5 ms·

Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

67 points by Anon84 2y ago

hindsightbias 2y ago
Thank god I figured out HFCS 2-liters in jr high. Never needed another conspiracy to explain everyone else getting progressively wackadoodle.
tomkat0789 2y ago
“results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almost three decades, from adolescence into midlife (N = 2215).” Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning. The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.
- jojobas 2y ago
  "Randomly following people creates conspiracy paranoia".
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  There’s correlation, but not causation. It’s also possible that people who are already conspiracy minded tend to be lonely because those personality traits are off-putting to others.
  - rnimmer 2y ago
    paranoia and conspiratorial thinking does not lend itself to trusting others, so could go either way. e.g. paranoid people do not feel safe getting close with people.
therobots927 2y ago
During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild things. Luckily I met my now fiance and she gradually talked me out of it, but I was very resistant and I got pretty upset sometimes when she challenged me on it. I have a lot more sympathy for people that fall for these things now, otherwise I would be a hypocrite.
- macintux 2y ago
  Kudos for finding your way out. It's very, very easy to rationalize your beliefs once they take hold.
  - therobots927 2y ago
    Thanks but I really just feel bad for people still in the cult. I never posted anything myself so my conscience is clear that I didn’t egg any of them on, but just reading it was enough for me to feel like I was a part of something. Really weird stuff and it’s unfortunate to see people still locked in that mindset, of thinking that any day now huge amounts of wealth will be yours and you won’t have to worry about money again. It’s kind of cruel and I’m lucky that I had a high enough income that my losses in the stock didn’t impact me.
- modeless 2y ago
  Which one?
  - therobots927 2y ago
    That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.
    - Animats 2y ago
      There's a minor industry doing that now. See r/metaverse_blockchain, where there's a new "memecoin" being hyped every day. Many are very similar. Some are clearly using the same template for their scams. Most of them forward their links through Linktree.
  - gagagaga7 2y ago
    I fell into the lableak/fauci covering it up conspiracy theory
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
karlmarkx 2y ago
[flagged]
riskable 2y ago
Are we certain it's not the other way around? Conspiracist world views could also be what leads to loneliness (because nobody wants to hang out with you).
- datameta 2y ago
  Its probably somewhere in the middle - a feedback loop.
luxuryballs 2y ago
it’s not that any specific conspiracy theories are wrong just that you had more free time to reflect on things and consider the nature of mankind
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I think the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” and thus provide some modicum of validation for their existence. When you’re alone, you can also be as wild and wacky as you want because there’s no one to push back against it.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” It’s one deeper. It’s the anxiety of confronting the fact that nobody is in charge, there isn’t a secret cabal pulling the strings, it’s a bunch of competing, chaotic forces that you’re caught—somewhat meaninglessly—in the middle of. Replacing that with a puppeteer, even a horrible one, is relieving. (The fact that inventing divine origins for natural phenomena—and cruel gods—is so well preserved across cultures extant and historic strikes at this being a need, not a comfort.)
    - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
      Like the IDF? (Someone said that's who this account belongs to.) Also, did anyone ever tell you that you write like https://youtu.be/0s4sIY3bYEE https://youtu.be/0s4sIY3bYEE sounds?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Like the IDF? (Someone said that's who this account belongs to.) We all live many apparent lives on the Internet. You’ve been on HN long enough, I’m sure, to have seen that. (My favourite was being accused of mind control. My least: someone decrying my Americanness, which as a naturalised immigrant was an unexpected sore spot.) As an aside, it is somewhat fascinating seeing how online debate parameterises in this bipolar manner. My pet war is Ukraine, and I can remember polarising what I saw through a pro/anti lens. > did anyone ever tell you that you write like [Mr. House] sounds? No.
bananabiscuit 2y ago
Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative. When you are interacting with people, there is pressure to conform to consensus reality, regardless of the merit of that reality. Anybody who goes against the grain, wether they are wrong, or correct and eventually vindicated, first has to face negative social pressure from their peers.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  It comes across to most people as obvious and negative from the get go. They’re not antonyms.
- gcau 2y ago
  Anecdotally in my experience, autistic people are a lot more likely to "not care" about social consequences and also more often think about or believe conspiracy theories. It's also not a bad thing to have some people believing in conspiracies, especially when the media/government decides that any stories about them are crazy conspiracies and everyone believes them.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Herd mentality means you share conspiracy theories with the herd, so they don't get recognized as conspiracy theories. Think Nazi Germany etc, that only gets recognized afterwards. So you might identify more crazy stuff in autistic people who don't align with the herd, but if you sum up all the crazy stuff the herds thinks that is roughly on a similar level to an average autistic person, just that its all aligned in a thought bubble so people don't see it unless you look outside your bubble. To illustrate, do you think a devout democrat feels an average autistic person or a republican believe in more dumb stuff? And vice versa. Regardless which of those sides are right it still adds up to a ton of crazy shit for the average herd.
