Some Psychology
As previously mentioned, I expected to find manipulation and misinformation behind conspiracy theories. So, my exploration started with discovering the psychological techniques that are used to convince people to believe in such theories.
I turned to an article called “The Genesis of A Conspiracy Theory” written by Katrin Weigmann, a freelance journalist. It starts by explaining a German television program -Plusminus- that aired a documentary about an alleged new cancer therapy. As a whole this documentary suggested that the pharmaceutical industry was purposely stopping the development of the therapy. According to them the therapy was cheap and would return little profits for pharmaceutical companies. To make a longer explanation short, there was no purposeful stopping on therapy development. However, this prompted a discussion of how a scientific issue can turn into a conspiracy. The article cites flaws in how our brain processes information as key reasons for conspiracy theory belief. It cited various specific psychological phenomena which contributing to this. The first was “illusory pattern perception.” This arises when people see patterns where there are none. In terms of conspiracy theories, people like patterns that fit in with their current world views. This means that people’s brains may be able to find patterns in random events because it fits in with their world view.
This melds in with the second phenomena that was mentioned: “confirmation bias.” This describes how people easily believe things that fit their current beliefs. It is much harder to convince somebody to believe in something that doesn’t align with what they already believe. Katrin cites one researcher who says that “People will eventually develop elaborate rationalizations, often devoid of any logic, to justify their beliefs and maintain a world view that is in line with their attitudes and ideologies.”
"Believing is seeing... once we have a belief we see the information that will confirm that belief and we stop seeing what we don't want to see... We want to see evidence that confirms our beliefs and we want to forget anything that is dissonant or discrepant"
-Dr. Carol Tavris
The article also cited humans desire to be safe and in control as a reason why conspiracy theories seem attractive. While conspiracy theories give simple explanations, science is constantly being refined and discussed which means that scientific theories can change.
For people who feel safe in predictable circumstances conspiracy theories provide a more consistent source of predictability. This can be built upon by the fact that people who believe in conspiracies may feel more in control thinking that they have information that few people have. This connects with the next phenomenon of “Us versus Them” thinking. Katrin describes how how big companies, government agencies, and academia can be described negatively as a “them.” Citizens and the general public can be depicted as an “us.” The “them” is the negative group that can’t be trusted. The "us" is the innocent victims of the "them's" manipulation.
Following this information, came one more important component “The single-study fallacy.” This is something that is often used by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the complexity of issues and where science stands requires reading a variety of credible news sources and research reports. People get most of their information from journalists. If either the journalists or the public read only one study then misinformation or out of date information can spread quickly.
This article surprised me in a couple of ways. The first was that these psychological phenomena were in no way unique to conspiracy theories. As I read, I found myself thinking “that makes sense,” or “ah, I’ve fallen for this before.” I was even more surprised when the article mentioned that “more than a third of the American Public suspect that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” and that “61% of Americans still think that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone.” Initially conspiracy theorists seemed like nutty people who believed without reason and trusted no one. But after interacting with Katrin’s article I started to suspect that I had misjudged conspiracy theories. It became more apparent why conspiracy theories were appealing and why people might believe them. I also started to wonder who else had the same misled beliefs as me.