This can be counter-productive when extreme. Grand conspiracies involve many people, multiple organizations or agencies, acting for long periods of time.
A conspiracy theory is defined as a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some goal (1, 2, 3). Conspiracy theories are not by definition false; indeed, many real conspiracies have come to light over the years.
Grand conspiracy theories tend to divide the world into three groups:
1. The conspirators themselves, they are powerful, have incredible resources and evil intentions. However, they make silly simple mistakes, the conspiracy theorists notice.
2. The conspiracy theorists have the ability to read between the lines and see the invisible hand of the conspirators at work.
3. Everyone else in the world, the naive people, the ones who are not engaged in the conspiracy and don’t see that it exists.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1966) by Richard Hofstadter is considered to be the first scholarly essay on conspiracy thinking. The essay looks at conspiracy thinking as a psychopathology and paranoid delusional disorder. However, because it is so common, conspiracy thinking is not fully explained by this.
Conspiracy thinking is a way to make sense of complex or mysterious events, when people feel that they lack control or are being victimized. In fact, we often lack detailed information about important political events or other events, thus opening the door even further to conspiracy thinking to fill the gaps in our knowledge with ideas or notions that are comforting in some way.
Another reason people believe in conspiracy theories is cognitive dissonance. When confronted with contradictory evidence for their beliefs, people protect their beliefs to overcome the dissonance of being wrong.
Also in play is hindsight bias, in which we tailor after-the-fact explanations to what already happened.
1. Pattern Recognition
Conspiracy theories are a form of pattern recognition, the cognitive form of pareidolia, a pattern imposed upon disconnected events or on random data, such as seeing an image in a stain, in a tree or a cloud. Conspiracy thinking is a hyperactive pattern detection.
Pattern recognition is also more common in response to feelings of powerlessness, pareidolia becomes more likely in research scenarios where subjects are made to feel more powerless. It can also channel feelings of anger.
2. Reality testing and pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is filtered through the reality-testing module in our brains. An apparent pattern is tested and the brain decides whether it conforms to our internal model of reality.
3. Confirmation bias
In confirmation bias, there’s the tendency to see all evidence as confirmatory. Sometimes even negative evidence tends to reinforce their certainty and confidence. Being a self-reinforcing effect, it makes conspiracy theorists stubbornly resistant to change.
4. Fundamental attribution error
Another cognitive trap, this time the tendency to blame other people’s behavior on internal, rather than situational, factors.
Conspiracy theorists think that all actions and outcomes are deliberate and intended, there’s no coincidence or chance. They ignore that people may be innocently responding to a situation rather than deliberately orchestrating every detail.
5. Closed-belief system
Conspiracy thinking quickly becomes a closed-belief system, a belief system insulated from external refutation from facts and evidence. All evidence against the conspiracy can be explained as being part of the conspiracy itself. Any lack of evidence can be explained as having been removed or covered up by the conspirators. In this way, they can explain away any dis-confirming evidence and the lack of any evidence. In essence, they render themselves immune to any possible refutation.
6. Shifting the burden of proof
They also render themselves immune to any burden of proof. They frequently shift the burden of proof onto others, when they have the burden of providing evidence in the first place.
7. Moving the goalpost
Shifting the burden of proof is combined with moving goalpost. No matter how much evidence is provided, it is never enough. For them every quirky must be explained to an arbitrary level of detail.
8. Anomaly hunting
Anomaly hunting is the process of looking for anything that seems out of the ordinary.
Complex historical events cannot be fully explained. This is because of the law of large numbers, the number of variables is so high that strange coincidences are will happen and are inevitable. There will always be anomalies to find, and conspiracy theorists use them to imply a dark conspiracy.
9. Naive assumptions
Conspiracy theorists often combine anomaly hunting with naive assumptions about how things should happen. Things are anomalous because they don’t fit with their idea of how events should have unfolded.
It is naive to assume that we can know with any detail what would result in any unprecedented event. Anything that does not fit their assumptions is an anomaly and evidence.
10. False dichotomy
The conspiracy theorist proposes a false dichotomy - that either the standard explanation of events is true or their conspiracy is true.