- polemic 2y ago
  That is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.
roenxi 2y ago
The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey. To me, this says that lonely people probably have more time to reflect on the world. For example more social people don't have time to keep track of, say, the financial and electronic tracking systems that have been developed over the last 20 or so years. They really are quite frightening considering what the Nazis achieved in 1940s tech. The next industrial genocide may well be unprecedented. How alert people are to that fact is probably correlated to Q3. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fpsyg-04-00225.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps... Saving people a click: 1...many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about. 2...politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions. 3...government agencies closely monitor all citizens. 4...events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities. 5...there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions.
- clipsy 2y ago
  That's a pretty awful poll. 3 is essentially a statement of fact, 5 is describing any "dark money" PAC, and 2 is a healthy skepticism of people who are asking to have enormous power over us.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    I dunno about awful, it is exactly what it says on the tin - do people have a "conspiracy mentality"? It is just easy to misinterpret as a negative when it is not.
- jasonlotito 2y ago
  Note: That's the final five questions in a 38 question survey with 33 primer questions about specific conspiracy theories. It wasn't just 5 questions.
Animats 2y ago
It's hard to tell the real conspiracies from the fake ones. Suggested reading: The Texas GOP 2024 platform.[1] [1] https://texasgop.org/official-documents/#platform https://texasgop.org/official-documents/#platform
- ikawe 2y ago
  There’s a lotta links to a lotta documents in this world, and this one is a few dozen pages longer than I can quickly peruse. Anything in it you want to highlight?
  - Animats 2y ago
    No. I'd prefer that people read what they actually wrote, without emphasis.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      The platforms (and actual performance) of all parties should be carefully and skilfully critiqued (but then we'd have two problems). Not so popular, but more proper.
buildsjets 2y ago
Dale Gribble’s close friends Hank, Bill, and Boomhauer exist as a counterpoint to this argument.
- krapp 2y ago
  They don't actually exist, they're cartoons. They can't provide a counterpoint to arguments about the real world.
  - Gwiz462 2y ago
    Bonus points if they don't ACTUALLY exist in the cartoon.
  - tasty_freeze 2y ago
    It was a joke.
linearrust 2y ago
> Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic What? Which ones? Undermined how? > and were used in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, raid on the Capitol. I thought a major political party was involved. Not 'conspiracy theorists'. > They lie at the core of political and social polarization Really? Conspiracy theorists lie at the core of political and social polarization? > fueling vaccine skepticism, climate change skepticism Well then address the skepticism and move on. What's the issue here? > and anti-science movements such as the flat earthers Flat earthers? Are we really suppose to pretend flat earthers have taken control over? No specifics given. It's almost like this study and article was created solely for political purposes. What's the point of this 'study' and article? Don't question authority? What's a bigger conspiracy theory than 'lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers influence global pandemic contaiment efforts'? Does anyone seriously believe lonely conspiracy theorists influence anything? That's a sillier conspiracy than reptilian aliens influencing world affairs.
- ralph84 2y ago
  Yes. The whole point of lumping flat earthers together with people who question powerful people making decisions behind closed doors is so that people stop questioning the powerful people.
- adleyjulian 2y ago
  > What? Which ones? Undermined how? There's a long list of conspiracy theories about the vaccines. There are chips in there to track people, they're actually sterilizing people for population control, it's the mark of the beast, it's made with aborted fetuses, etc. This impacted vaccination rates. I can't think of any that would have actually increased rates, maybe something about the rich hoarding the vaccines, but that's a stretch. Also, they measured conspiracy mindset with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which has general questions like "I think there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions". They found that lonely teens, that then got lonelier overtime, had a higher rate of a conspiracy mentality in their 40s. It's hardly surprising but they also controlled for depression and anxiety, and found that loneliness still had a positive correlation with the mentality. I found that part interesting.
e32tanner 2y ago
[flagged]
- ilikehurdles 2y ago
  Essentially the only thing this study is saying, without the social psychologists themselves realizing it, is that people who stick to their views despite a majority of their peers disagreeing with those views tend to be ostracized from social groups. Sometimes those views are false conspiracy theories, sometimes they’re reasoned skepticism, sometimes they’re pointing out uncomfortable truths. I would be more interested in studying how people are convinced to ostracize peers when their beliefs about something unrelated to their survival or day-to-day life are opposed to their own.
- profsummergig 2y ago
