We've dealt with a lot of conspiracy theories here at Skeptophilia. Amongst the more notable:
- COVID-19 was a bioterrorism agent sent into the West by China.
- The Denver Airport is a portal to hell.
- The CIA has allied itself with evil aliens to infiltrate political leadership all over the Earth and ultimately institute a tyrannical one-world government. These same people apparently think The X Files was a scientific documentary.
- The US has targeted weather weapons, and the government uses them to steer hurricanes and tornadoes toward people they don't like.
- Something something something Nibiru Planet X we're all gonna die and NASA doesn't care something something.
- Not only did the Democrats cover up the fact that Barack Obama born in Kenya, Republicans covered up the fact that Donald Trump was born in Finland.
It's easy to assume that all of these are born of a lack of factual knowledge and understanding of the principles of logical induction. I mean, if you have even the most rudimentary grasp of how weather works, you'd see that HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, located in Alaska) couldn't possibly affect the path of hurricanes in the south Atlantic.
Especially since it was shut down in 2014.
But however ridiculously illogical some conspiracy theories are -- the Earth is flat, the Moon landings were faked, the Sun is a giant mirror reflecting laser light from an alien spaceship -- there are people who fervently believe them, and will hang onto those beliefs like grim death. Anyone who disagrees must either be a "sheeple" or else in on the conspiracy themselves for their own nefarious reasons.
If I had to rank the people I least like to argue with, conspiracy theorists would beat out even young-Earth creationists. They take "I believe this even though there's no evidence" and amplify it to "I believe this because there's no evidence." After all, super-powerful conspirators wouldn't just go around leaving a bunch of evidence around, would they? Of course not.
So q.e.d., as far as I can tell.
It turns out, though, that it's more complicated than a simple lack of scientific knowledge. A paper that came out this week in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin describes a study led by psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University, which found that -- even controlling for other factors, like intelligence, analytical thinking skills, and emotional stability -- conspiracy theorists were united by two main characteristics: overconfidence and a mistaken assumption that the majority of people agree with them.
The correlation was striking. Asked whether their conspiratorial beliefs were shared by a majority of Americans, True Believers said "yes" 93% of the time (the actual average value for the conspiracies studied is estimated at 12%). And the overconfidence extended even to tasks unrelated to their particular set of fringe beliefs. Given an ordinary assessment of logic, knowledge of current events, or mathematical ability, the people who believe conspiracy theories consistently (and drastically) overestimated how well they'd scored.
"The tendency to be overconfident in general may increase the chances that someone falls down the rabbit hole (so to speak) and believes conspiracies," Pennycook said. "In fact, our results counteract a prevailing narrative about conspiracy theorists: that they know that they hold fringe beliefs and revel in that fact... Even people who believed very fringe conspiracies, such as that scientists are conspiring to hide the truth about the Earth being flat, thought that their views were in the majority. Conspiracy believers – particularly overconfident ones – really seem to be miscalibrated in a major way. Not only are their beliefs on the fringe, but they are very much unaware of how far on the fringe they are."Which brings up the troubling question of how you counteract this. My dad used to say, "There's nothing more dangerous than confident ignorance," and there's a lot of truth in that.
So how do you change a belief when it's woven together with the certainty that you're (1) in the right, and (2) in the majority?
It would require a shift not only in seeing the facts more clearly and seeing other people more clearly, but seeing yourself more clearly. And that, unfortunately, is a tall order.
It reminds me of the pithy words of Robert Burns, which seems like a good place to end:
O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us;
It would frae many a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.
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