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Elements of Conspiracy Theories (CT)

1) A claim that hasn't proven to be true

2) Nothing is at appears

3) Everything is intentional

4) Everything is connected

5) World is divided into good people and evil conspirators

6) The theory can't be disproven

Demographic Indicators of CT

-Best predictor is age

-Young people more likely to believe in CT

-Women and men equally likely

-Income not a predictor

Historical Examples of CT

-9/11 (al-Qaeda or US gov't)

-Sandy Hook (gunman or Obama)

-Operation Northwoods (Real US military attacks to blame Cuba. Used as proof gov't can stage events)

-Japanese Internment Camps (Japanese-Americans thought to be plotting against US. No evidence of conspiracy was said to be proof of conspiracy)

Modern Examples of CT

January 6th Capitol Attack (right-wing terrorists or deep state, unelected officials encouraged unrest)

Modern Illuminati Conspiracy (Secret elite group manipulates world events to create a New World Order. Everything (wars, elections, etc.) is orchestrated by the group

Why CT are psychologically appealing/psychological mechanisms

1) Humans view behavior thru moral categories

2) Moral clarity feels good

3) Evil motives explain confusing events

4) Once evil assumed, disbelief is a serious betrayal

5) Moral division protects group identity

6) It all creates emotional certainty, which always trumps factual certainty

Elements of Paranormal Claims

1) Involve events that don't fit ordinary explanations

-Mothman, Phoenix lights

2) Subjective experiences become authoritative (absolute)

-Near death experiences

3) Attribute causes to non-ordinary elements/forces

-Bell witch, poltergeists

4) Connect disparate events into a single narrative

5) Fill existential and explanatory gaps

Supernatural vs. Paranormal

Supernatural

-Refers to explicitly beyond nature

-Something divine/metaphysical

-Ex: Ghosts, Demons

Paranormal

-Refers to things that theoretically have a natural explanation we just know yet

-Ex: Aliens, Loch Ness Monster

Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

Includes:

1) Telepathy: mind to mind communication

2) Clairvoyance: knowing about distant events the regular senses don't experience

3) Precognition: knowing the future

4) Psychokinesis: moving things w/ mind

J.B. Rhine Studies

1930s Duke researcher claimed ESP success, media hyped it, but scientists said experiment lacked controls and replication

Ganzfeld Studies

1970s tried to correct J.B.Rhine studies. People had all senses suppressed and tried to guess thoughts of person in another room. Small positive effect, problems like selective reporting and true believers conducting the study

Why replication and scientific support are weak for ESP

-People believe it because coincidences feel personal

Study Outcomes: selective reporting, lack controls, true believers conducting

Most significant issue w/ all ESP research --> yet to be a positive finding of replication

Therapeutic Touch (Alternative Health)

Practitioners claim they can sense a patient's energy field with their hands, diagnose disturbances in energy caused by illness/injury, and restore balance/recovery by "massaging" the energy field without touching the body

Why Therapeutic Touch (and Alternative health) is Appealing

1) Feels natural, holistic, and empowering

2) Works through placebo, attention, and expectation

3) Ties into many biases (confirmation bias/motivated reasoning)

Evidence Against Therapeutic Touch

Emily Rosa's Study: A 9 year old tested TT by seeing if practitioners could sense which hand she hovered over; they couldn't. Failed results were published in a medical journal

How Professional identity Sustains Belief (Therapeutic Touch)

-TT has been taught in more than 100 nursing schools in the US

-Nurses can get continuing education units for TT classes

-Critiques of practices framed as attacks on nursing autonomy

-Once identity (nursing identity) gets involved, facts don't matter

How Identity and Ideology Distort Reasoning About History

1) Story that Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery

-Against documented evidence

-Rewritten story protects peoples identities, and when truth threatens identity, identity wins

2) 1619 Project

-Series of essays in the NYT

-Claimed that 1619 is true founding of US and Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery

-No documentary evidence

Monocausal Explanations

-Tendency to pick one preferred explanation and then filter all facts through it

How Identity and Ideology Distort Reasoning About Race

Essentialism

-belief that racial groups are defined by inherent, biological, & immutable traits that determine identity, behaviors, abilities

Human Genome Project

-Found no genetic markets for race

-It's impossible for there to be biological race differences in things like athleticism bc race isn't a biological category

Essentialism Errors Proved Wrong

-Sherpas: Live in high altitudes and have genetic advantages, results from 1000s of years in 1 environment

-Jamaican Sprinters: Cultural pipeline

-Dutch Speed Skates: National tradition, world class facilities

People who see race differences in athletic ability confuse genetics w/ geography

How Identity and Ideology Distort Reasoning About Sex

-Both sides show how identity-driven beliefs override evidence: one sides denies biology; the other denies gender identity

-People cling to both extremes because they're comforting

- If sex alone explains, the world is simple/predictable

-If identity explains everything, the world can be molded to our interests

Harms of denying that sex is overwhelmingly binary

1) Medicine needs sex-specific data

2) Screening depends on biological reality

3) Public health policy requires sex-specific statistics

4) Denial undermines credibility

If sex is biological, then why does gender identity sometimes diverge from it?

