that: - it gives them comfort that bad things happening are attributable to evil forces, rather than to chance or systemic variables and incentives aligning in a bad way - it gives them purpose and strokes their ego, that they are in on it, while the rest of the people are blind to the truth - it gives them a sense of community, with other people that believe the same thing Take anything crazy that has happened in the past decade on the international stage, you will have people jumping up within hours that have an conspiracy explaination, despite there not even being clear facts about what actually happened. People saying that don't do that because they suspect it may be true, they do it because having any explaination no matter how bad gives them something, they wouldn't have if they just waited for further information.
diogenescynic 3y ago
Because we know the media is lying to us constantly... 'there are WMDs in Iraq'....'Jeffrey Epstein commit suicide'... 'Trump is a Russian agent'...or Obama saying the drinking water in Flint was safe to drink... or how about Vioxx killing hundreds of thousands and the media sweeping that under the rug? Or how about all the October 7th lies that were spread and turned out to be false? Or how liberals/progressives thought COVID risks were 10x worse than it actually was due to their media sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/briefing/covid-risks-poll-americans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/briefing/covid-risks-poll... Or that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake... The media lies to us daily and is never held accountable. No one ever loses their job for lying--usually they are promoted. Dr. Fauci and Trump are both liars, and yet are evangelized by different sides... Even Harvard was run by a liar/plagiarizer.... which should give everyone good reason to take a pause and wonder if they should believe anything the media says when it's consistently so wrong/obviously lying. Mainstream media just rationalizes whatever the powers that be wants--even if not explicitly requested because there's a revolving door between media/politics. The last press secretary Jen Psaki worked for CNN.. the press secretary before her worked for Fox. Modern media is a complete failure and that is why conspiracy theories are spreading faster than ever. Everyone knows Rachel Maddow lies just as much as Fox News. Objectivity and truth have gone extinct.
6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago
i like conspiracies because it's the same thing that makes us like disaster movies. we, humans, like fear when it's under control. we like to be afraid, but not too much. we like to see movies where aliens come to destroy us, but someway, we win over them (a single rock thrown at us from space would get rid of us...) it's the same reason why we prefer bad guys. the good guys, they're boring, they all look alike. but bad guys. there's a whole spectrum of it. i like conspiracy theories because it turns a bland, boring reality into something more fun. and i like those theories because I don't believe in them and approach them like disaster movies. talking of reality is a tad boring. but conspiracies can be intricated one into another, with multiples layers and a whole spectrum of it. that's why we like them : we let the fear make us imagine stuff, but we keep that fear under control all along.
RecycledEle 3y ago
I go with whatever side has the evidence. If someone says George H W Bush assassinated JFK, and yells that I am stupid when I ask for evidence, while the other guy says it was Oswald and offers me thousands of pages of proof, I will say it was Lee H Oswald (after briefly checking the evidence.) If someone says Lee H Oswald assassinated JFK, and yells that I am stupid when I ask for evidence, while the other guy says it was George H W Bush and offers me thousands of pages of proof, I will say it was George H W Bush (after briefly checking the evidence.) There are no stupid questions, but there are billions of stupid people who do not ask questions about "settled" topics. Even worse, there are billions of people who judge others without trying to understand their point of view. I'm willing to listen to any argument, assuming I have time.
- tauchunfall 3y ago
  >I go with whatever side has the evidence. But what is evidence? A photo of a sea monster in a Scottish lake can be evidence. Or a NASA photo of a large face on mars. In both cases misidentification of objects is probably involved. Then there is a category of evidence that is difficult, time-consuming and/or non-intuitive to understand, e.g. climate change.
- guilhas 3y ago
  Normally there is evidence for both theories, the problem is the "credible" mainstream sources will only present one side of it. And that is what most people is going to believe Anything else is just a "coincidence", "planted", conspiracy", "don't confuse co-relation with causation", whatever "razor"... Epstein story has been a conspiracy for 20 years, obviously the evidence was mostly broadcasted in conspiracy channels. And what came out would be smeared, discredited, to cause uncertain around it And sometimes rightly as journalists, and families, were life threatened if they pursued the story
- diogenescynic 3y ago
  What about when the evidence is fake? Remember when there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq? I also think liberals/progressives like to cloak themselves in 'science' but they thought COVID risks were an order of magnitude greater than what they actually were... I think there's a huge error that they still refuse to acknowledge. Why should we trust the media when they repeatedly get things wrong and then never admit it? Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity are two sides of the same coin.