  Could you please share a link of where NYT acknowledges that "masks don't work"? I was under the impression they worked pretty well at stopping droplets from spraying out.
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  I've never heard it claimed that there was no laptop. It is a question of provenance and whether the laptop somehow indicts Joe Biden. The claim was that Hunter Biden was getting paid millions and funneling it to Joe, and Joe in turn was pulling strings in Ukraine to protect his son and this money stream. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... "A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 did not find wrongdoing by Joe Biden with regards to Ukraine and his son's business dealings there. Despite persistent allegations that the laptop contents indicated corruption by Joe Biden, a Republican House Oversight committee investigation in April 2024 also found no wrongdoing." Despite that, certain media outlets continue to claim otherwise, and a large online community continue to believe it.
npunt 2y ago
Loneliness and social media are are potent mix of self-reinforcing behavior. Loneliness creates the conditions for greater social media use because social media is a pseudo-satisfier for real human connections. Meanwhile, short form social media like twitter & tiktok mimics a schizophrenia-like experience of hearing many unrelated voices in quick succession. Social media use is also habitual and addictive, meaning you're not entirely in control as you keep scrolling for hours on end. It's not a stretch to imagine that one consequence of this situation is to start seeing connections where there are none, which at the extremes is the root of conspiracy thinking. Making connections is also a form of regaining control, and when played out on social media is a way to feel like you're connected with others and part of something of consequence. Of course outside of devices, this conspiratorial slide further isolates you from society, and so the self-reinforcing spiral continues.
- mrtesthah 2y ago
  Social media exposure also facilitates the Illusory Truth effect, in which a lie repeated many times becomes perceived as truth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Guthur 2y ago
So there is no such thing as individuals conspiring to achieve a goal; colonisation wasn't a thing, national socialism was just some random frat parties, communism was just a book club. The problem is assuming that everything is a conspiracy just as much as nothing is a conspiracy.
vitehozonage 2y ago
This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  Reminds me of Spurious Correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- mrtesthah 2y ago
  Would you mind citing any specific passage that you perceive to be "incredibly politicized"? Can you cite one of these "political judgments" from the paper?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tim333 2y ago
    I thought the first example they gave: >Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic was maybe ironic. Listening to the people at the start who said it was likely a lab screw up rather than dismissing them as conspiracy theorists might have led to better efforts to contain it. (for those interested here's the then head of the US CDC talking about being blocked from going over to help contain it and similar things https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119 https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119)
    - mrtesthah 2y ago
      There are many conspiracy theories besides the one you cited. A conspiracy that covid is not real or does not kill people very obviously undermines compliance with public health directives.
    - adleyjulian 2y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Why does a submission like this get flagged. One can only guess. Maybe HN users with flagging privileges do not like the conclusions of paper published or summarised in Nature so they flag it in an attmept to stop others from discussing the submission.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > Why does a submission like this get flagged. To minimize chances of it being used as ammunition in the future perhaps....that would be a pretty specialized motivation though.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  The submission has actually been flagged by undercover FBI sock puppets who want to disappear this kind of content. At least this thought just crossed my mind, so it has to be true. It's an attmept to stop us from discssing the matter. They could've just deleted this entire thread but obviously that would have been too obvious, so they do it the sneaky way. /s
- incomingpain 2y ago
  Looking at comments: "Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative." "This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all." "The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO." "The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. " Yep, all 4 i agree with. They all have similar foundations of complaint. That the quality of this study is nowhere near good. Therefore flaggable. This isn't really a scientific study, it's a political statement. They went in looking for a conclusion and fit their data to it.
  - greentxt 2y ago
    Right. But it's good to know Nature isn't good anymore. Maybe it never was? I always held it in pretty high regard.
sudshekhar 2y ago
The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO. The range of arguments which may be called "conspiracy theories" is far and wide. And the truth about many theories only becomes clear after a lot of time. What the author might have discovered instead is the tendency of lonely people to seek new belief systems starkly in contrast to the group they feel alienated from.
Molitor5901 2y ago
The study parameters could use some improvement. People who are lonely have smaller worlds, and less access to social information. It's only a conspiracy worldview according to the observer, but to that lonely person, it's what they know. Something feels disrespectful about the analysis in this study but I can't put my finger on it.
greentxt 2y ago
Meta. Nature jumped the shark. That's sad, but important information.

