Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
nature.com
nature.com
Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning.
The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.
Some of the worlds greatest thinkers and innovators suffered social execution from their peers and were deeply depressed.
Rather, for these lonely people, conspiracy theories are how they project their own unmet emotional needs outward onto the perceived world around them -- as a coping strategy. They need to feel like they belong and are relevant in the world. This leads them to harbor resentment toward the rest of the world whom they perceive to be in league with an amorphous "them". The conspiracist's belief that he possesses "secret knowledge" about the world fulfills his needs for belonging and relevance by making him feel as if he is part of an in-group superior to the one he perceives to be alienating him[1].
But why do this through "secret knowledge"? Usually this is the conspiracy theorist's way of coping with some inexplicable world-changing event like 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the loss of their chosen political candidate in an election; they need to "know" why immediately, but cannot, and therefore move straight from the "thinking" stage (which requires holding uncertainty and multiple possible explanations) into the "knowing" stage (which is a kind of faith-based certainty about the world)[2][3].
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1. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000392.pd...
2. https://overcast.fm/+CuhudQ56w
3. https://psmag.com/social-justice/thinking-vs-knowing-when-fa...
While I'm at it I might just as well recommend David Miano's YouTube channel World of Antiquity, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU to his video "LIES told by Atlantis proponents" (accidentally had this tab open. Coincidendence!??!! I don't think so!).
BTW another red flag that occurs across all these Ancient and/or Alien Civilization fringe theories is that the argumentation of the believers disparages certain groups of people, mostly non-Europeans—"they could've never achieved this level of precision, they were much too primitive".
> move straight from the "thinking" stage [...] into the "knowing" stage
I've seen this time and again, people who talk, argue and act as if it's enough for a thought to cross the mind, and it's already almost taken for granted, accepted as fact.
So you might identify more crazy stuff in autistic people who don't align with the herd, but if you sum up all the crazy stuff the herds thinks that is roughly on a similar level to an average autistic person, just that its all aligned in a thought bubble so people don't see it unless you look outside your bubble.
To illustrate, do you think a devout democrat feels an average autistic person or a republican believe in more dumb stuff? And vice versa. Regardless which of those sides are right it still adds up to a ton of crazy shit for the average herd.
To minimize chances of it being used as ammunition in the future perhaps....that would be a pretty specialized motivation though.
"Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative."
"This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all."
"The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO."
"The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. "
Yep, all 4 i agree with. They all have similar foundations of complaint. That the quality of this study is nowhere near good. Therefore flaggable.
This isn't really a scientific study, it's a political statement. They went in looking for a conclusion and fit their data to it.
Maybe it's correct in its conclusions. Who knows. The "method" in "scientific method" does all the work. Otherwise all you get are "claims" which some may agree and others disagree with. You can't just make assertions without proof, without operational definitions, etc...
Not technically it doesn't: the method is a guideline, it is implemented by Humans, and even science has done extensive investigation into how unreliable Humans are.
I rejected the conspiracy theories and machismo-empowerment waves of 2016 and 2019, and found myself completely isolated. My conservative friends said "join us" and my liberal friends said I wasn't woke. Kinda thought that was a fever that would pass, but besides my closest friends and family, that restaging was surprisingly permanent.
I came into my own back in freshman year of college when I was convinced about 9/11 being fishy by "Loose Change." If true, that's outrageous! So I then kept looking into it and came to understand conspiracy theories and skepticism. It's so sad. All of my friends left and right are conspiracy theorists now, 20 years later. Anti-progress pendulum or something.
Everything novel in the world arises as a result of a recursively self-propagating memetic function, one that could be characterized in its earliest phases as a conspiracy: namely that one, two, and then a handful of people settle on a common notion about something universal that needs to change, whether it's for the good or the bad of everyone else, and when successful that idea fans out memetically to others so that it accumulates the necessary physical mass and force required to cause real change.
By the time the impact of this force hits people who have no connection or even awareness of the original initiating group, it feels entirely exogenous and a search for the conspirators, those who triggered the initiation of this wave, is an understandable response especially if the change is unwanted.
As a recent example, one of the cleverest bits of social engineering in the Bitcoin project was the possibly intentional disappearance of its pseudonymous founder, conveniently removing the ability of those so exogenously impacted to identify the origin of the change with any particular individual, greatly complicating accusations of conspiracy. A much earlier example, curiously similar in form, is the origin story of the traditional founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, to whom was even ascribed authorship of that movements own founding "white paper," called the Emerald Tablet.
>Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic
was maybe ironic. Listening to the people at the start who said it was likely a lab screw up rather than dismissing them as conspiracy theorists might have led to better efforts to contain it.
