![]() ![]() ![]() 2011), or a view of oneself as a victim of conspiracies in one’s own life (Butler et al. 2013), a fictitious conspiracy story (Swami et al. This pattern holds if the second belief is a real-life conspiracy theory (Swami and Furnham 2012), a general belief that conspiracies regulate human events (Steiger et al. Perhaps the most consistent finding is that people are relatively consistent in their conspiracy ideation if they believe one conspiracy theory, they tend to have other conspiratorial beliefs (e.g. As the literature has matured, our theoretical understanding of the origins of conspiracy ideation has begun to sharpen. Fortunately, the number of peer-reviewed empirical publications on the topic has increased rapidly in only the last five years. As such they invite careful study of why they easily take root in the human mind (Bost and Prunier 2013 Drinkwater et al. ![]() This omission is puzzling because conspiracy theories exist not on the fringe but in the mainstream, enough so to be regarded as cognitively normal. Until recently, there has been little behavioral research into the structure of conspiracy ideation, the people who adopt conspiratorial beliefs, and the circumstances under which they adopt them. One irony of this state of affairs is that the skeptical community has engaged the discussion of conspiracies while missing a significant arrow in its quiver: a scientific understanding of the psychological underpinnings of conspiracy ideation. And one well-known research finding is that conspiracy theories, like other deeply held beliefs, are strongly resistant to disconfirmation (McHoskey 1995 Nyhan and Reifler 2010 Sunstein and Vermeule 2009). 2011), especially New Age beliefs (Newheiser et al. To compound skeptics’ frustration, they tend to coexist with paranormal beliefs (Drinkwater et al. Conspiracy theories remain a staple of American popular culture (Kelley-Romano 2008) and are readily found in cultures across the globe (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009 Swami and Coles 2010). In the nearly four decades of this publication, belief in conspiracy theories (which I will term “conspiracy ideation”) shows no signs of abating, let alone disappearing. And fail we have, at least in educating the populace not to believe in conspiracy theories. This palpable frustration is an understandable reaction to failing in the skeptical mission. Much of our language, often in so many words, conveys the belief that conspiracy theories are the product of anti-intellectual and even psychologically disordered minds. It is of little wonder that the skeptical community’s attempts at education are leavened with hostility. Readers of this magazine are familiar with the common properties of conspiracy theories: their selective sifting of evidence (McHoskey 1995), their habit of growing more complicated and improbable over time to incorporate additional actors and events (Keeley 1999), their astonishing tendency to assimilate disconfirming evidence as further evidence in favor of the theory (Kramer and Gavrieli 2005), and their poisonous influence on discourse about public institutions and policies (Swami 2012). Separate analyses showed that the effect of lacking control significantly increased the perception of conspiracies in both the other-focused scenarios and the self-focused scenarios, demonstrating that illusory pattern perception increased regardless of whether the self was affected by the possible conspiracy.Where do conspiracy beliefs come from? Recent behavioral research suggests that they do not reflect pathology or lazy thinking but may instead come from normal, rational minds.Īs part of its educational mission, the Skeptical Inquirer regularly publishes critical investigations into conspiracy theories-claims that organizations of powerful, self-serving entities manipulate world events for their own benefit behind the scenes, away from the prying eyes of the public. The analyses revealed a main effect of lacking control ( F 1,82 = 9.96, P = 0.002) and no interaction between scenario focus and lacking control ( F 1,82 = 0.001, P = 0.98). To test this possible boundary condition, we altered the conspiracy scenarios used in experiment 6 to be from a third-person perspective (other-focused) and manipulated the lack of control by using the recall task from experiments 3 and 6 We submitted conspiratorial perceptions to a 2 (control: control, lacking control) by 2 (scenario focus: self, other) analysis of variance (ANOVA). Because the conspiracy and superstition scenarios used in the previous experiments were written from a first-person perspective, it may be that illusory pattern perception in social domains only occurs when the self is affected by or implicated in the pattern. ![]()
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