Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories | Hacker News Reader

Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

nytimes.com

36 pointsjpatokal53 comments

FTA: "Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at the University of California, Davis, says that conspiracy theories wouldn’t exist in a world in which real conspiracies don’t exist. And those conspiracies — Watergate or the Iran-contra Affair — often involve manipulating and circumventing the democratic process."

So the answer to the question "Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories" is "because sometimes they are true."

FTA: "if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. "

FTA: "“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England."

Note how we suddenly switched from discussing people who think a theory is "plausible" to "belief". There are certainly nutjobs who swallow implausible theories whole. These people are not rational. Those who commit the crime of conspiracy would love to tar those rational people who find such theories plausible with the same brush.

One thing I find interesting about many conspiracy theories is that they are effectively true, even when the conspiracy is false. Many seem to involve not a group of cohorts acting in agreement but a group of influential people with aligned interest acting independently.

"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin

That's exactly right. You don't need a conspiracy when interests align. Especially when the interested parties have a lot of power.

This is more or less Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Hegemony, distinct from coercion, is the production of "spontaneous consent" for the policies of the "ruling class" through the means of civil society, intellectuals, and culture. By shaping how people perceive their interests, there's no need to coerce behaviors or acceptance of policies.

> But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another

Believing a thing is plausible doesn't necessarily mean believing it is actually true, ergo there's no contradiction in believing many contradictory things are "plausible" until the question is properly settled.

I always see this kind of shit from mainstream propaganda trying to ram home the party line and paint dissent as somewhere between crazy and eccentric, it's getting really old.

This. The more amazing thing is how many people believe that any content published in the NYT/MSM is largely true and unbiased.

Ah, just on time... Another, "If you don't think like we do, you're insane" article from the greatest evidence of modern journalistic decline we have before us, The New York Times.

Begin the shift towards painting opponents of PRISM as conspiracy theorists. Oh, and I read in the NYTimes that conspiracy theorists are really suffering from personality disorders. It's in the DSM6!

You actually buy into the conspiracy theory that the government is in bed with corporations and storing and combing through tons of our own data that we trust with these companies? Hahahahah! You're a real conspiracy theorist believer!

Isn't NYT a quasi-PR-department of US government? See Judith Miller. Expect more damage control articles from NYT on the current fiasco.

Yes, precisely. But that's a conspiracy theory so you must have a personality disorder :(

I wrote my undergrad thesis on conspiracy theories (in Turkish politics)[1], but it includes a section reviewing academic literature on conspiracy theories and a lot of resources in the bibliography.

Karl Popper wrote briefly about conspiracy theories in "Open Society and its Enemies."[2] It was part of a larger argument about emergent vs. planned orders, but I think it's a very good point: many conspiracy theories arise "from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society – especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike – is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups." It's simply hard for us to accept that improbable, harmful events are the result of lots of unplanned actions rather than one malevolent design.

[1]: http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/14... [2]: http://ovo127.com/2011/01/24/sir-karl-popper-the-conspiracy-...

It's an extension of the Animistic Fallacy[1].

Flash of lightning, rumbling thunder: Zeus threw a thunderbolt. Same thing scaled up -- we look for one or a few humans causing events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animistic_fallacy

To me it seems like this can also cut the other way, with some people assigning any positive results to the efforts of powerful people with whom they agree.

An example is the belief that economic growth results directly from government policy and actions. This is true to some extent, in that the government must enforce fair dealing. But we learned in the 20th century that economies that are too centrally directed will fall behind those that allow emergent behavior in an open marketplace.

"Confirmation bias - the tendency to pay more attention to evidence that supports what you already believe - is a well-documented and common human failing."

... Search bubbling doesn't help.

"Not only does more exposure to these alternative narratives help engender belief in conspiracies, he says, but the Internet's tendency toward tribalism helps reinforce misguided beliefs."

... In other words, just read the New York Times (or BoingBoing, since it's Maggie Koerth-Baker) and ignore everything else.

Edit: Oh, and the Alex Jones reference at the end is a nice ad hominem too - as long as we're counting logical fallacies - since nothing he has ever cited could possibly be accurate because: blow-hard, and conspiracy. Also: creationism, because: complicated!

Did you just try to discredit an article about conspiracy theories by alleging that the article is in fact part of another conspiracy theory? I think you just proved the article's point.