67 points by Anon84 2y ago

Thank god I figured out HFCS 2-liters in jr high. Never needed another conspiracy to explain everyone else getting progressively wackadoodle.

tomkat0789 2y ago

“results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almost three decades, from adolescence into midlife (N = 2215).” Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning. The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.

jojobas 2y ago
"Randomly following people creates conspiracy paranoia".
crazydoggers 2y ago
There’s correlation, but not causation. It’s also possible that people who are already conspiracy minded tend to be lonely because those personality traits are off-putting to others.
- rnimmer 2y ago
  paranoia and conspiratorial thinking does not lend itself to trusting others, so could go either way. e.g. paranoid people do not feel safe getting close with people.

therobots927 2y ago

During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild things. Luckily I met my now fiance and she gradually talked me out of it, but I was very resistant and I got pretty upset sometimes when she challenged me on it. I have a lot more sympathy for people that fall for these things now, otherwise I would be a hypocrite.

macintux 2y ago
Kudos for finding your way out. It's very, very easy to rationalize your beliefs once they take hold.
- therobots927 2y ago
  Thanks but I really just feel bad for people still in the cult. I never posted anything myself so my conscience is clear that I didn’t egg any of them on, but just reading it was enough for me to feel like I was a part of something. Really weird stuff and it’s unfortunate to see people still locked in that mindset, of thinking that any day now huge amounts of wealth will be yours and you won’t have to worry about money again. It’s kind of cruel and I’m lucky that I had a high enough income that my losses in the stock didn’t impact me.
modeless 2y ago
Which one?
- therobots927 2y ago
  That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.
  - Animats 2y ago
    There's a minor industry doing that now. See r/metaverse_blockchain, where there's a new "memecoin" being hyped every day. Many are very similar. Some are clearly using the same template for their scams. Most of them forward their links through Linktree.
- gagagaga7 2y ago
  I fell into the lableak/fauci covering it up conspiracy theory
  - mikeyouse 2y ago

karlmarkx 2y ago

[flagged]

riskable 2y ago

Are we certain it's not the other way around? Conspiracist world views could also be what leads to loneliness (because nobody wants to hang out with you).

