Merged Psychology of Conspiracy Theoriests

Brainster said:
It's seductive, because you become an elite; one of the few who is in the know. I remember Luke Rudkowski claiming on Alex Jones that he was teaching his professors, not the other way around.
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I also think with the 16 to 22 male demo,CT's fit into the natural tendacy of that group to dislike authority. CT's are a great way to convince yourself that you are standing up to The Man.
 
This is the most recent thread about this topic, so I am resurrecting it instead of another from 2010 which I'll reference anyway, as it has a few links to research:
Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists


Now on to my actual issue:
The latest post at 911Blogger is this:
Scientific Study Reveals "Conspiracy Theorists" Are The Most Sane Of All
It merely re-blogs this: http://thespiritscience.net/2014/11...onspiracy-theorists-are-the-most-sane-of-all/
Which in turn links to an actual study:
Abstract
Full text

You'd think, judging from the blog titles, that the study has nice things to say about "Conspiracists", but far from it! Some quotes:

  • Last sentence of the Abstract: "These tendencies in persuasive communication can be understood as a reflection of an underlying conspiracist worldview in which the details of individual conspiracy theories are less important than a generalized rejection of official explanations." (i.o.w. "Why would I need evidence when I already have an ideology?")
  • From reception of existing literature: "Some researchers have gone further, proposing the existence of a conspiracist worldview ... Wood et al. (2012) [MJ Wood is also the lead author of the present study; Oystein] demonstrated that even beliefs in directly contradictory conspiracy theories were positively correlated with one another ... Dean...described most conspiracy theories as “bits and pieces without a plot… [that] fail to delineate any conspiracy at all. They simply counter conventional narratives with suspicions and allegations that, more often than not, resist coherent emplotment”"
  • Results: "Thirty-one percent of conspiracist comments contained information that constituted support for their own position, compared to 56% of conventionalist comments." (i.o.w. "I have no evidence, but I am right cuz I say so")
  • Discussion: "conspiracy advocates showed a tendency to spend much more time arguing against the official explanation of 9/11 than advocating an alternative ... There is much less of a focus on defending coherent explanations that can better account for the available evidence ... conspiracist comments often simply stated that 9/11 was an inside job as a sort of slogan without much to support it. ... 9/11 conspiracism is by and large a minority viewpoint in the West"
  • And at the end of the discussion, this back-breaker: "We argue that in fact, anomaly hunting, or a fixation on errant data, is a manifestation of the way conspiracism is structured as a worldview. In general, conspiracy belief is not based around specific theories of how events transpire, though these may exist as well. Instead, conspiracism is rooted in several higher-order beliefs such as an abiding mistrust of authority, the conviction that nothing is quite as it seems, and the belief that most of what we are told is a lie. Apparent anomalies in official accounts seem to support this, even if they do not point to a specific, well-defined alternative." (My emphasis).

On the other hand, "Conventionalist comments ... were significantly more hostile than conspiracist comments. ... this makes sense: conventionalists, rather than focusing on presenting novel information, instead attempt to enforce conformity to the majority viewpoint."


How coult the "Truth" bloggers misrepresent the study so badly??
 
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Someone should do a thread on "Psychology of the Everything's Just a Coincidence Theorists."

People are convicted of conspiracy all the time in this country. We have laws against conspiracy because we know from long experience that conspiracies happen.

According to the U.S. Government, two of our presidents were killed by conspiracies: Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

The government convicted and hung several people for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to kill Lincoln. The government adamantly insisted that Lincoln was killed by a conspiracy.

A select committee of the House of Representatives concluded that Kennedy was probably killed by a conspiracy. The chief counsel, his assistants, and the staff investigators made it clear in subsequent books that they were certain that a conspiracy killed Kennedy.

Also, there was a conspiracy to depose FDR. The plot was foiled before it could swing into action because one of the generals the plotters approached ratted on them. True to form, the government and the press denied there had been a plot, but subsequent research has refuted that cover-up.

http://www.ctka.net/pr399-fdr.html

Congressional Democrats posited a massive conspiracy involving Reagan, his national security staff, the CIA, and elements of the Pentagon in the Iran-Contra affair, and they noted that if Oliver North had shredded just a few more documents, the conspiracy may well have remained uncovered.

And on and on and on we could go.
 
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Gawdzilla said:
Originally Posted by turingtest View Post
Uh-huh. Only a CTist would claim that people who don't think everything is a conspiracy are saying nothing ever is.
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Another example of why it should be called "Conspiracy Mythology".
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It certainly does have that religion-like, nuance-free, "all or nothing" quality about it, doesn't it?