ilaksh 3y ago
The term "conspiracy theory" is stopthink. The government only has to use the label in order to discredit a claim of wrong-doing. I think that this comes down to worldview. Many people need to believe that their government is by and large completely ethical. But governments often behave in ways that are strategic and explicitly not ethical. This goes for your favorite government also. One experiment a "normal" non "conspiracy-theorist" can do is to think back as far as you like into the history of your own government. Go as far back as you need. At some point you will run into an acknowledged historical event where your government did something rather heinous and possibly quite deceptive. Then run forward in your knowledge of history of your government and you will find at least a few other acts that were reprehensible. The interesting thing is that for most people, there is a magical cut-off date a few decades back where suddenly any such supposedly historical heinous act becomes an "insane conspiracy theory". Another big issue is that people will use the same term to describe absolute utter nonsense as they do to refer to real events or activities that they don't want to admit their government was involved with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9#Thought-terminating_clich.C3.A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/11-unbelievable-conspiracy-theories-that-were-actually-true.htm https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/11-unbelie...
- atoav 3y ago
  > The term "conspiracy theory" is stop-think. The government only has to use the label in order to discredit a claim of wrong-doing. I don't think so. The government calling something a conspiracy theory does not discredit a theory automatically – in fact it could lead to the polar opposite. If your theory is legit and other people can check it objectively a government calling it a conspiracy theory likely leads to more eyeballs checking that thing and if it is not someones anti-government-fan-fiction it might gain traction. The best move a government can make when someone has a legit conspiracy theory that has some factual basis is don't make any public statements about it. Conspiracy narratives (the word theory should be reserved for things that can be actually replicated) are good when the government wants to muddy the waters, but to do so they don't have to call things a conspiracy theory, they just have to sow the right seeds and let the right people disocover it. That being said, when I hear conspiracy theory, I typically think about people who have a believe, ignore objective facts that don't fit said believe and cherrypick "evidence" that does. And half of those people don't believe this themselves, they are in it for the greater fool. It isn't called a conspiracy theory, because it is a theory about a conspiracy, it is called a conspiracy theory, because every fact speaking against it can be explained by a big enough conspiracy. That doesn't mean there are no real conspiracies and actual historic, scientific and/or journalistic ways of pinning those down. It just means that what we commonly call "conspiracy theorists" aren't good at not lying to themselves (something good journalists, historians and scientists are good at).
guilhas 3y ago
Because the sources giving the mainstream theory, have turn into propaganda machines with 1 dimensional point of views, that will lie, omit, censor, discredit, and do almost anything, to push their political narrative, except confront the facts So the population looses trust of mainstream institutions over time, and will believe instead on anything that aligns better with their believed "theory of everything" Government lies, authorities lie, FoxNews only talks A, CNN only talks B, Alex Jones shouts about everything, they all attack each other... what can we believe?
hindsightbias 3y ago
People are more comfortable being wrong 99% of the time than they are with Occam’s and Hanlon’s Razors.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  According to the original article https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2023-79252-001.html https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2023-79252-001.html this is pretty accurate. Highest +ve and -ve correlations with conspiracy thinking: Table 3 ===== .56 Social Threat .42 Delusion Proneness .40 Anthropomorphism -.17 Tie: Cognitive Reflection / Control -.25 Active Open-Minded -.26 Trust Table 4 ===== .38 Schizotypy .35 Unusual Experiences .34 Tie: Paranoia / Psychoticism no third place -ve -.07 Agreeableness -.15 Humility
Quinzel 3y ago
Reading this reminded me of social identity theory which helps to understand why individuals might persist in false beliefs if doing so means they remain part of an in-group they perceive as more favourable than some undesirable “out-group” they compare themselves to. Whatever the case, while it may be so that people who are less critical thinkers may be more prone to believing in conspiracies it seems there is a real social element to conspiracies. Probably if you want to help someone to see the light through their conspiracy beliefs, you would have to do more than provide “evidence” to the contrary, but rather look to address the underlying need for social connection and maybe even security within relationships.

