The more we learn about conspiracies and the individuals who create and spread them, the better positioned we are to thwart them
A Qanon believer speaks to a crowd of President Donald Trump supporters outside of the Maricopa County Recorder's Office in Phoenix, Az., on Nov. 5, 2020.Conspiracy theories describe what adherents believe to be secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups to control, impoverish or harm hard-working people. Man y conspiracy theorists share the conviction that information is being concealed from them by “elites” or “the deep state.
The profusion of sophisticated fake news websites and the sheer number of credulous user posts dealing with a particular conspiracy topic reinforces the impression that a credible claim is being made. As Robert Caldini wrote in his excellent book“we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct.”
Last year, researchers at Emory University reviewed 170 studies that involved 160,000 participants dealing with the psychology of conspiracy believers. Julia Aspernas at in Linkoping University in Sweden investigated the relationship between susceptibility to misleading information and the conviction that truth is relative. The results show that those who believe that the truth is subjective are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and to hold on to their beliefs even when faced with facts that contradict them. They also have a greater tendency to find profound messages in nonsense sentences.
In times of economic uncertainty, artificial intelligence, climate change, an influx of refugees in Western countries – all of these events create uncertainty in the sense that the world one grew up in and knows is changing. In this atmosphere people’s fears rise and they tend to revert to a bunker mentality, characterized by a fear of the “others.”
A leader who knows how to exploit these fears can get his or her followers to drink the KoolAid at his or her command.
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