Self-promotion is hardly a conspiracy (unless you can have a conspiracy of one, from a simple conflict of interest... namely in the form of: "alternative narratives are bad," says the author, quoting on behalf of a well-established narrative).

"Tribalism" is not incorrect though. You mention Bradley Manning in hacktivist circles and they'll nearly unanimously tell you that man is a hero who didn't do anything wrong at all.

And then Snowden comes in and goes out of his way to mention in his interview that, 'oh by the way, I carefully chose specific things to leak as I didn't want to risk national security, I just want to help my country'. Gee, who does that sound different from?

But it won't matter that Snowden has chided Manning, because Manning is part of the tribe, and it's not enough that the tribe upholds his principles (which they surely share), but the tribe must also uphold all his actions.

I grew up for years only seeing this kind of tribalism amongst the GOP supporters (the types who idolized Rush Limbaugh despite his divorces and drug use, or claimed that waterboarding is OK because Ashcroft said so). It's quite disappointing to have seen that become such an issue outside of the GOP as well.

A lot of people prefer indiscriminate leaking, and feel that any national security cost is worth it. Just because Snowden thinks of it differently doesn't mean that we now all have to think of leaking that way - that's tribal.

“I don’t desire to enable the Bradley Manning argument that these were released recklessly and unreviewed,”

>'oh by the way, I carefully chose specific things to leak as I didn't want to risk national security, I just want to help my country'

That's an interesting quote from him, seeing as he has apparently provided thousands of documents to Greenwald:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/how-edward-j-snowden-or...

And if he actually looked at and carefully reviewed all of those (which is possible after 3 months at the NSA) then his point would still apply, would it not?

Manning, on the other hand, leaked too much: "his review of leaked Afghanistan and Iraq battlefield reports revealed techniques for neutralizing improvised explosives, the name of an enemy target, the names of criminal suspects and troop movements". [1]

Does explaining how the U.S. Army was neutralizing IEDs so that Taliban could work around those methods and continue to kill and maim Afghan civilians, children, and ISAF soldiers really help you as a citizen? How many families died from roadside bombs that were designed to avoid these neutralization methods thanks to Manning's leaks? Are you sure the answer is 0?

But again, this is what I mean by tribalism. You try to discredit Snowden's own point since Manning is in the tribe. Does it even occur to you that it's possible Manning could have gone overboard in his goal for transparency? That he could have done 1 thing wrong and 999 things right?

[1] http://www.navytimes.com/article/20130611/NEWS06/306110044

>...then his point would still apply, would it not?

Impossible to say. He couldn't know for certain that none of the data could harm national security any more than Manning could. They both could have "gone overboard" in their push for transparency, though you could guess I'd argue neither of them did, and that far more right than wrong has resulted from their actions. Things like "the name of an enemy target, the names of criminal suspects, and troop movements" aren't exactly actionable years after the fact and are likely already available to the enemy. Methods for diffusing IEDs are the only substantially problematic item in that list, though something tells me that the insurgents were already quite adept at that cat and mouse game, preferring IEDs to open encounters since at least 2006 [1]. That doesn't make it right. It just makes it "1 thing wrong" amidst an ocean of data that revealed the true extent of the wars and just how badly they were going. It was the raw proof needed to document that the Taliban and other anti-coalition actors were dealing out just as much death and destruction on their own people as the coalition, if not more so (in Afghanistan at least, _substantially_ more so). And yet the natives of the areas were still largely unable to form a unified political, social, and military response to address the sectarian violence within their own ranks. If that isn't evidence for a failed intervention in areas steeped in historical sectarianism that we needn't be involved with any longer, I don't know what else is.

I'm very interested in knowing about the supposed "dozens" of other compromises the Navy Times mentions:

>"For the first time, prosecutors presented evidence that the disclosures compromised sensitive information in dozens of categories."

However, getting information out of the proceedings has been a battle all its own. We've had to fight tooth and nail to even get a _typewriter_ into a separate media room, and it's looking like this is the only public record that will ever exist on the matter. Those journalistic organizations that have gained access to the proceedings were forced to sign documents agreeing to not release certain information in exchange for the privilege of attending. And it wouldn't surprise me if most of those "dozens" of bits of evidence are all locked up in off-site locations away from the proceedings, making it difficult if not impossible to reliably fact check and cross-examine potential witnesses during trial.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/ieds-improvised-...

The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved.

Take, for instance, "9/11 was an inside job". People were really taken off planes somewhere, then the planes where remote controlled, a missile hit the pentagon not a plane, demolition charges were set in the buildings, etc...