1) Identity is a mental map of self

2) Gender identity has biological roots

3) Gender variance is a cultural universal

4) Psychological consistency

Prooijen and Douglas

Ppl did a questionnaire on their tendency for CT. Those who scored high in CT were shown dozens black-and white dot images and were twice as likely to "see" random patterns that weren't there

People experience a "thrill" seeing a pattern no one else sees

Illusory Pattern perception

Finding meaningful patterns in unrelated stimuli

Leman and Cinnirella

Created pairs of news-story pairs, had ppl fill out a CT scale, & asked them how likely it was that the pairs were causally connected

Ex: "Senator Dies of Stroke"

"He was supposed to testify against a big corporation soon"

The higher the conspiracy score, the higher the ratings of connection

Coincidence Over-Attribution

Tendency to put causal attributions on chance occurrences

Whitson and Galinsky

Participants primed w/ power or powerlessness by writing about times they did or didn't have control

People primed to feel powerless saw more patterns in ambiguous images and agreed w/ more CT

When personal controls goes away, people create imaginary control

Wood, Douglas, and Sutton

People who believed one explanation for Diana's death (assassinated by British Intelligence) were more likely to believe a different explanation too (she faked her death) -- even though both can't be true

This pattern repeated for events like 9/11

What ties them all is mistrust of the official story, that's why fact checking doesn't change minds

Ridolfo, Baxter, and Lucas

Participants told 1 of 2 versions of 2 things about ESP

-Either 25% or 90% of ppl believe in it

-Science either rejects or accepts it

Popularity mattered most--ppl believed ESP when others did

When ESP was described as unpopular, science rejecting it made ppl more likely to believe-- showing an anti-establishment reflect

Traits that Characterize Believers

1) Low interpersonal trust

2) Low agreeableness

3) High openness to experience

4) Need for uniqueness

5) Collective narcissism

6) Magical thinking

The Conspiracy Echo Chamber and Reinforcement Loop

Every major social media platform is built on an algorithm that learns what keeps you scrolling

Bots start neutral, then follow one conspiracy post and end up inundated w/ conspiracies

Textbook: Personalized feeds show only one worldview and dissenting voices are labeled "trolls:

How group belonging reinforces false beliefs/echo chambers

We tend to think of conspiracy theorists as loners, but most report feeling a sense of community when they find others who get it

Ppl don't drop claims that are clearly wrong bc the data doesn't just threaten their opinion, it threatens their social safety net

How memes reinforces false beliefs/echo chambers

They spread bc they reward participation

Each one is like a mini-replication of that Ridolfo et al. paper (popularity matters)

As memes rack up thousands of lines, people think they must be true

Emotional Engineering of Digital Spaces

Content that triggers anger, fear, or moral outrage travels farther

And conspiracy material is engineered to hit all three of those emotions

Sociology Parallels between Cults and Internet Conspiracy Communities

-Isolation of information

-Charismatic authority

-Us vs. Them morality

Why do CT persist even after they're debunked

Our minds discount corrections (motivated reasoning & confirmation bias)

Illusory Truth Effect

-Ppl tend to believe statements are true just by virtue of hearing them over & over

Source Amnesia

-Ppl often remember content of a claim but not the source

Backfire effect

-When corrections trigger defensive reasoning, they usually lend to beliefs becoming even stronger

Networks, Community, and Misinformation

False beliefs spread through social networks

Epistemic Islands: separate worlds of belief that rarely talk to each other

Trust is the glue & the trap of knowledge. When we trust people, we essentially outsource our skepticism

In networks of paranormal & especially CT, facts have no entry point. And the deeper a beliefs social roots, the less effective counter info becomes

Major Course Takeaways

1) Our brains make conspiracy & paranormal thinking easy & evidence-based thinking hard

2) Beliefs are also about identity, status, & belonging. No one's minds are changed if that social layer is ignored

3) Our information environment is basically designed to feed our cognitive biases & our social needs

4) Being a good skeptic is an ongoing practice, not a personality trait. It's a set of habits people have to cultivate

The Great Replacement Theory

Claims that powerful elites are intentionally trying to replace one cultural group w/ immigrants and minorities

Key word: intentional

It isn't really about immigration-- it's about protecting identity and status

Identity-Protective Cognition

When facts threaten our sense of who we are, we don't adjust our identity--we adjust the facts

Relative Status Loss

When dominant groups lose exclusivity, they interpret it as discrimination against them

Top-Down (Authoritarian) Systems

Conspiracy narratives are used by gov'ts to control ppl

1) They protect the state by inventing enemies

2) They convert dissatisfaction into disobedience

3) Critics can then be ignored, arrested, or censored

Ex: North Korea, Germany in WW2

Bottom-Up (Democratic) Systems

CT usually embraced by powerless, not powerful

1) In democracies like US, ppl who feel powerless are most likely to believe in CT

2) CT increases if ppl feel ignored, economically threatened, or socially marginalized

Why elite use of conspiracy narratives is dangerous

1) When Ct comes from ppl w/o power, result is mostly noise

2) Accountability disappears bc if failures are aways result of sabotage.hidden enemies, leaders never admit mistakes

3) Institutions & institutional actors (courts, scientists, journalists, election officials) become untrustworthy

4) Violence becomes easier to justify