It was nice of taftfan, though, to pop into a thread about the psychology of CTists and give us such a sterling example of it.
 
carlitos said:
Some conspiracy theorists are successfully trolling the JREF forum for lulz.
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Damn. You beat me to it.
However I will borrow from the Pterodactyls and call it "ptrolling" just to follow the P structure.

...............

bobtaftfan said:
Congressional Democrats posited a massive conspiracy involving Reagan, his national security staff, the CIA, and elements of the Pentagon in the Iran-Contra affair, and they noted that if Oliver North had shredded just a few more documents, the conspiracy may well have remained uncovered.

And on and on and on we could go.
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That is why, on this board, some effort is made to separate general conspiracies from the results of conspiracy theorists. When talking about criminal conspiracies and government conspiracies, new facts are evaluated for their accuracy, quotes found on the internet are checked for their provenance, and the results of independent investigation groups are reviewed for errors by people familiar with the field. New information can lead to a different conclusion.

Conspiracy theorists adopt the opposite attitude - the conclusion cannot change so new data must be dismissed outright or must be woven into the conspiracy in such a way as to make the conspiracy grow. So if an investigation made by engineers points to a different conclusion, the CTers respond by saying, "They're in on it too." And when it is pointed out that the committee of engineers was endorsed by a reputable association of engineers, the CTers say "That engineering society must have been infiltrated by conspirators" or "The government is threatening the families of the association executives." Conspiracy theories grow by leaps and bounds when new evidence is collected.

Another common aspect of conspiracy theories (as opposed to criminal conspiracies akin to the ones you quoted) is that the perpetrators and are the same time brilliant master-minds who plan every detail for years and profoundly-stupid morons. For example, according to CTers, the Sandy Hook school shooting was an elaborate hoax in which dozens of actors portrayed teachers, students, parents and LEOs. But, after the entire event was filmed, it was sent out to the news agencies with instructions to hold the broadcast until the scheduled time - unfortunately for the conspirators, one news agency released the video before the event actually happened. Meticulous geniuses and bumbling fools.

A less common aspect of conspiracy theories is that the conspirators feel an overwhelming urge to plant clues about the event long before the event happens. So an offhand mention of something in a four-year-old Simpsons' episode or something in the background of one scene of a Batman movie becomes "evidence" of how far reaching this conspiracy is. J.W. Booth did conspire with others and did expect them to implement different parts of the conspiracy at the same time. But these assassins did not sit down and say, "We must immediately put clues to our identity, our motives, and the actual date of the event into poems and stories allegedly written by other people. Mwhahaha!"
 
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WSEN said:
Also, whenever I am confronted with conspiracy theories, my sense of certainty goes away, which makes me doubt what I know and I hate that.
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Don't we all ? But that's the life of a skeptic/rationalist. You kinda have to admit that you don't know as much as you'd like.

Conspiracy theorists, of course, know everything.
 
bobtaftfan said:
Congressional Democrats posited a massive conspiracy involving Reagan, his national security staff, the CIA, and elements of the Pentagon in the Iran-Contra affair, and they noted that if Oliver North had shredded just a few more documents, the conspiracy may well have remained uncovered.
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Indeed. How many people knew enough about Iran-Contra to expose the criminal nature of the conspiracy? 20? 30? 40?
After 9/11, how many people knew that they had wittingly or unwittingly participated in the murder of almost 4000 people on American soil. 400? 500? 600? And in the subsequent decade, not a single one came forward to provide evidence that it was an inside job.

A further distinction is that the people involved in Iran-Contra believed that they were saving American lives. The conspirators in a 9/11 plot eventually knew that they were killing innocent men, women, and children.

So a partial list of the difference between Iran-Contra and 9/11-inside-job includes:

I-C was trying to save American lives not destroy American lives.
I-C was at least an order of magnitude smaller.
I-C did not involve secret government technology.

and perhaps the most important:

I-C has tangible evidence plus admissions by some of the conspirators.

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ETA: conspiracy theories never really die. There is a measurable portion of U.S. voters who still insist that President Obama was not born in the U.S.
 
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Ladewig said:
That is why, on this board, some effort is made to separate general conspiracies from the results of conspiracy theorists.
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Indeed, because we, like the rest of the world, see the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories grow by leaps and bounds when new evidence is collected.
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Not only because the conclusion can never change, but because the neurological payoff is greater for a belief that a vast conspiracy has been "uncovered."

Meticulous geniuses and bumbling fools.
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Because somehow it has to be explained why the allegedly most powerful men in the world escape detection by all of humanity, yet manage to be found out by a small handful of people sitting in basements poring over the Internet.