The man power needed to pull that off greatly exceeds the number of people willing to kill their own countrymen for money, political zeal, or fear.

Lol. It's not like you're going to tell the cogs what the machine is up to.

>The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved.

Yeah, this is like the ground level of thought on these topics. Let's not turn our backs red.

No slight intended to Mormons in general, I have a number of Mormon friends... but: I live in "Mormon-ville," and there is this weird thing about Mormons: they have a lot of bankruptcies. It seems to me like a lot. I am just the onlooker and have no evidence, but it appears to me that 1) get loan from national bank branch staffed by Momons, 2) default, 3) go before Mormon judge, 4) get lenient bankruptcy terms, 5) get another loan again soon from, you know, a Mormon lending officer... sooner than I could get it anyway.

My personal observation is that there are a lot of people in on the conspiracy or whatever you want to call it, and that as long as it stays within maybe "statistical anomaly" levels, it is a good income generator for the people of Utah.

It took me a while to understand your point, I think because I assumed you were challenging my comments. Once I understood, though, I found this to be a very well-positioned anecdote. And having belonged to a Mormon Boy Scout troop, I don't doubt the truth of it for a second. Identity is a powerful construct. Plus, the bigger your 10%, the better, right? Call it reclamation.

You're trying to answer the wrong questions instead of asking the right ones. The absence of answers to good questions says a lot more than half-assed answers to the wrong questions.

I don't profess to know what happened on 9/11. But if you ask the right questions, what we've been fed as the official theory comes out as an almost laughable story.

You might ask yourself why we as a society started a witch-hunt for those that try to find the truth behind it all. We blindly "supported" two or three wars and all the measures that were taken under the guise of security. We were OK with people being kidnapped, tortured, and held prisoner for a decade without any evidence. And nobody even knows why.

If you really put your teeth in these so called conspiracy theories, then one day you'll realize that the term becomes null and void, because it assumes that someone, or a group of people, actually knows what is up. Nobody does, we're just conditioned into taking anything our TV says at face value, so we assume "they" know. And why? For exactly the same reason you've mentioned, because we cannot accept that fact that something bad can go unnoticed and grow to something that big. So we get 2 nuanced stories from 4 TV-channels. Just enough to create the illusion that they're covering all the bases, while at the same time making us believe that we're forming our own and informed opinion by analysing all versions of the story.

But at this stage it is no longer a matter of people conspiring. The system has reached a state where it is normalcy. So, in places where it matters, only people that are already in the same mindset bubble up. Not because they are malicious or because someone has talked them into it, but because they're just a prime specimen of the environment they grew up in. It's a side-effect of a society that holds power and profit as its most important goal.

The reason a lot of people can not understand this is because they did not grow up in that same environment. So there is a disconnect between what we as a person believe we are capable of and what we're actually doing.

> But if you ask the right questions, what we've been fed as the official theory comes out as an almost laughable story.

Wait, what?

Are you talking about the actual 9/11 attacks? Or about events after it; about going to war with unrelated countries?

The actual attacks. What led up to it, and the aftermath.

And before you go that route, I just meant that it does not make sense or hold up to scrutiny, not that it is in any way 'fun'. Obviously.

I'd like to think of myself as thinking rationality, but I think my unerring faith in Hanlon's Razor causes me to be reflexively skeptical of all conspiracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

You mean to be skeptical of all conspiracies to commit malicious acts as they can be better explained as a conspiracy to commit stupid acts -- unless I am interpreting your unerring faith too literally.

Isn't that just as bad as someone who is naively trusting of every conspiracy theory they hear?

Well, it would certainly at least make a better fitness function for a genetic algorithm.

Hehe, I love it. Translation: believe this because it will get you laid.

One has to question why belief in superstitions is so universal across human cultures to begin with, don't be so quick to dismiss it as reducing your fitness. People did not have a logical understanding of why something like a rat king[1] was bad, or that lighting three cigarettes with one match was bad[2], but through the lens of superstition and "knowing" something bad would happen even without any higher understanding, it may have saved them.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king_(folklore)

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_on_a_match_(superstition)

2010 Conspiracy Theory: The US government is intercepting every online and cellular communication of it's citizens.

2013: Conspiracy Fact: The US government is intercepting every online and cellular communication of it's citizens.

Sometimes theories prove to be true.

