Theme: Deception

ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES

DEFINITION

A conspiracy theory is defined by four characteristics: (1) a group (2) acting in secret (3) to alter institutions, usurp power, avoid blame, obscure truth, or gain utility (4) at the expense of the common good.

COMMON

At least 50 percent of the population believe in at least one conspiracy theory. The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories. The more highly educated a participant, the less likely they are to believe conspiracy theories.

Debunking conspiracy theories leads to a “backfire effect.” Efforts to debunk inaccurate political information leave people more convinced that false information is true than they would have otherwise.

CAUSES

They feel a lack of control over their lives. If people feel they don’t have control over a situation, they’ll try to make sense of it and find out what happened. Ostracism increases superstition and belief in conspiracies. And it’s not because the isolation is making them insane—it’s really just a search for more meaning in life. The effort of sense-making leads them to connect dots that aren’t necessarily connected in reality. Conversely, feeling a sense of control protects against believing conspiracy theories. If you give people a feeling of control, then they are less inclined to believe those conspiracy theories.

CONFIRMATION BIAS – SEARCH FOR CONTROL

Human beings have a very natural tendency to take in information that fits their own perspective of the world. And we tend to reject information or reject evidence that we disagree with. And we do that for a very simple reason. We don’t like it when we feel wrong. We don’t like it when people tell us we’re wrong because that damages our psychological well-being. We don’t like thinking that our view of the world, our perspective of the world is incorrect.

So what tends to happen is that we look for information; we look for evidence that fits what we already know or what we already believe, and we try to avoid information or evidence that we either disagree with or that we know doesn’t fit with our perspective.

TESTING FOR MENTAL ILLNESS

As far as I know, if you use the serial-definition method rather than cold surveys, give the above definition, give examples of those that were true and false, and categorize a selection of conspiracy theories by the following list, you would find most people are less crazy than they appear.

0) Unlikely or simply false.

1) Misunderstanding of events to obtain ‘sensible world’

2) Intentional misrepresentation of events for attention and ‘sensible world’.

3) external consequences of common interest

4) conspiracy of common interest (following natural incentives without intention of doing bad)

5) conspiracy of common interest in self protection.

6) conspiracy to commit harm in excuse for creating some greater good (military nonsense).

7) conspiracy to commit harm to achieve personal or group ends.

8) conspiracy to achieve power for a group.

—“Incentives drive interest which creates intent. Conspiracies look at the end result and call foul play as opposed to using full accounting and stripping back the effect from the cause.”—Nick Zito

Curt

(compiled from various mainstream sources)