Why do some people believe strongly in conspiracy theories?

Great Debates
21

Others have covered the secret knowledge / smarter than the sheeple angle, but there’s another big one:

People are deeply uncomfortable with feeling that the world is random, that there’s no order. The most clear example of this is the Kennedy assassination. It’s the middle of the cold war - we had faced down the Cuban Missile Crisis and people were in daily fear for their lives and the lives of everyone they’ve ever known. Only believing that the forces in power were smart, sane, and wise enough to keep us from certain doom could give us comfort.

The idea that one lone nutjob could kill the US President - the President who had guided us through the roughest patch of the cold war - and could upset that whole precarious situation is deeply uncomfortable. And so people created even more powerful entities - grand conspiracies by the real powers that be that offed Kennedy. And then they could tell themseleves that fundamentally, you shouldn’t be too worried - that shadowy cabal were the ones in control all along and they’re still in control. Order is not lost.

People want to see some sort of order in the chaos, even if it means imagining secret, powerful, and even ill-intentioned cabals. Because then at least someone has control. That life isn’t random and chaotic.

22

Apart from the superiority component, I think part of it is assuming the victim mantle. You’re an average, white male who has been bypassed for a promotion in favor of a younger, black woman? It’s a conspiracy rather than your own lack of abilities. You have problems with your neighbors? They’re out to get you and are in cahoots with the garbage collectors to not put your trash cans back in the right space, the paperboy to throw your paper is such a way that it gets wet and behind the *67 prank call you got late Saturday night. Nothing is ever your fault, so surely it’s because there’s this massive, secret machinery keep you from being rich, having a trophy spouse and vacationing in the south of France. How can y’all not see that?

23

“I’m a loser” vs “The World is Against Me”.

I can’t get a raise at work - not because I’m a screw-up who can barely be called ‘adequate’, but because the Jews/Catholics/Illuminati/Homosexuals conspire against WASP Males.

The reason the hard-rock coal mines have shut down is because Obama is a secret Muslim who hate America - not because it costs $58/ton to produce coal in Appalachia vs $8/ton in the massive strip mines in Wyoming. Luckily, there are bunches of pill-pushing quacks who write Oxycontin 'scripts, so we all sit around stoned in our shacks and ancient trailers.

But: as soon as we stop all those people who are coming here and “taking our jobs”, the 50’s will return and the White Man will again rule the roost.

24

We’ve been through this many times. Let’s have patented Stupid, Pointless dropzone Anecdote. A guy at work was, most recently, railing about how Planned Parenthood sterilizes African-American women. A woman of color called him on it, with her own experiences. He disagreed strongly, saying you can look it up.

After he left for lunch, I asked her if she had ever seen Dave Chapelle playing Conspiracy Brother in Undercover Brother, because they sound similar.

“I like Dave Chapelle,” she said.

“Yeah, too bad he went crazy for a while.”

“He didn’t go crazy. He just needed to get away from that Illuminati because he didn’t want to join.”

I love my Illuminati, and can go on at length about Propaganda Due, but I needed to work.

25

Stupid to blame Planned Parenthood, when the real villain is Church’s Chicken.

26

A big factor nowadays:

It’s profitable to push CTs. When CTs were amateur stuff pushed by relatively lone nutcases (e.g. the original Roswell UFO coverup CT), they didn’t get much traction with the public at large.

But now that professional marketing organizations invent these things to sell to the rubes, well … the rubes are defenseless against the superior sales tactics.

And as folks have said, once somebody buys into one CT, their mind is habituated to more readily buying into more, and wilder, CTs.

For years I’ve had a running fantasy of launching a get-myself-rich-quick scheme. Back in college and subsequent I thought being a TV preacher was probably the best way to fleece the rubes for fun and profit while staying on the safe side of the law. For the last 20+ years I’ve thought being a CT pusher would be much more successful.

I have enough morals to never act on this fantasy. Lots of other folks evidently have lesser scruples.

27

I think in that sense, it’s like any other case of ‘I know something you don’t know’ - which is a behaviour that people exercise even in the context of real, actual facts.

But for conspiracy theorists, it’s a kind of pathology like addiction or something - possibly a predisposition, but a downward, self-reinforcing spiral path once you start to travel it.

A common feature of conspiracy enthusiasts is that they will believe and promote multiple conspiracy theories that are incompatible with one another, or in direct conflict with one another - for example in this study, it was found that the more people believed in the idea that Osama Bin Laden had already died before Special Forces stormed his compound, the more likely they were to also believe that he didn’t die at all and was still alive.

28

My absolute favorite internet conspiracy nutjob is Steven Lightfoot who is convinced that Stephen King killed John Lennon and committed a whole lot of other crimes, backed by the government.