In a world where self interest drives most survival, conspiracies exist even in small areas like groups of people at a job, committees, small tribal groups, wall street, corporations (enron), even reality TV shows. Add power and lots of money to that and you get more.

By nature/survival people try to get ahead by cheating. The one thing is for sure, the word 'conspiracy' shuts off people's brains, they don't have to be massive.

If I ever committed a crime with a small amount of people with a big payoff, I would hope that it seems like it would take a massive amount of people and that it be classified a conspiracy. It would be so much easier to get away with it. Even feeding into it being a conspiracy to encourage people to look the other way.

Yet on the flipside we can believe a group of terrorists conspire to take use down from shadowy caves like a comic book or some government organization is targeting us. Everyone believes in some conspiracies and usually it is relative to cognitive bias.

I just watched a North America nature show with a group of hawks who conspired to catch game. It had video of several of these big birds working in concert to flush and kill amongst thorns and bushes. Unbelievable theory: those video producers must have conspired; patching together clips to make me believe it.

Not totally sure of your point, but yes nature documentaries are pretty much always lies in the local footage sense and global scientific sense.

But it does lead to the interesting question have people who have subverted the true science of animals and nature like David Attenborough do harm or is it for a greater cause. Half relevant XKCD here http://xkcd.com/397/

There are some theories that fall into a third category of "unlikely, hard to prove, probably false but intensely fascinating." A good example is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [1], which Richard Dawkins describes as:

"A book that is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."[2]

By the way, the Wikipedia page about Jaynes' book uses part of that quotation, but cuts off the last sentence.

Dawkins provides a good summary of the book:

"Jaynes notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind of dialogue between the 'self and another internal protagonist inside the head. Nowadays we understand that both 'voices' are our own - or if we don't we are treated as mentally ill...

"Jaynes's suggestion is that some time before 1000 BC people in general were unaware that the second voice - the Gilbert Pinfold voice - came from within themselves. They thought the Pinfold voice was a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh or, more probably, a minor household god, offering them advice or orders. Jaynes even located the voices of the gods in the opposite hemisphere of the brain from the one that controls audible speech. The 'breakdown of the bicameral' mind was, for Jaynes, a historical transition. It was the moment in history when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to be hearing were really internal. Jaynes even goes so far as to define this historical transition as the dawning of human consciousness. There is an ancient Egyptian inscription about the creator god Ptah, which describes the various other gods as variations of Ptah's 'voice' or 'tongue'. Modern translations reject the literal 'voice' and interpret the other gods as 'objectified conceptions of [Ptah's] mind'. Jaynes dismisses such educated readings, preferring to take the literal meaning seriously. The gods were hallucinated voices, speaking inside people's heads. Jaynes further suggests that such gods evolved from memories of dead kings, who still, in a manner of speaking, retained control over their subjects via imagined voices in their heads. [2]

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...

[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=yq1xDpicghkC&printsec=front... (page 392)

Thanks so much for linking that... I think my own head just exploded from considering what you just wrote.

A variant of this theory is significant in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

It took me literally months on the Metro to get through Quicksilver, so it may be another year or so before I add another Stephenson book to my list. But thanks for pointing that out as I'll definitely have to read it at some point.

Maybe it's hard to accept that the world is what it appears to be.

Forget this disinfo. Read Robert Anton Wilson and understand. ;)

I haven't heard that name in a long time. That is some freaky stuff.

The timing of this article, especially given the tone of NYTimes' coverage of the PRISM event, is highly suspect.

/tinfoil

I have my own pet conspiracy theory and that is that the people (I don't know who, the usual conspirators?) are creating crazier and crazier conspiracy theories to discredit the declining percentage of conspiracy theories which are actually true. For example, there is a conspiracy theory that CIA knew about 9/11 to some detail and just decided to let it happen, which may hold some merit (i.e. while crazy it's the least crazy) and doesn't require thousands of people keeping a secret. And then there are the others - it was a controlled demolition, the plane didn't even hit the buildings, it had a massive bomb on its underbelly and even more unbelievable crazy stuff

The only way anything big ever gets done is through conspiracy.

After all, a small group of individuals who conspire to achieve a goal is basically the root of both progression and destruction right?

No. That is a definition of "conspiracy" that is rarely thought of any more. It is usually the last in the list of definitions in dictionaries. The most understood definition is to work with other people, usually in secret, to do something "evil".

Fact: Nobody has ever conspired to do anything, ever.

Because they're right? Have you heard of PRISM?

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