(for those interested here's the then head of the US CDC talking about being blocked from going over to help contain it and similar things https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119)
2. The first death from the virus was in January and it was less than 2 weeks later the first confirmed case was in the US. I think we forget how fast this thing went from novel pneumonia in Wuhan to potential world-wide pandemic. Maybe a head start on shutting down the borders would have delayed things a bit, but there would have been zero appetite to shut down everything in January 2020.
3. There absolutely were conspiracy theories that undermined efforts to contain Covid. E.G. the vaccine heralded end times and was the mark of the beast, or people would start dropping dead from the vaccine and it was part of the Great Reset etc. Or that the bans on gatherings were intended to stop religion, Covid didn't even really exist and it was part of a plan to institute a new world order, etc.
The range of arguments which may be called "conspiracy theories" is far and wide. And the truth about many theories only becomes clear after a lot of time.
What the author might have discovered instead is the tendency of lonely people to seek new belief systems starkly in contrast to the group they feel alienated from.
Loneliness creates the conditions for greater social media use because social media is a pseudo-satisfier for real human connections.
Meanwhile, short form social media like twitter & tiktok mimics a schizophrenia-like experience of hearing many unrelated voices in quick succession. Social media use is also habitual and addictive, meaning you're not entirely in control as you keep scrolling for hours on end.
It's not a stretch to imagine that one consequence of this situation is to start seeing connections where there are none, which at the extremes is the root of conspiracy thinking. Making connections is also a form of regaining control, and when played out on social media is a way to feel like you're connected with others and part of something of consequence. Of course outside of devices, this conspiratorial slide further isolates you from society, and so the self-reinforcing spiral continues.
It’s one deeper. It’s the anxiety of confronting the fact that nobody is in charge, there isn’t a secret cabal pulling the strings, it’s a bunch of competing, chaotic forces that you’re caught—somewhat meaninglessly—in the middle of.
Replacing that with a puppeteer, even a horrible one, is relieving. (The fact that inventing divine origins for natural phenomena—and cruel gods—is so well preserved across cultures extant and historic strikes at this being a need, not a comfort.)
Also, did anyone ever tell you that you write like https://youtu.be/0s4sIY3bYEE sounds?
We all live many apparent lives on the Internet. You’ve been on HN long enough, I’m sure, to have seen that. (My favourite was being accused of mind control. My least: someone decrying my Americanness, which as a naturalised immigrant was an unexpected sore spot.)
As an aside, it is somewhat fascinating seeing how online debate parameterises in this bipolar manner. My pet war is Ukraine, and I can remember polarising what I saw through a pro/anti lens.
> did anyone ever tell you that you write like [Mr. House] sounds?
No.
Suggested reading: The Texas GOP 2024 platform.[1]
Anything in it you want to highlight?
Not so popular, but more proper.
To me, this says that lonely people probably have more time to reflect on the world. For example more social people don't have time to keep track of, say, the financial and electronic tracking systems that have been developed over the last 20 or so years. They really are quite frightening considering what the Nazis achieved in 1940s tech. The next industrial genocide may well be unprecedented. How alert people are to that fact is probably correlated to Q3.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps...
Saving people a click:
1...many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about.
2...politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions.
3...government agencies closely monitor all citizens.
4...events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities.
5...there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions.
You can grep for "The 38 items administered in this study [dubbed the Conspir-acy Theory Questionnaire (CTQ) by Darwin et al., 2011] con-tained 33 items measuring the belief in specific conspiracy theoriesand five items assessing participants’ general tendency to believe inconspiracies or their conspiracy mentality. We refer to these latterfive items as the CMQ (see Appendix for complete item wording)." in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps... to see the context of what I'm going off.
Yes. What I said was accurate.
Everyone here seems to be missing the 'essence' of the study and article. Do these conspiracy theorists influence global pandemic policy? Do flat earther conspiracy theorist affect global climate change policy?
That's what the article and the 'study' is ultimately implying. That lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers are controlling global policy.
Some think reptilians are controlling the world. Nature and these 'researchers' think that lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world.
Pretending all conspiracy theorists are just "lonely" and harmless people who have no real effect on the world is simply naive.
The article and the study is.
> But it is obvious that some conspiracy theories such as replacement theory, the trans "groomer" panic and COVID conspiracy theories have become mainstream within certain political demographics.
And certain conspiracy theories like 'lonely conspiracy theorists in living their mom's basements are secretlly controlling the world' have become mainstream within certain politcal demographics.
That's my point. Neither side are 'lonely conspiracy theorists'. Both sides are part of major political parties.
> Pretending all conspiracy theorists are just "lonely" and harmless people who have no real effect on the world is simply naive.
Yes. So stop being so naive. Most of these conspiracy theories on all sides are being pushed by major media outlets like nature and major political parties.
Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is flat. The scientific process, to contrast, would drive you to try and falsify your theory via experimentation, and the flat earth theory is so easily falsifiable.