datameta 2y ago
Its probably somewhere in the middle - a feedback loop.

luxuryballs 2y ago

it’s not that any specific conspiracy theories are wrong just that you had more free time to reflect on things and consider the nature of mankind

dyauspitr 2y ago
I think the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” and thus provide some modicum of validation for their existence. When you’re alone, you can also be as wild and wacky as you want because there’s no one to push back against it.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” It’s one deeper. It’s the anxiety of confronting the fact that nobody is in charge, there isn’t a secret cabal pulling the strings, it’s a bunch of competing, chaotic forces that you’re caught—somewhat meaninglessly—in the middle of. Replacing that with a puppeteer, even a horrible one, is relieving. (The fact that inventing divine origins for natural phenomena—and cruel gods—is so well preserved across cultures extant and historic strikes at this being a need, not a comfort.)
  - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
    Like the IDF? (Someone said that's who this account belongs to.) Also, did anyone ever tell you that you write like https://youtu.be/0s4sIY3bYEE https://youtu.be/0s4sIY3bYEE sounds?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Like the IDF? (Someone said that's who this account belongs to.) We all live many apparent lives on the Internet. You’ve been on HN long enough, I’m sure, to have seen that. (My favourite was being accused of mind control. My least: someone decrying my Americanness, which as a naturalised immigrant was an unexpected sore spot.) As an aside, it is somewhat fascinating seeing how online debate parameterises in this bipolar manner. My pet war is Ukraine, and I can remember polarising what I saw through a pro/anti lens. > did anyone ever tell you that you write like [Mr. House] sounds? No.

bananabiscuit 2y ago

Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative. When you are interacting with people, there is pressure to conform to consensus reality, regardless of the merit of that reality. Anybody who goes against the grain, wether they are wrong, or correct and eventually vindicated, first has to face negative social pressure from their peers.

dyauspitr 2y ago
It comes across to most people as obvious and negative from the get go. They’re not antonyms.
gcau 2y ago
Anecdotally in my experience, autistic people are a lot more likely to "not care" about social consequences and also more often think about or believe conspiracy theories. It's also not a bad thing to have some people believing in conspiracies, especially when the media/government decides that any stories about them are crazy conspiracies and everyone believes them.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Herd mentality means you share conspiracy theories with the herd, so they don't get recognized as conspiracy theories. Think Nazi Germany etc, that only gets recognized afterwards. So you might identify more crazy stuff in autistic people who don't align with the herd, but if you sum up all the crazy stuff the herds thinks that is roughly on a similar level to an average autistic person, just that its all aligned in a thought bubble so people don't see it unless you look outside your bubble. To illustrate, do you think a devout democrat feels an average autistic person or a republican believe in more dumb stuff? And vice versa. Regardless which of those sides are right it still adds up to a ton of crazy shit for the average herd.
polemic 2y ago
That is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.

roenxi 2y ago

The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey. To me, this says that lonely people probably have more time to reflect on the world. For example more social people don't have time to keep track of, say, the financial and electronic tracking systems that have been developed over the last 20 or so years. They really are quite frightening considering what the Nazis achieved in 1940s tech. The next industrial genocide may well be unprecedented. How alert people are to that fact is probably correlated to Q3. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fpsyg-04-00225.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps... Saving people a click: 1...many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about. 2...politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions. 3...government agencies closely monitor all citizens. 4...events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities. 5...there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions.

clipsy 2y ago
That's a pretty awful poll. 3 is essentially a statement of fact, 5 is describing any "dark money" PAC, and 2 is a healthy skepticism of people who are asking to have enormous power over us.
- roenxi 2y ago
  I dunno about awful, it is exactly what it says on the tin - do people have a "conspiracy mentality"? It is just easy to misinterpret as a negative when it is not.
jasonlotito 2y ago
Note: That's the final five questions in a 38 question survey with 33 primer questions about specific conspiracy theories. It wasn't just 5 questions.