12 points by Anon84 3y ago

It helps when all of these conspiracy theories get proved true day after day. So, there's that. The real question is, why are people so close minded and sure of their world view not to believe in conspiracy theories.

throwaway8877 3y ago
The problem is not that some of the suspicions of wrongdoing turn to be true, the problem is believing something that is clearly utter nonsense and has been debunked constantly. Even worse, many of these are pushed by malicious state actors.
- drekipus 3y ago
  I just heard a good podcast on this last night by Ezra Klein (NY Times) with guest C.T Nguyen. Even the utterly nonsense can become a way to simplify the world and hold it all in your head, like a videogame. The attraction comes not from the plausibility of it but rather, the simplicity after a few challenging obstacles of understanding. IE: flat earth become a rather easy way to simplify global politics and ruling classes. It's not obviously absurd, as there's a few steps in reaching this "enlightenment"
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
All of them? How many unfounded ideas are you exposed to daily? They're all true? If I had to guess I think that they're almost never proven true.

illuminant 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074621

recursivedoubts 3y ago

> The results strongly supported a tripartite motivational model of conspiratorial ideation. This model posits that conspiratorial thinking is driven by three key needs: understanding one’s environment (epistemic), feeling secure and safe (existential), and maintaining a superior image of oneself and one’s ingroup (social). ok, yeah, cool, so what am I supposed to call this if i want to avoid being epistemically, existentially and socially bad? https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-conference https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-c... want to make sure that i'm not a conspiracy theorist, sounds bad

bigdict 3y ago

Because they suspect they may be true.

atoav 3y ago
Really? Isn't the point that differenciates conspiracy narratives from actual falsifiable theories that those believing those stories have to choose to ignore (or explain away) arguments that would destroy the believe? I think the more likely explaination is that: - it gives them comfort that bad things happening are attributable to evil forces, rather than to chance or systemic variables and incentives aligning in a bad way - it gives them purpose and strokes their ego, that they are in on it, while the rest of the people are blind to the truth - it gives them a sense of community, with other people that believe the same thing Take anything crazy that has happened in the past decade on the international stage, you will have people jumping up within hours that have an conspiracy explaination, despite there not even being clear facts about what actually happened. People saying that don't do that because they suspect it may be true, they do it because having any explaination no matter how bad gives them something, they wouldn't have if they just waited for further information.

diogenescynic 3y ago

Because we know the media is lying to us constantly... 'there are WMDs in Iraq'....'Jeffrey Epstein commit suicide'... 'Trump is a Russian agent'...or Obama saying the drinking water in Flint was safe to drink... or how about Vioxx killing hundreds of thousands and the media sweeping that under the rug? Or how about all the October 7th lies that were spread and turned out to be false? Or how liberals/progressives thought COVID risks were 10x worse than it actually was due to their media sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/briefing/covid-risks-poll-americans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/briefing/covid-risks-poll... Or that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake... The media lies to us daily and is never held accountable. No one ever loses their job for lying--usually they are promoted. Dr. Fauci and Trump are both liars, and yet are evangelized by different sides... Even Harvard was run by a liar/plagiarizer.... which should give everyone good reason to take a pause and wonder if they should believe anything the media says when it's consistently so wrong/obviously lying. Mainstream media just rationalizes whatever the powers that be wants--even if not explicitly requested because there's a revolving door between media/politics. The last press secretary Jen Psaki worked for CNN.. the press secretary before her worked for Fox. Modern media is a complete failure and that is why conspiracy theories are spreading faster than ever. Everyone knows Rachel Maddow lies just as much as Fox News. Objectivity and truth have gone extinct.

6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago

i like conspiracies because it's the same thing that makes us like disaster movies. we, humans, like fear when it's under control. we like to be afraid, but not too much. we like to see movies where aliens come to destroy us, but someway, we win over them (a single rock thrown at us from space would get rid of us...) it's the same reason why we prefer bad guys. the good guys, they're boring, they all look alike. but bad guys. there's a whole spectrum of it. i like conspiracy theories because it turns a bland, boring reality into something more fun. and i like those theories because I don't believe in them and approach them like disaster movies. talking of reality is a tad boring. but conspiracies can be intricated one into another, with multiples layers and a whole spectrum of it. that's why we like them : we let the fear make us imagine stuff, but we keep that fear under control all along.

RecycledEle 3y ago

I go with whatever side has the evidence. If someone says George H W Bush assassinated JFK, and yells that I am stupid when I ask for evidence, while the other guy says it was Oswald and offers me thousands of pages of proof, I will say it was Lee H Oswald (after briefly checking the evidence.) If someone says Lee H Oswald assassinated JFK, and yells that I am stupid when I ask for evidence, while the other guy says it was George H W Bush and offers me thousands of pages of proof, I will say it was George H W Bush (after briefly checking the evidence.) There are no stupid questions, but there are billions of stupid people who do not ask questions about "settled" topics. Even worse, there are billions of people who judge others without trying to understand their point of view. I'm willing to listen to any argument, assuming I have time.

