How do people interact with conspiracy theories?
Realizing that I had held misconception, lead to a deep dive into how people interact with conspiracy theories as the next stop on this exploration. This started through conversations with my friends. I started with just two people. At first I wanted to gauge how much each of them knew about the topic of conspiracy theories, both of them said they knew next to nothing. To continue getting a baseline I asked them each if they believed in conspiracy theories. They both did not. This put them in a similar situation to my own. Then I probed further and asked them to describe a person who believed in conspiracy theories. Again both of them described similar people. They characterized conspiracy theorists as crazy, creative, and out of the box thinkers. Within this description I was drawn to the word crazy because I was beginning to suspect that conspiracy theorists aren’t always the crazy wild people I pictured them to be. From these discussions I realized that I wasn’t alone in holding misconceptions about conspiracy theories. The negative connotations around the world “conspiracy theory” were beginning to become more apparent.
To widen my understanding how people interact with conspiracy theories I spectated on the conversations occurring via Instagram and reddit. I found the following post on Instagram.
In the comment section a variety of views on the controversial topic were expressed. One commenter sarcastically said “a government agency lying??? Whaaaat! I can’t believe it,” another commented “there is no ‘dark side of the moon’” and yet another person commented “never trust anyone who says they have 100% proof.” Here I noticed that there wasn't one single mindset about the conspiracy theory. Even after reading just one post, the variety of different stances somebody could make were evident. I wondered why I assumed that people took the same stance as me when it came to conspiracy theories.
At this point I turned my attention to reddit and fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole even further. One thread asked the question “People who used to believe in a conspiracy theory, what made you stop believing it?” One commenter admitted to believing that Bush or the Government was involved in 9/11 (a belief he gained via YouTube videos). However after watching a documentary debunking the theory he realized his mistake. In one thread about the moon landing a commenter mentioned that he believed the first moon landing was faked but the rest of them were real. Again, I noticed that within the same conspiracy there were different beliefs. Another thread asked the question “what’s one conspiracy theory you absolutely wholeheartedly believe in?”
I found one set of responses particularly interesting.
The second commenter mentioned that they didn’t even think about Epstein's death when considering conspiracy theories because the evidence seemed so reasonable. To add onto their point I would push the statement further and ask another question. “What about the being asked to think about “conspiracy theories” lead you to assume that evidence in favor of them couldn’t be reasonable?”
From this exploration a couple things came to light. The first is that I’m not alone in holding misconceptions about the negative connotation around the term “conspiracy.” This was shown both through conversations with my friends and through reading threads on reddit. I also learned that there were more conspiracy theories out there than I anticipated. Within each theory there is a variety of different stances that people hold. All of these factors contributed to a growing understanding that the topic of conspiracy theories is more complex than my initial thought that they were all wrong and there was no evidence for belief in any.