Animats 2y ago

It's hard to tell the real conspiracies from the fake ones. Suggested reading: The Texas GOP 2024 platform.[1] [1] https://texasgop.org/official-documents/#platform https://texasgop.org/official-documents/#platform

ikawe 2y ago
There’s a lotta links to a lotta documents in this world, and this one is a few dozen pages longer than I can quickly peruse. Anything in it you want to highlight?
- Animats 2y ago
  No. I'd prefer that people read what they actually wrote, without emphasis.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    The platforms (and actual performance) of all parties should be carefully and skilfully critiqued (but then we'd have two problems). Not so popular, but more proper.

buildsjets 2y ago

Dale Gribble’s close friends Hank, Bill, and Boomhauer exist as a counterpoint to this argument.

krapp 2y ago
They don't actually exist, they're cartoons. They can't provide a counterpoint to arguments about the real world.
- Gwiz462 2y ago
  Bonus points if they don't ACTUALLY exist in the cartoon.
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  It was a joke.

linearrust 2y ago

> Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic What? Which ones? Undermined how? > and were used in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, raid on the Capitol. I thought a major political party was involved. Not 'conspiracy theorists'. > They lie at the core of political and social polarization Really? Conspiracy theorists lie at the core of political and social polarization? > fueling vaccine skepticism, climate change skepticism Well then address the skepticism and move on. What's the issue here? > and anti-science movements such as the flat earthers Flat earthers? Are we really suppose to pretend flat earthers have taken control over? No specifics given. It's almost like this study and article was created solely for political purposes. What's the point of this 'study' and article? Don't question authority? What's a bigger conspiracy theory than 'lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers influence global pandemic contaiment efforts'? Does anyone seriously believe lonely conspiracy theorists influence anything? That's a sillier conspiracy than reptilian aliens influencing world affairs.

ralph84 2y ago
Yes. The whole point of lumping flat earthers together with people who question powerful people making decisions behind closed doors is so that people stop questioning the powerful people.
adleyjulian 2y ago
> What? Which ones? Undermined how? There's a long list of conspiracy theories about the vaccines. There are chips in there to track people, they're actually sterilizing people for population control, it's the mark of the beast, it's made with aborted fetuses, etc. This impacted vaccination rates. I can't think of any that would have actually increased rates, maybe something about the rich hoarding the vaccines, but that's a stretch. Also, they measured conspiracy mindset with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which has general questions like "I think there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions". They found that lonely teens, that then got lonelier overtime, had a higher rate of a conspiracy mentality in their 40s. It's hardly surprising but they also controlled for depression and anxiety, and found that loneliness still had a positive correlation with the mentality. I found that part interesting.

e32tanner 2y ago

[flagged]

ilikehurdles 2y ago
Essentially the only thing this study is saying, without the social psychologists themselves realizing it, is that people who stick to their views despite a majority of their peers disagreeing with those views tend to be ostracized from social groups. Sometimes those views are false conspiracy theories, sometimes they’re reasoned skepticism, sometimes they’re pointing out uncomfortable truths. I would be more interested in studying how people are convinced to ostracize peers when their beliefs about something unrelated to their survival or day-to-day life are opposed to their own.
profsummergig 2y ago
Could you please share a link of where NYT acknowledges that "masks don't work"? I was under the impression they worked pretty well at stopping droplets from spraying out.
tasty_freeze 2y ago
I've never heard it claimed that there was no laptop. It is a question of provenance and whether the laptop somehow indicts Joe Biden. The claim was that Hunter Biden was getting paid millions and funneling it to Joe, and Joe in turn was pulling strings in Ukraine to protect his son and this money stream. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... "A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 did not find wrongdoing by Joe Biden with regards to Ukraine and his son's business dealings there. Despite persistent allegations that the laptop contents indicated corruption by Joe Biden, a Republican House Oversight committee investigation in April 2024 also found no wrongdoing." Despite that, certain media outlets continue to claim otherwise, and a large online community continue to believe it.

