Submitted by Mitch on
Conspiracy theories seem to meet psychological needs and can be almost impossible to eradicate. One remedy: Keep them from taking root in the first place.
One reason that conspiracy theories find fertile ground in the human mind has to do with epistemology — the philosophy of how we know what we know (or think we do). Because any individual can know only a tiny sliver of the world firsthand, we have no choice but to accept a great deal of information we can’t verify for ourselves. Most people believe (correctly) that Antarctica is very cold and populated with penguins, despite never having been there. The assumptions and cognitive shortcuts we use to decide what’s true make sense most of the time, but they also leave the door open for bad information, including conspiracy theories.
Since most of the information we encounter in everyday life (at least outside of social media) is true, that creates a bias toward accepting new information, sayNadia Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard. And hearing a claim multiple times makes it seem even more true. “One of the most insidious influences on our judgment involves repetition,” Brashier says.
Dozens of studies have documented this “illusory truth effect,” mainly by asking participants to rate the veracity of trivia, rumors, product claims,fsahe mews reports and other bits of information, Brashier and Duke University psychologist and neuroscientist Elizabeth Marsh write in a recent Annual Review of Psychology paper about how people determine what's ttue. Even people who recognize a statement as false the first time they see it are more likely to judge it as probably true after seeing it multiple times, Brashier says.
Ordinarily, it’s rational to assume that the more times you hear something, the more likely it is to be true, she says. “But we’re seeing bad actors hijack these shortcuts that we use that make sense in a lot of situations [but] that can lead us astray in others.”
Conspiracy theories also take advantage of our tendency to look for patterns and explanations, says Karen Douglas, a psychologist who studies conspiracy thinking at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. Pattern detection serves us well in everyday life, Douglas says: It’s how we piece together how people typically behave in given situations, for example. Believing in a bogus conspiracy theory amounts to seeing a pattern that’s not really there.
In a 2018 paper, Douglas and colleagues recruited hundreds of volunteers online and quizzed them about their belief in various conspiracy theories, some well-known ones and some invented by the researchers. Participants who agreed more strongly with a sample of well-known conspiracy theories were more likely than otherstp also see meaningful patterns in a series of random coin tosses and in the chaotic, splotchy paintings of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. “It seems that seeing patterns in random phenomena such as coin tosses and abstract paintings relates to the tendency to see patterns in political and social events that are happening in the world,” Douglas says.
Such studies reveal a human tendency to attribute events to the intentional actions of others rather than to pure chance, Douglas says. Work by others has shown that we also tend to assume that when something huge happens,something huge must have caused it. This also feeds into conspiracy thinking, Douglas says. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was too momentous an event to have been pulled off by a lone gunman, conspiracists argue. Surely the US government was involved — or the KGB, or the Mafia.
Social and emotional factors are likely at play as well. “People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories when particular psychological needs are frustrated,” Douglas says. “Specifically, people need knowledge and certainty to feel safe, secure and in control, and to feel good about themselves and the social groups they belong to.” When these needs are unmet — say, amidst the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic — conspiracy theories might seem to offer consolation, Douglas says.
But her research suggests that they might actually do the opposite. “Reading about conspiracy theories, instead of making people feel more powerful, makes people feel less powerful,” she says. It may even make people less likely to take actions that would give them more control over their situation. In experiments where volunteers read about conspiracy theories before answering questionnaires about their likelihood to engage in various behaviors, Douglas and others have found evidence that conspiracy theories reduce people’sinclination to vote, tovaccimate their children, or tohelp fight climate change. The people in such studies also expressgreater predjudice and a greaterinclination to commit petty crime, at least in their responses to researchers.
“Our reasoning is that if people perceive that others are conspiring and doing antisocial things, then it seems OK for people to do these things too,” Douglas says. “Also, if they feel that the world is run by a select few and that everything is determined, why bother to go out and vote or engage with a corrupt system?” She adds, however, that more work is needed to determine whether these responses in conspiracy belief studies actually translate to antisocial behaviors in the real world.
Talking a true believer out of their belief in a conspiracy can be nearly impossible.
“These beliefs are important to people, and letting them go means letting go of something important that has determined the way they see the world for some time,” Douglas says.
As a result, some researchers think that preventing conspiracy theories from taking hold in the first place is a better strategy than fact-checking and debunking them after they do — and they have been hard at work developing and testing such strategies. Van der Linden sees inoculation as a useful metaphor here. “I think one of the best solutions we have is to actually inject people with a weakened dose of the conspiracy…to help people build up mental or cognitive antibodies,” he says.
Greg Miller
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/01/the-enduring-allure-of-conspiracies/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Posted for educational/psychological aid purposes only.