What Is a Conspiracy Theory And Why Do They Tend To Proliferate? Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?
According to the University of Kent psychologists Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas, and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” a conspiracy theory is “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal” that is “notoriously resistant to falsification,” and that has ‘new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of disconfirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy suggests that many such plots are possible.” With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.” For example, the authors of this study report that “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana’s death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory, that the moon landing was a hoax, and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another. For example, the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. They call this process global coherence: “Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.” Thus, “conspiracy advocates’ distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contractions between them.”
Some conspiracy theories are true, some false. How can one tell the difference? The more the conspiracy theory manifests the following characteristics, the less likely it is to be true. Here are:
The Top 10 Ways To Test Conspiracies
1.Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy, or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely false.
2.The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. Most of the time in most circumstances, people are not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
3.The conspiracy is complex and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
4.The conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets.
5. The conspiracy encompasses some grandiose ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, it’s probably false.
6.The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger events that have much lower probabilities of being true.
7. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous and sinister meanings to what are most likely random and insignificant events.
8.The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
9.The theorist is extremely and indiscriminately suspicious of any and all government agencies or private organizations.
10. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence for his theory and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence.
