The doctors I work for would point out that it’s possible to hold a singular delusion (like erotomania) and be fully functional otherwise.
There are 2 major psychological drives behind believing in conspiracy theories.
The first one is that you get to be in on a secret that gives you a leg up on everyone else. You’re so unique and smart that you see how things really are, not like the miserable idiot sheep that surround you. You really understand how the world works, you know what’s up. Pat yourself on the back.
The second one is a desire to find meaning and control in the universe. The idea that shit happens - that life and the universe and meaningless and indifferent to you and the world is deeply uncomfortable to a lot of people.
To take the Kennedy assassination for example - the world was just previously on the brink of nuclear war. There’s a game of brinksmanship played at the very highest level by a few people. The entire future of the human race is at stake. The idea that one lone nut with a rifle could fundamentally alter such a huge stakes game is deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people.
It shakes any notion that there’s a greater force directing and controlling the world - the religious put god in this position, and some conspiracy theorist assume it’s a smokey backroom filled with the people who really run the world (or maybe lizard people). But the idea that one nut changed the world in an instant is deeply uncomfortable. So they invent a giant, vast conspiracy directed by the people who are really in charge in order to give the world meaning - an event which shakes the world so much must have a grand plan by powerful, shadowy elites behind it rather than a lone nut.
But it’s essentially true that the same stuff that allows you to buy into one conspiracy essentially makes you buy into all of them. If there were real substance behind one or several conspiracies, you’d think there’d be people who say “look, I know lizard people don’t exist and that 9/11 really was just some terrorists, but [insert conspiracy theory here] really has some evidence for it” - but instead all you see is people who will accept any conspiracy theory you throw into them, no matter how ridiculous, even if it conflicts with one of their existing conspiracy theory beliefs.
I had a co-worker who was big on CTs - he even took different routes home every night so they wouldn’t know where he would be on any given night. I didn’t taunt *him *though, he had lots of guns…
Just for the record, there are actual conspiracies in the world. Every Coup d Etat for example. I can also see how at first glance that serious questions could be raised about 9/11, ie. Jet Fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel, but after you read the NIST report it all makes sense.
What drives me insane is the CT crowds inability to accept that they are wrong when they have been proved wrong, over and over again. Take our own Kozmik, we had well over 1000 posts in a thread in the pit, refuted every single point he ever made, wore him down and he gave up. I am sure he is still up in Michigan, mad as a hatter, wondering why The Dope just didn’t listen to him, circling articles in the NYT in red crayon.
I just don’t get it
CAPT
Nobody disagrees with this. But Conspiracy Theories go in their own category because they work with invented evidence and because the theories crop up and expand in particular ways.
But that is exactly what drives me nuts. I am wrong sometimes(often?) but when confronted with real evidence, I might argue but I will admit when I am proven wrong or simply mistaken.
The 9/11 Truthers for example. After the NIST report came out, the Truther crowd says no way “the NIST is in on it”. Really? Now think about that for just one second and your only real reaction can be :smack:, not “No the NIST had to be in on it”. The group AE911, whose videos were so recently on display here, those people have to know better and I consider their actions Criminal because they feed this game for profit but that is a PIT thread all it’s own.
I just wish that the CT crowd would use it’s collective talents to tell us something useful, like…
To what extent did the CIA’s(and others) direct action lead to the downfall and death of Allende and the events afterward?
Was there anyone, who by direct action/non -action, helped/caused the recent Iraq war, with respect the the WMD intelligence reports?
I have more and am sure the Doper Clan could add more that a few, but I think I am drifting into Hijack territory, so
That is all
CAPT
I dunno, actually going to the moon is a lot cooler than pretending to do so.
Substitute complicated for interesting.
This, specifically: they have a never-ending capability of expanding the theory to include the objections. In ordinary life, that’s infantile.
Did you clean your room?
Yes.
How come it’s still dirty.
Someone must have messed it up.
Did you see them?
Well, no…
A reasonably intelligent child can maintain this charade for hours. “But, Mommy, you aren’t being fair! It could have been my Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toy that messed up my room!”
