Why people believe conspiracy theories

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The idea that such beliefs are held only by a bunch of nerdy white guys living in their parents' basements is a myth. Surveys by Uscinski and Parent show that believers in conspiracies “cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” People on both the political left and right, for example, believe in conspiracies roughly equally, although each finds different cabals. Liberals are more likely to suspect that media sources and political parties are pawns of rich capitalists and corporations, whereas conservatives tend to believe that academics and liberal elites control these same institutions. GMO conspiracy theories are embraced primarily by those on the left (who accuse, for example, Monsanto of conspiring to destroy small farmers), whereas climate change conspiracy theories are endorsed primarily by those on the right (who inculpate, for example, academic climate scientists for manipulating data to destroy the American economy).

Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?

Conspiracy theories often crop up during times of uncertainty and fear: after terrorist strikes, financial crises, high-profile deaths and natural disasters. Past research suggests that if people feel they don’t have control over a situation, they’ll try to make sense of it and find out what happened. “The sense-making leads them to connect dots that aren’t necessarily connected in reality,” van Prooijen says.

He and his team showed that the opposite is also true: feeling a sense of control is protective against believing conspiracy theories.

The best predictor of believing in one conspiracy, he says, is believing in another.

Here's Why People Believe In Conspiracy Theories

In September 1999, exactly two years before 9/11, the journal Political Psychology carried a study by researchers at New Mexico State University, who concluded that “beliefs in conspiracies are related to feelings of alienation, powerlessness, hostility, and being disadvantaged”.

In these circumstances, says Wood, the brain faces two psychological possibilities: “Either somebody else is controlling what’s going on, or nobody is.”

People are more likely to believe that someone else is controlling what’s happening, he says, “because then, at least in principle, the world is a knowable and controllable place, and not random. Someone is in control, even if it’s not the right person.”

A recent paper published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science concluded that political extremists of any kind, wedded to “simple political solutions to societal problems”, were attracted to conspiracy beliefs. And according to a 2008 paper by psychologists at the University of Texas, some types of people are just mentally predisposed to “signal detection” – spotting “illusory patterns” where none exist, “including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock-market information [and] perceiving conspiracies”.

The long read: why people believe conspiracy theories | The National

 

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And why conspiracy theories are dangerous:

A poll carried out by Ohio State University five years after 9/11 found that a third of Americans believed the US government was behind the attacks.

By 2013, a YouGov poll found that 50 per cent of Americans doubted the official account – 46 per cent suspected World Trade Center Building 7 had been brought down by planted explosives, as many “truthers” insist.

Scepticism is similarly rife in the Middle East. In 2011, a decade after the attacks, a poll by the non-partisan Pew Research Center in Washington, found that the majority of Muslims in seven Middle Eastern countries did not believe Arabs had been involved in 9/11. Scepticism was strongest in Egypt (75 per cent), Turkey (73 per cent) and the Palestinian Territories (68 per cent).

In fact, the Pew Center reported that there was “no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks”.

The long read: why people believe conspiracy theories | The National