The psychology of conspiracy thinkers appears complex.
On the surface, it might seem simple. More and more social
psychology research ties acceptance of conspiracy thinking to perceived loss of
control over life.
But that itself can’t be the sum of it. Many people who lose
a greater amount of control over life than they previously had do not buy into
conspiracy thinking. For example, 95 percent of people who have strokes (very
conservative estimate, surely more like 99.5 percent) don’t claim their stroke
(if they even use that word) was caused by chemtrails.
Per the medieval Western Church pondering the mystery of
salvation, “Cur alii, non alii”?
So, the psychology is more complex than “loss of control.”
But, acceptance of conspiracy theories is also about more
than psychology. Trying to reduce the likelihood of acceptance of conspiracy
theories to loss of control is like Orwell’s tale from India about the blind
men describing an elephant. Even outside of that, limiting the discussion to
psychology would be like men with severe astigmatism trying to describe it or
something.
Movement skeptics or Skeptics™ folks might say that
conspiracy thinking is anti-scientific. Well, partially true with anti-science
conspiracy theories such as the chemtrails above or faked moon landings, but
not even fully true there. And science, other than social sciences, isn’t
involved at all with politics or history conspiracy theories.
But philosophy is.
Logic, basically classic informal logic and the classical
logical fallacies, are obviously in play, even if Massimo Pigliucci says we
should stop calling people on fallacies, even when they’re committing what
would be considered classical fallacies by any disinterested observer.
But, other areas of philosophy are involved, too. One is
epistemology. Another is philosophy of language, specifically on agreeing on
language used to describe and to “frame” an event. And, in some cases, it and
epistemology may overlap here.
Then there’s the role of the Internet.
The ramp-up of misinformation in general, and conspiracy
thinking in particular, has been fueled by the Net in general and social media
in particular.
That's even more the case, I think, with disinformation, which is deliberate,
per the distinctions the author has at the link. The question is, is this
something desired by conspiracy theory promoters? Are a higher percentage of
them, than of the general public, anarchists in some way? If so, which came
first, believing conspiracy theories or anarchist tendencies?
And, is conspiracy thinking, or at least promotion of it, an
addictive behavior inside the addictive behavior of being online in general and
being online with devices and/or social media in particular? (There's
ironies here. I'm including this in a blog post that could be just for
"the machine," and the author wrote this piece which could also just
be for "the machine.")
Beyond THAT, though, those theories still get no closer to
the cur alii, non alii than we have been so far.
One author at Psychology Today postulates a second reason. (I’m taking understanding and certainly as ultimately a subset of control and
thus nut a second reason.)
And that is the positive self-image angle.
David Ludden doesn’t use the word, but … I just thought of
it.
Conspiracy theorists are Gnostics. They believe they have
secret, esoteric knowledge. And that does help their self image.
Beyond that, the rise of the social media has made it much
easier for people to self-sort. For instance, there’s several sub-conspiracy
theories within the JFK assassination conspiracy theory world, as in, LBJ did
it, or the Mob did it, or Castro did it, or the “deep state” did it, etc.
Facebook groups, and probably even more, sub-Reddits, are among leading avenues
for allowing these to grow.
Not to underestimate the power of the spoken word, and the
ease of making videos now, YouTube is probably No. 3. Especially now that it’s
becoming easy to fake videos.
Now, the parallelism with Gnosticism may not seem complete.
For example, where is the difference between “adepts” and “learners” or “auditors”?
Well, with things like “closed” or “secret” Facebook groups,
sub-Reddits, it’s right there. You may have to have demonstrated a certain
amount of knowledge on “open” Facebook, Twitter, Reddit larger groups, etc.,
before you gain admission to one of these groups. And, since it’s a group run
by a leader, you’re always at danger of expulsion.
The psycho-history angle also has parallels.
This, then, actually ties back to real live Gnosticism.
Gnosticism arose in the late Hellenistic era, but took off when? Under the
Roman Empire, certainly the most powerful nation state west of China both in
external power and in internal control of its citizenry before modern times.
And, east of its borderlands, the Parthians semi-organized, and then the
Sassanids more organized, an empire of sorts of their own An America where,
ostensibly democratic fronts, people worry about the big brother of big
government, big business or both, is very real.
The loss of control ties with an attempt to regain control, even if the area of control has to be massively circumscribed.
That said, to the degree we do take knowledge and certainty
itself as a third issue, that links back to philosophy, namely, epistemology.
That’s more insight, but still not total insight on the cur
alii, non alii.
And Undark seems to have another piece of the puzzle, from
neuroscience.
People who understand much about our hominid ancestors know
that they are believed to have had a penchant for two things: agency imputation
and pattern detection. It’s also believed that the most evolutionarily
successful hominids were those that overdid it to some degree, because the
price of a false positive was far less than that of a false negative.
According to two researchers, one Dutch, one American,
Elizabeth Preston says that conspiracy theorists are likely to have a high
level of false positives on pattern detection. The Dutch researcher, with a
Dutch colleague, adds that many conspiracy theorists may also imbibe in another
early hominid issue: xenophobia toward outgroups. Given that issues like that
are how more conservative people allegedly differ from more liberal people, per
the Big Five personality scale (I think the claims are overblown), this could
be seen as a partial additional explainer of some politically conservative
conspiracy thinking.
Finally, per David Hume reminding us that the reason need
always follow the passions, conspiracy theories are always emotionally driven. That's even more the case than with traditional motivated reasoning.
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