But a reasonably intelligent adult? The way of thinking strikes me as alien.
I agree with SenorBeef’s analysis, that conspiracy thinking appeals to our need for knowledge and our need for sense. But it seems to me that, in some cases, the fantasy aspect starts to get control over the adherent’s (or victim’s!) rational mind. They recede into a kind of infantilism.
This is why I think there may be some aspect of mental illness, at least in the most non-responsive of believers, the ones who keep adding terms to the already spiky montage of details. (“So, the guy on the grassy knoll was killed by the guys behind him, to keep him silent, and then all the people who were nearby have, over the years, been killed, and the bullet was put on the hospital gurney by someone who wanted us to believe…”)
Conspiracy theories are more interesting in the Hollywood sense, whereas reality is more interesting by virtue of being rule-bound, but still complex and interconnected enough to be surprising.
The CT view of the Moon landings is that we didn’t go and Nefarious People made a Big Lie to Confuse The Sheep. This is interesting in the Hollywood sense because it has Big Villains, Plucky Heroes, and a Grand Evil Plot. It is pure opera, and the CT believers get to be the protagonists simply by buying in.
The real world view of the Moon landings is that we went and now the world has changed because of it. The various laws of physics allowed us to go, what we did there had an impact due to those laws of physics, and if you look with the right knowledge and tools you can still see evidence, like ripples in a pond still radiating away from that one beautiful event. Everything is interconnected, everything was influenced to some extent, and you can’t fake that. Reality is too intertwined.
The problem is that schools don’t teach how interconnected reality is. Humans have a nasty habit of compartmentalizing, of thinking that the laws of nature of course apply to atoms but don’t apply to their stomachs, to pick an example at random.
This conditions people to think in terms of, for lack of a better word, ‘sets and stages’, where reality is broken up into different regions (‘sets’) and there is very limited carry-over from one ‘set’ to the next. Thunderstorms in Burma aren’t because there is a major weather system over Asia that will eventually spawn a storm in California; no, a storm in Burma is because it is storming in Burma, and the future storm in California is not connected. With this worldview, CTs become possible, because the Conspirators would only have to manage a few ‘sets’, as opposed to the entirety of reality: they wouldn’t need to worry about the kind of long cause-and-effect chains that take us from the Space Race to the Arab Spring, simply because movie directors don’t, and CT believers want to live in a movie.
The worst of it is, this compartmentalization makes people think science is inapplicable to what they do every day. It isn’t; science is built on and feeds back into the everyday, it, in a very deep sense, is the everyday, if only with better record-keeping.
This is fundamental:
Reality is elegant: It does a lot with a little. There are a surprisingly few underlying rules and everything is built on them. Everything, in all its amazing complexity, comes from them, and they can be used to make predictions amazing in their precision and accuracy.
Conspiracy theories are inelegant: They do a little with a lot. They have massive, plot-heavy narratives that attempt to weave in every piece of evidence their jackdaw-like creators can find, and usually fail even at that. Their theories have no predictive power; they can only be modified, ad hoc, after the fact, leaving the result no more elegant than it was before.
Movies work like CTs because it’s only a paper moon, and you can’t use a paper moon to derive the underlying reason apples fall from trees and deduce the existence of other moons above other wine-dark seas. Movies are all surface, with no internal substance (or, at most, a minimum of internal scaffolding); CTs are like that.
Eventually you reach a point where the conspiracy had to have begun before Kenndy was born.
It’s a crazy world out there. I’ve always liked the thought that they take some odd comfort in the idea that at least someone is in control (even if they are evil overlords).
I find conspiracies ( with lizard men or else ) much more disturbing than one lone nut.
Marley23, Steken, and FinnAgain, why are You all attacking Me. What is going on?
Why You hate Finnish people, FinnAgain even has a slur against Finns as his username!
I am not a shrink, but it is my personal observation that most conspiracy theorists fall into the DSM IV spectrum of paranoia. Perhaps even paraphrenia, although neither of these terms have very formal definitions or accepted criteria for diagnosis. This is not a clinical diagnosis, per se, for me; just an observation.
