High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability | Hacker News Reader

High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

17 pointslnyan20 comments

There is a difference between conspiracy theories and conspiracy practices.

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

I forget where I heard this recently, but iirc there was a study that showed that when someone believes in a conspiracy theory, and you present them evidence that it's false, their natural reaction is actually to double down on the belief rather than question it.

Yes, and that's why the adage "sunlight is the best disinfectant" when applied to an absolutist free speech argument is BS. For every one person you manage to free of their delusions, the other 99 just strengthen their resolve.

Or in other words, you can't deprogram someone from a cult from within the cult.

This is the classic case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

Specifically argumentation related critical thinking ability … aka the ability to form and evaluate internally consistent arguments in favor of or against an idea.

This is a very important “of course”.

Conspiracy theories are reliant on bad argumentation…therefore people who struggle in that area are less inclined to identify the flaws in the theories.

What about people who ace standardized tests, but are open to "conspiracy theories"? Just outliers? I've seen a couple.

Maybe these people are good at standardized tests, but not good at critical thinking?

> "critical thinking ability—measured by an open-ended test emphasizing several areas of critical thinking ability in the context of argumentation"

This sounds similar to standardized tests like the LSAT

The LSAT is a very unusual test compared to all other standardized tests, in that it requires very little knowledge and is basically an IQ test.

What kinds of standardized tests are you talking about?

There's a whole plethora of them, ranging in difficulty, appropriate age and the amount of critical thinking they measure.

In fact any test given to a group of people can be considered a standardized test. But very few of them measure any sort of critical thinking, or even reading comprehension.

Like the SAT, GMAT, LSAT

I realize my comment is a tangent, but I find conspiracy theories incredibly enjoyable. I don't even mean that in a condescending way - I genuinely think they're fun to research. This might be my favorite.

https://www.audubon.org/news/are-birds-actually-government-i...

I used to find conspiracy theories enjoyable. I used to listen to the Art Bell show on the radio, and stories about aliens and the Illuminati all the time. But now that conspiracy theory has become so mainstream that my life is actually affected by the collective will of delusional pinheads who believe that vaccines are a New World Order plot to harvest their adrenochrome, Jewish space lasers control the weather and Chinese communists stole the election for Joe Biden, they just aren't fun anymore.

i may have to pick up some of their apparel

That’s what THEY want you to think!

So is obedience, Sheeples! Mä-ä-ä-äh...

Is there a non-paywalled version somewhere?

Before conspiracy theory culture went mainstream via the last presidential administration, there were the 9/11 truthers, led by orgs like AE911Truth. These orgs do real damage to peoples' lives, such as convincing surviving family of 9/11 victims that the US govt planned the attacks and covered up a conspiracy to bring down WTC7.

It takes slightly more than a casual interest to draw the correct conclusion that WTC7 fell from uncontrolled office fires. In this case, reputable scientists and engineers at NIST did the analysis work for us.

One wouldn't be faulted for casually examining a collapse video of WTC7 and preliminarily concluding that the tower fell from some type of controlled demolition. Of course, further examination of the video negates this conclusion.

WTC7's collapse could be a project for a critical thinking skills class for high school students.

Many did or would accept the collapse of the towers, but WTC7 people could never be convinced. That was maddening to debate, because there was no there there of a conspiracy. Why create a false flag taking down the towers to start a war for oil to cover up taking down WTC7? Never got even a crazy answer the that question. Just blank stares.

> Never got even a crazy answer the that question. Just blank stares.

Because it never occurred to them, I suspect. It would only have occurred to them if they were checking the conspiracy hypothesis with reality, trying to poke holes in the claim. That's the very opposite of a conspiracy theorist who already has the conclusion and is now attempting to back-justify it.

We all have our cognitive dissonances, but perhaps the hallmark of "conspiracy theory" thought is that it persists despite whatever degree of dissonance it has with the rest of reality (even reality as acknowledged by the believer). Probably because it never gets subjected to such "integration testing" and so exists in its own self-contained universe, free of all the other implied consequences, if it were true. Pointing out such inconsistencies won't do any good. Because such inconsistencies are never seen as actual flaws in their hypothesis (which of course, is correct). At best, you simply don't understand and your argument is seen as a giant fallacy. At worst, well... you're probably in on it, anyway.

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