tauchunfall 3y ago
>I go with whatever side has the evidence. But what is evidence? A photo of a sea monster in a Scottish lake can be evidence. Or a NASA photo of a large face on mars. In both cases misidentification of objects is probably involved. Then there is a category of evidence that is difficult, time-consuming and/or non-intuitive to understand, e.g. climate change.
guilhas 3y ago
Normally there is evidence for both theories, the problem is the "credible" mainstream sources will only present one side of it. And that is what most people is going to believe Anything else is just a "coincidence", "planted", conspiracy", "don't confuse co-relation with causation", whatever "razor"... Epstein story has been a conspiracy for 20 years, obviously the evidence was mostly broadcasted in conspiracy channels. And what came out would be smeared, discredited, to cause uncertain around it And sometimes rightly as journalists, and families, were life threatened if they pursued the story
diogenescynic 3y ago
What about when the evidence is fake? Remember when there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq? I also think liberals/progressives like to cloak themselves in 'science' but they thought COVID risks were an order of magnitude greater than what they actually were... I think there's a huge error that they still refuse to acknowledge. Why should we trust the media when they repeatedly get things wrong and then never admit it? Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity are two sides of the same coin.

ilaksh 3y ago

The term "conspiracy theory" is stopthink. The government only has to use the label in order to discredit a claim of wrong-doing. I think that this comes down to worldview. Many people need to believe that their government is by and large completely ethical. But governments often behave in ways that are strategic and explicitly not ethical. This goes for your favorite government also. One experiment a "normal" non "conspiracy-theorist" can do is to think back as far as you like into the history of your own government. Go as far back as you need. At some point you will run into an acknowledged historical event where your government did something rather heinous and possibly quite deceptive. Then run forward in your knowledge of history of your government and you will find at least a few other acts that were reprehensible. The interesting thing is that for most people, there is a magical cut-off date a few decades back where suddenly any such supposedly historical heinous act becomes an "insane conspiracy theory". Another big issue is that people will use the same term to describe absolute utter nonsense as they do to refer to real events or activities that they don't want to admit their government was involved with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9#Thought-terminating_clich.C3.A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/11-unbelievable-conspiracy-theories-that-were-actually-true.htm https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/11-unbelie...

atoav 3y ago
> The term "conspiracy theory" is stop-think. The government only has to use the label in order to discredit a claim of wrong-doing. I don't think so. The government calling something a conspiracy theory does not discredit a theory automatically – in fact it could lead to the polar opposite. If your theory is legit and other people can check it objectively a government calling it a conspiracy theory likely leads to more eyeballs checking that thing and if it is not someones anti-government-fan-fiction it might gain traction. The best move a government can make when someone has a legit conspiracy theory that has some factual basis is don't make any public statements about it. Conspiracy narratives (the word theory should be reserved for things that can be actually replicated) are good when the government wants to muddy the waters, but to do so they don't have to call things a conspiracy theory, they just have to sow the right seeds and let the right people disocover it. That being said, when I hear conspiracy theory, I typically think about people who have a believe, ignore objective facts that don't fit said believe and cherrypick "evidence" that does. And half of those people don't believe this themselves, they are in it for the greater fool. It isn't called a conspiracy theory, because it is a theory about a conspiracy, it is called a conspiracy theory, because every fact speaking against it can be explained by a big enough conspiracy. That doesn't mean there are no real conspiracies and actual historic, scientific and/or journalistic ways of pinning those down. It just means that what we commonly call "conspiracy theorists" aren't good at not lying to themselves (something good journalists, historians and scientists are good at).

guilhas 3y ago

Because the sources giving the mainstream theory, have turn into propaganda machines with 1 dimensional point of views, that will lie, omit, censor, discredit, and do almost anything, to push their political narrative, except confront the facts So the population looses trust of mainstream institutions over time, and will believe instead on anything that aligns better with their believed "theory of everything" Government lies, authorities lie, FoxNews only talks A, CNN only talks B, Alex Jones shouts about everything, they all attack each other... what can we believe?

hindsightbias 3y ago

People are more comfortable being wrong 99% of the time than they are with Occam’s and Hanlon’s Razors.

082349872349872 3y ago
According to the original article https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2023-79252-001.html https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2023-79252-001.html this is pretty accurate. Highest +ve and -ve correlations with conspiracy thinking: Table 3 ===== .56 Social Threat .42 Delusion Proneness .40 Anthropomorphism -.17 Tie: Cognitive Reflection / Control -.25 Active Open-Minded -.26 Trust Table 4 ===== .38 Schizotypy .35 Unusual Experiences .34 Tie: Paranoia / Psychoticism no third place -ve -.07 Agreeableness -.15 Humility

Quinzel 3y ago

Reading this reminded me of social identity theory which helps to understand why individuals might persist in false beliefs if doing so means they remain part of an in-group they perceive as more favourable than some undesirable “out-group” they compare themselves to. Whatever the case, while it may be so that people who are less critical thinkers may be more prone to believing in conspiracies it seems there is a real social element to conspiracies. Probably if you want to help someone to see the light through their conspiracy beliefs, you would have to do more than provide “evidence” to the contrary, but rather look to address the underlying need for social connection and maybe even security within relationships.