If you look at vaccines, or climates, or 9/11, or those guys that believe nobody was killed in some massacre, they all use the same sort of logic (or shall we say non-logic). Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.
It's not impossible to have conspiracies in the real world. But I'd say those are rare. The more people are involved the harder it is to keep a secret. There are also situations where the evidence isn't necessarily pointing overwhelmingly one way or another, and there is science that later gets refined or even overturned as more data/knowledge is acquired. Science isn't necessarily absolute truth, it's just the model that best explains the observable phenomena.
Yeah but you're basically describing ideologues here. This is how the vast majority of political activists approach the world where, last time I checked, parties even pretending to do things by scientific consensus are rare and they tend to not, in reality, refer to much science.
> If you look at vaccines ... they don't trust experts or scientists.
My mother just caught COVID last week. I was told - by people confidently claiming to speak for experts - that this wouldn't happen after she and the rest of the population were vaccinated because the spread would cease. I personally doubt the experts actually said that because they tend to be accurate in their field of expertise but good luck with that perspective around the time of the vaccine mandates.
I suspect even more than lack of trust that the issue is experts are so rare in politics that people don't recognise them when they do turn up. There are a lot of unexperts playing pretend on such topics and expert opinions are subject to misrepresentation.
I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some talk about herd immunity and what that means.
Another problem is that experts aren't always the greatest communicators and the science is hard to communicate.
Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.
I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.
Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.
That is a bold claim you might want to walk away from. 3 posts ago you were holding up vaccine conspiracy theorists as people who, and I quote, "Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.".
Now a few posts later you're suggesting that That the public health officials aren't experts in public health and that their policies were not based on settled science.
When you are insulting a large group of people who's position was, basically, "we don't think public health officials are doing a good job, we aren't satisfied with the evidence you're showing us and we want freedom to make our own decisions" it is probably a mistake to suggest that the public health officials were doing a bad job, often not experts and caught lying with the purpose of stopping people acting in their own best interests. It makes the conspiracy-minded theorists seem pretty reasonable.
Of course in the pandemic, this is the point where people who were claiming to be following science bought up the fact that the vaccine was certain to stop transmission of COVID and it was basically advocating in favour of murder to say otherwise. Turns out that was not the case so they've had to stop doing that.
Their policies might have been based on "settled science" (e.g. research on respiratory diseases from the 70's) but I think that wasn't really the appropriate way to handle things as the pandemic developed. It might have been appropriate for day 1 but officials IMO lacked the ability to adapt to the changing reality.
The actual policies varied a lot between countries which is why I qualified my statement.
At the end of the day, you can be critical without being conspiratorial. I'm open to new information that supports the idea that the way health officials handled the pandemic was optimal but given that different jurisdiction gave conflicting advice so that seems counter evidence.
There are many specific examples that come to mind. If we can't critique the response then there's not going to be any learning. Experts and science are not perfect.
Again, point taken and maybe I'm a bit too strong, but that's what I'm trying to get at.
EDIT: i.e. I've no issue with people that are being critical after examining the evidence. These people are not conspiracy theorists and that process is a healthy part of making progress in science and policy. That's not the same thing as people saying Bill Gates put 4G chips in the vaccines or some other mysterious behind the scenes forces or conspiracies.
The problem is assuming that everything is a conspiracy just as much as nothing is a conspiracy.
What? Which ones? Undermined how?
> and were used in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, raid on the Capitol.
I thought a major political party was involved. Not 'conspiracy theorists'.
> They lie at the core of political and social polarization
Really? Conspiracy theorists lie at the core of political and social polarization?
> fueling vaccine skepticism, climate change skepticism
Well then address the skepticism and move on. What's the issue here?
> and anti-science movements such as the flat earthers
Flat earthers? Are we really suppose to pretend flat earthers have taken control over?
No specifics given. It's almost like this study and article was created solely for political purposes.
What's the point of this 'study' and article? Don't question authority?
What's a bigger conspiracy theory than 'lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers influence global pandemic contaiment efforts'?
Does anyone seriously believe lonely conspiracy theorists influence anything? That's a sillier conspiracy than reptilian aliens influencing world affairs.
There's a long list of conspiracy theories about the vaccines. There are chips in there to track people, they're actually sterilizing people for population control, it's the mark of the beast, it's made with aborted fetuses, etc. This impacted vaccination rates. I can't think of any that would have actually increased rates, maybe something about the rich hoarding the vaccines, but that's a stretch.
Also, they measured conspiracy mindset with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which has general questions like "I think there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions".
They found that lonely teens, that then got lonelier overtime, had a higher rate of a conspiracy mentality in their 40s. It's hardly surprising but they also controlled for depression and anxiety, and found that loneliness still had a positive correlation with the mentality. I found that part interesting.