One frequently sees an individual with enough smarts to gather data and analyze, and yet come to a conclusion that is fundamentally not driven by an open-minded analysis. The conclusion is driven instead by a pervasive belief that something sinister is at play. Every fact is then constrained into a pattern which must fit the conspiracy, even to the point that anyone presenting an alternate interpretation is part of the the conspiracy.
What is common to these various theories is that “they” have sinister motives to control/influence/endanger me. The actual conspiracy theory to which one clings ends up being much less relevant. Perhaps I choose the Freemasons; perhaps I choose a Government coverup for a Presidential assassination or moon landing hoax; perhaps I choose chemtrails. What I am really doing is finding a plausible reason for my underlying paranoia, and this helps resolve a disconnect which would occur if I just felt generally paranoid but there was no excuse to feel that way.
A secondary driver is the need to feel special and unique. Inside Knowledge does this, and the drive to know something not obvious to the rest of the world seems to be a common personality trait. But if that were all that were at play, an inquiring mind could be disavowed of false notions, where a conspiracy theorist is very hard to move off of a “fact” which turns out to be just plain silly.
The Dunning-Kruger effect comes to mind.
Or to put it another way, schools don’t teach critical thinking and how to recognize fallacies and scams.
I’ve posted about this lack in our educational system(s) here before. Maybe the solution is to have a team of volunteer Dopers going around to schools to teach the basics (we could ride in a white van marked “Critical Thought Squad” and wear neat uniforms).
Conspiracy theorists do fascinate me. I can read Apollo hoax theories on message boards for hours. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a combination of factors at play:
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The “coolness” factor. When I was a kid, I used to get books out of the library on subjects like UFOs, crop circles, ghost photos and the Loch Ness monster. Hey, these non-mainstream ideas are fun and cool when you’re 12 years old, and you might start believing in some of them. Of course, as most people get older and learn critical thinking, they realise that there’s a rational explanation. Conspiracy theorists tend to have arrested development in this regard.
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A feeling of helplessness. I get the impression that CT proponents are not generally happy with their lot in life, and they want someone to blame. It helps their self-esteem if their failure in life is not due to their own shortcomigns, or simply bad luck, but because there’s a shadowy global cabal running the show.
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A poor understanding of science. Most CT fans seem to have real trouble grasping even basic science, which makes attempting to understand something like the Apollo program (which actually was rocket science) rather troublesome. When you can’t grasp the fact that perspective will make parallel shadows appear to converge, or that despite the fact that the sky was black, the astronauts were on the moon in the daytime (hence no stars visible in photos), or that just possibly the finest minds in America might have thought of the fact that there’s no air on the moon, and consequently rigged up a flagpole that held the flag outstretched… well the more arcane aspects of the missions will really baffle you.
The vast majority of moon hoax theories can be summed up as:
I don’t understand this photo
I’m not dumb, therefore the photo must be fake
Therefore the whole mission was fake.
- Lack of critical thinking. An often heard cry from CTers is “I can think for myself - I don’t fall for what They tell me”, and yet, of course, their own theories are very rarely original but instead come wholesale from some YouTube video or Geocities site they once saw. When someone points out the facts, a typical response is “Why do you believe that just because the government says so?” Er, we don’t. We couldn’t care less what the government says: we look at the evidence and decide for ourselves what makes sense. We also give more weight to the opinions of, say, a geologist who has examined moon rocks, than to those of someone with no qualifications other than owning a website written in yellow Comic Sans on a black starry background.
CTers also seem to have the endearing notion that they only have to show that one photo out of the tens of thousands taken on the Moon “looks wrong” and the whole edifice crumbles. Strangely, this doesn’t work the other way: when somebody points out that they’ve misinterpreted the photo, and it’s their “evidence” that is wrong (and thus the whole theory they have constructed on it falls down), it’s “Never mind that, look at this YouTube video on something entirely different…”
I know they’re bad for me, but those forums just draw me in…
Not attacking you. Arguing against you.
Now that’s just… Well. We’re in Great Debates. I’ll hold my tongue.