If they can call it into doubt and poke holes in the standard story, through naive anomaly hunting, then their conspiracy must be true. All they have to do is find anomalies, cast doubt and replace the standard story of events, with no burden of proof upon themselves. There are other possibilities, so they are offering a false choice.
11. Widening the conspiracy
Widening the conspiracy is another tactic to render a conspiracy immune to contradictory evidence.
Grand conspiracies tend to grow, the power and resources attributed to the conspirators grow like there is almost nothing they cannot do.
Eventually, the theories will simply collapse under their own weight. It becomes too great to be plausible and maintain coordination and secrecy.
Monological belief system
People who believe in one conspiracy theory tend to believe in many others. Psychologists at the University of Kent published a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.”
“Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining world-view comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.” (4)
Belief in a particular theory is strongly predicted by belief in others, even if unrelated (2, 3, 5, 6).
Over time, the view of the world as a place ruled by conspiracies can lead to conspiracy becoming the default explanation for any given event - a unitary, closed-off world-view in which beliefs come together in a mutually-supportive network known as a monological belief system (3, 5, 6, 7).
The monological nature of conspiracism is driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by the coherence of each theory with higher-order beliefs that support the idea of conspiracy in general. Conspiracism constitutes a monological belief system, drawing its coherence from central beliefs such as the conviction that authorities and officials engage in massive deception of the public to achieve their malevolent goals (4).
Another process may also be work, global coherence, which overrules contradictions, and “that everything happens for a reason….” (8).
Considerations
The existence of absurd and implausible conspiracy theories can be used to dismiss any questioning of conventional explanations. Some even hypothesize that the government is responsible for some of the worst conspiracy theories in order to cover up the real one.
Conspiracy theories are often very simplistic or one dimensional explanations.
Conspiracism has become a major subcultural phenomenon.
Clarke found a trend of increasing vagueness in these modern conspiracist communities (9).
When a conspiracy is hypothesized it must be treated like any other scientific hypothesis, we cannot assume the conspiracy is true, look for confirming evidence, protect it from dis-confirming evidence, we cannot shift the burden of proof and support the theory with anomaly hunting. That’s the pseudoscience of grand conspiracy theories.
The principle of the null hypothesis in science: any theory or hypothesis is false until proven otherwise. Thus, the default rule of thumb with conspiracy theories is that they are false.
The more complex the conspiracy and the elements involved, the less likely it is to be true.
References
1. Coady, D. (2006). Conspiracy theories: The philosophical debate. Aldershot: Ashgate.
2. Douglas, K.M., & Sutton, R.M. (2008). The hidden impact of conspiracy theories: Perceived and actual influence of theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana. Journal of Social Psychology, 148,210–222.
3. Goertzel, T. (1994). Belief in conspiracy theories. Political Psychology, 15, 731–742.
4. Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas, and Robbie M.Sutton. Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory conspiracy Theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science January 25, 2012
5. Swami, V.,Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Furnham, A. (2010). Unanswered questions: A preliminary investigation of personality and individual difference predictors of 9/11 conspiracist beliefs. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24, 749–761.
6. Swami, V., Coles, R., Stieger, S., Pietschnig, J.,Furnham, A., Rehim, S., & Voracek, M. (2011). Conspiracist ideation in Britain and Austria: Evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real-world and fictitious conspiracy theories. British Journal of Psychology, 102, 443–463.
7. Clarke, S. (2002). Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 32, 131–150.
8. Thagard, P. (1989). Explanatory coherence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,12, 435–502.
9. Clarke, S. (2007). Conspiracy theories and the Internet: Controlled demolition and arrested development. Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 4, 167–180.
Nickerson, Raymond. “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises.” Review of General Psychology 2, no. 2 (1998):175–220.
Goertzel, Ted. “The Conspiracy Meme.” CSI. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_conspiracy_meme
Klass, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1997.
Novella, Steven. “Conspiracy Thinking: Skepticism’s Evil Twin.”
NeuroLogica Blog. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/conspiracy-thinking-skepticisms-evil-twin
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1966).
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. The definitive book on the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Goldwag, Arthur. Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies. New York: Vintage Books,2009.
Vankin, J., and J. Whalen. The Fifty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. New York: Citadel, 1995.
For more information on Sérgio Fontinhas, see Big Fitness Project.
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