A less common aspect of conspiracy theories is that the conspirators feel an overwhelming urge to plant clues...
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Because the purpose of conspiracism is not to discover the truth, but to show how clever the conspiracy theorist is. Therefore the neurological payoff of discovering a plethora of cleverly hidden "clues."
 
bobtaftfan said:
According to the U.S. Government, two of our presidents were killed by conspiracies: Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
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The U.S. Government knows that Lincoln and JFK were killed by conspiracies? Does the U.S. Government know that they know this?
 
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I see conspiracy theories as "information age religions". Every aspect of religion is in there: belief in a higher power (in form of all powerful conspirators), proselytizing (did I spell that right?), creation of meaning in ultimately meaningless events and of course the promise of deliverance once everybody is convinced and the conspiracy uncovered, leaving more "worthy" people to wield the conspirators powers.
 
JohnG said:
The U.S. Government knows that Lincoln and JFK were killed by conspiracies? Does the U.S. Government know that they know this?
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A conspiracy to kill Lincoln and other Union officials was fairly well established, and some conspirators were caught and tried. That is the conventional narrative.

The assertion that the U.S. government knows there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy is likely based on the findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which decided there was "probably" a conspiracy. This in turn was inferred solely from acoustic evidence suggesting other gunshots were fired -- evidence which was later relegated after the committee disbanded. Because HSCA's finding in this case was inferential and of a low order of confidence, there is no actual evidence of any conspiracy, nor were any other conspirators named, nor their methods or motives.

What the conspiracy theorists omit from the HSCA findings is their conclusion that Kennedy was killed solely by bullets fired solely by Lee Harvey Oswald from the place indicated.
 
My snarky comment was inspired mostly how some CTists latch onto "small c" conspiracies (as opposed to big, Alex Jones-worthy CONSPIRACIES) in the same way Cryptozoologists latch onto Coelacanths.
 
WSEN said:
Yo yo yo what up what up guys!
I'll see what you guys have to say!

First off, I am too dumb with the science to explain everything or to debunk things nor do I have the time nor the effort to do so. Also, whenever I am confronted with conspiracy theories, my sense of certainty goes away, which makes me doubt what I know and I hate that. I am totally fine with the uncertainties of life and doubt but when it comes to things like pseudoscience/conspiracy theories/mysticism and other weird ****, it makes me feel uncomfortable as the implications of the conspiracy theory, if true, could be immense and frightening. First off, I want to ask you guys this. What do you think of the psychology of these conspiracy theorists? First I saw them as unreliable, crazy crackpots but then the more I looked into them, since I was ignorant of the facts, I thought that they would be even more careful and meticulous of their fact checking than other people because, the conspiracy theory comes after the facts, after joining things together. I used to think that the facts that they would write are completely b/s and incompetent and or made up but more often than not, it was true what they are saying. Why would they have an incentive to lie? Their research is well done in my opinion. Of course, there are websites that promote nonsense and b/s such as collective-evolution and such but as you know, there is no motivation for conspiracy theorists to lie about their facts+they are very anal with their fact checking as they have a higher threshold of reputation to hold. But when I do look at the facts, it's surprising because I would also have came to such a conclusion of the conspiracy theorists. For example, the obvious conclusion that I came across to the Malaysian Airlines case was, Aliens. If you weigh up all the facts, of course, it would seem like a plausible conclusion. This is to illustrate a point. However, I guess you could make all sorts of theories with all the facts you have given to you and you may pick and choose which facts to use of things that happened that day (9/11) and link it to your theory.


(Why are people interested in boring conspiracy theories? Most popular ones are very boring, such as moon landing or JFK. I mean, even if true or false? So what? Who cares? Wouldn't something much more grandiose and macro such as UFOs and the NWO be much more entertaining and perplexing?)

I respect the work everyone is doing here, even if you guys may/may not be doing it purely for fun.

If people could further elaborate, that'd be great.
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This has come up before, such as in threads like [What Motivates Conspiracy Theorists?]

My proposal was the following taxonomy:

  • intrinsic
    • personality (there appears to be a 'consiprational' personality)
    • psychosis (intensity is transient, influenced by medication)
    • motivated (seeks out evidence to mitigate cognitive dissonance)
  • extrinsic
    • misinformed (evidence limited to specific sources)
    • deceptive (fully aware the conspiracy is untrue, but needs to stick to the narrative to achieve a goal)
 
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Craig4 said:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110504080730.htm

Here is an interesting study. CTers may be pretty much people who would do the things they accuse the government of. I assume accusing people of doing reprehensible things they would do is sort of transference. They confront their own moral demons by assuming a government would do what they want to but can't.
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I think that's psychological projectionWP, rather than transference.
 
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