Did you know that Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo is obviously an airplane flying into the Twin Towes, “proving” the Clintons orchestrated 9/11?

29

Because, just often enough, there are real conspiracies.

30

Which popular conspiracy do you think is the most plausible?

31

I’d rather know which ones he/she thinks are real, not theories.

32

I knew a British moon landing hoaxer once. His reasoning was that if anybody could get to the moon then the British would have done it first. Since they didn’t the Americans had to have faked it.

33

No pharma drugs for me, because Vioxx.

34

Gasoline companies closing refineries (for “repairs”) in order to raise the customer price at the pump.

35

I agree. For some people, there HAS to be a really compelling, sinister REASON that bad things happened. They can’t accept that a lone nut managed to shoot JFK, or that about a score of men managed to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks without inside help, or that a handful of homegrown nuts managed to blow up the OKC federal building.

I guess it scares them too much to imagine that things can be that random or that vulnerable, so they have to come up with a way that they’re not actually that random or vulnerable, and that takes the form of conspiracy theories.

That’s the garden variety doofus who’ll tell you about their pet theories or whatever in a stage whisper at a party.

There are others, like Alex Jones, who are probably really mentally ill. Nobody believes ALL that crap without having more than a few screws loose in the head.

36

Yet, we know that Enron’s traders did something VERY similar to manipulate energy prices on the west coast.

37

Similarly, Wells Fargo account managers and such, but conspiracies about simple greed are less sexy than ones about the inevitable herding of gun-owners into FEMA death camps and so forth.

38

While all the answers provided so far probably have some influence on people’s willingness to believe CTs, I suspect that you are falling for the same type of fallacious thinking that many CTers fall for, namely, thinking that there IS an answer, that there MUST be an answer to the question you’re asking.

I think this applies to people’s beliefs, too. Some of us make some sort of conscious effort to make sure that our beliefs correlate with reality, but many do not, and very few do so thoroughly and rigorously. Even for the most rational of us, correspondence with reality is only one of a large number of variables influencing what we believe, many of them random and uncontrollable.

False beliefs like CTs are not the exception to the rule; they ARE the rule. Human minds are FULL of false beliefs, and we correct them only when there is a clear, immediate benefit (often a social benefit) to doing so.

Remember Click and Clack’s Car Talk? Think about how many people called up with false beliefs about how cars work. Think about how many false beliefs exist in any organization about the best way to do something, just because no one has ever questioned it (and questioning it might be costly and wasteful compared with doing it the way we know). Think about how many assumptions we make about the the people around us without ever trying (or even being able) to verify them.

CTs are just the most interesting ones (which probably helps them spread) that attract the attention of the rest of us. No one notices or cares if someone thinks they have to warm their car up when its 30 degrees out, or that the cashier was rude because of the political button you were wearing, but we all notice and comment when someone thinks the moon landing was faked or the earth is flat.

In truth, all of those beliefs were arrived at through the same drunkards walk of mostly random speculation and lack of verification or falsification. Most of us haven’t verified that the earth is round, but we live in an industrial society where there is some practical and economic value to having correct facts about the shape of the earth. Most of us (outside of rocket scientists, airplane pilots, logistics coordinators, etc) aren’t affected by that directly, but it’s enough to shift the social pressure in our culture such that there is enormous social value in agreeing that the earth is round. But some of us are far enough removed from the small segment of society that actually benefits directly from having correct beliefs about the shape of the earth that false beliefs can fester and even form their own pockets of society in which false beliefs have social benefit. Not for any particular reason, but just because for those people there is little benefit to being right.

39

True. The question was about “most plausible,” and, almost by definition, that’s gonna exclude the really sexy ones, with black helicopters, Chinese armored brigades forming up in Mexico, Area 51 alien autopsies, and where mismatched socks go after laundering.

40

When it comes to money-making we don’t need a conspiracy to have common behavior.

Most folks are self-interested enough and most games are well-understood enough that it’s easy for the players to self-organize without anyone being in charge. There’s no “conspiracy” of fatcats trying to get the top marginal tax rate decreased. Just a bunch of separate individuals who, because they are similarly situated, have the same goal: less taxes for themselves.

Ditto the salesmen at Wells Fargo. The big boss says to the middle managers: you’ll get paid extra if your team sells more. 500 rocket scientists all come to the same conclusion: Make my team sell more.

Political conspiracy is a different animal. Because while all of us have experience handling money, most of us have no experience handling much power. So it’s easy to develop fantastical theories about reliable henchmen who keep perfect secrets, deep abilities to predict the future and plot accordingly, etc.

Reality, as one of my fellow union leaders used to say about our corporate management, is more like: “Those bozos can’t plan, let alone plot!”