npunt 2y ago

Loneliness and social media are are potent mix of self-reinforcing behavior. Loneliness creates the conditions for greater social media use because social media is a pseudo-satisfier for real human connections. Meanwhile, short form social media like twitter & tiktok mimics a schizophrenia-like experience of hearing many unrelated voices in quick succession. Social media use is also habitual and addictive, meaning you're not entirely in control as you keep scrolling for hours on end. It's not a stretch to imagine that one consequence of this situation is to start seeing connections where there are none, which at the extremes is the root of conspiracy thinking. Making connections is also a form of regaining control, and when played out on social media is a way to feel like you're connected with others and part of something of consequence. Of course outside of devices, this conspiratorial slide further isolates you from society, and so the self-reinforcing spiral continues.

mrtesthah 2y ago
Social media exposure also facilitates the Illusory Truth effect, in which a lie repeated many times becomes perceived as truth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

Guthur 2y ago

So there is no such thing as individuals conspiring to achieve a goal; colonisation wasn't a thing, national socialism was just some random frat parties, communism was just a book club. The problem is assuming that everything is a conspiracy just as much as nothing is a conspiracy.

vitehozonage 2y ago

This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.

bufferoverflow 2y ago
Reminds me of Spurious Correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
mrtesthah 2y ago
Would you mind citing any specific passage that you perceive to be "incredibly politicized"? Can you cite one of these "political judgments" from the paper?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tim333 2y ago
  I thought the first example they gave: >Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic was maybe ironic. Listening to the people at the start who said it was likely a lab screw up rather than dismissing them as conspiracy theorists might have led to better efforts to contain it. (for those interested here's the then head of the US CDC talking about being blocked from going over to help contain it and similar things https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119 https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119)
  - mrtesthah 2y ago
    There are many conspiracy theories besides the one you cited. A conspiracy that covid is not real or does not kill people very obviously undermines compliance with public health directives.
  - adleyjulian 2y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Why does a submission like this get flagged. One can only guess. Maybe HN users with flagging privileges do not like the conclusions of paper published or summarised in Nature so they flag it in an attmept to stop others from discussing the submission.

mistermann 2y ago
> Why does a submission like this get flagged. To minimize chances of it being used as ammunition in the future perhaps....that would be a pretty specialized motivation though.
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
The submission has actually been flagged by undercover FBI sock puppets who want to disappear this kind of content. At least this thought just crossed my mind, so it has to be true. It's an attmept to stop us from discssing the matter. They could've just deleted this entire thread but obviously that would have been too obvious, so they do it the sneaky way. /s
incomingpain 2y ago
Looking at comments: "Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative." "This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all." "The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO." "The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. " Yep, all 4 i agree with. They all have similar foundations of complaint. That the quality of this study is nowhere near good. Therefore flaggable. This isn't really a scientific study, it's a political statement. They went in looking for a conclusion and fit their data to it.
- greentxt 2y ago
  Right. But it's good to know Nature isn't good anymore. Maybe it never was? I always held it in pretty high regard.

sudshekhar 2y ago

The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO. The range of arguments which may be called "conspiracy theories" is far and wide. And the truth about many theories only becomes clear after a lot of time. What the author might have discovered instead is the tendency of lonely people to seek new belief systems starkly in contrast to the group they feel alienated from.

Molitor5901 2y ago

The study parameters could use some improvement. People who are lonely have smaller worlds, and less access to social information. It's only a conspiracy worldview according to the observer, but to that lonely person, it's what they know. Something feels disrespectful about the analysis in this study but I can't put my finger on it.

greentxt 2y ago

Meta. Nature jumped the shark. That's sad, but important information.