Without going too far back in history. Whether the 1969 moon landing was a docufilm shot by Stanley Kubrik in a can theater or the Pentagon was never hit by a suicide plane on 11/XNUMX, have been the hottest conspiracy theories until recently.
But with the polarization of American political life, the arrival of the pandemic and the echo chambers of social media in full steam, conspiracy theories have sprung up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
There is even QAnon, a movement whose origin is unknown, which is taking on the political importance that the Tea Party once had among the Republican ranks. Based on a purely and radically conspiratorial platform, it is sending its own representatives to Congress.
This is a phenomenon that cannot be dismissed as the product of American exceptionalism or as a folkloric manifestation of a group of deviant personalities.
There is something to worry about, partly because as Frankfurt thinkers teach us and as the cinema of the 70s showed us, there is a lot of violence in the connective tissue of American society and in its very social composition.
Warning!
We also think of the role that conspiracy theories had in the rise and consolidation of the authoritarian regimes of the 20s and 30s. A great thinker of modernity, Theodor Adorno, immediately after the Second World War coordinated a research group that had to identify a new anthropological species, the authoritarian personality and outline its role in political and social life. The result was a monumental study of social psychology which showed that irrational beliefs are the gateway to authoritarianism.
A research by a group of psychologists from Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) has recently come out in the United States which aims to profile the personality traits prone to conspiracy theories. Benedict Carey, scientific reporter for the New York Times, took care of this work, who dedicated an interesting piece to it in the New York newspaper entitled A Theory About Conspiracy Theories.
We translated and adapted Carey's post.
“If you don't believe someone is conspiring against you, then you aren't paying attention”! This lettering is on a sticker glued to many US Citizen Pick-up bumpers.
We are at 50%
More than one in three Americans believe the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a chemical weapon, and another third believe the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exaggerated the threat of COVID-19 to harm President Donald Trump .
It's not known whether these numbers, taken from a survey released Sept. 21, 2020 by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center for Public Policy, will decline as the virus is contained.
However, the data does show a time when a particular type of conspiracy theory is becoming popular, namely the belief that the "official story" is actually a big lie being propagated for the benefit of dark and powerful interests.
At the extremes of the “Big Lie” theory are organizations, such as QAnon, that see conspiracies of satanic cannibals and pedophiles everywhere, disguised as corporate leaders and celebrities (from alien abduction stories and sci-fi). And, in this plague year, they also see scientists and evil governments conspiring to use COVID-19 for their own dark purposes.
The number of Americans who actually believe in at least one of the fanciful conspiracy theories is estimated to be around 50 percent, but this figure could be higher (there's a popular bumper sticker that says, "If you don't believe that someone is conspiring against you, then you're not paying attention").
However, psychologists still fail to identify well the profile of people who give rise to theories of the Big Lie, especially those versions that seem to be taken from a horror film.
The first profiles
In the most in-depth analysis conducted on conspiracy believers so far, a research team from Atlanta has outlined several personality profiles that are quite clear. One is already known: he is the impulsive and assertive type who loves to collect wrongs and injustice and is eager to expose the naivete of his fellows rather than his own.
Another type is, however, less known. It is a more solitary and restless figure, indifferent and moody. One category that could include many older people who live alone. The analysis also rediscovered, in its extreme forms, an element of real pathology, that is, a "personality disorder", according to psychiatric jargon.
“With all the changes that are happening in politics, with the polarization and disrespect, conspiracy theories are taking root more than ever in people's thinking and behavior,” said Shauna Bowes, the Emory University psychologist who led the study team. "Since there was no consensus on the psychological basis of conspiracy theories, we have tried to address the issue with this document."
Precedents in history
Of course, conspiracy theories are as old as mankind, and some scientists believe that in times when communities were small and vulnerable, fending off hidden conspiracies was probably a matter of survival.
In the modern era, scholars such as Theodor Adorno and Richard Hofstadter have identified irrational beliefs and paranoia as central elements of the emergence of authoritarian movements and leaders.
Psychologists have only begun to take this issue seriously in the last decade, and their findings have been gradual and generally in line with common sense.
Often people embrace conspiracy theories as a balm to soothe a deep grievance. These theories offer a kind of psychological counterweight, a feeling of control, an internal narrative that imparts meaning to a world that, from their point of view, seems to have none.
For example, the belief that pharmaceutical companies invent diseases to sell their products may provide the simple mechanism for developing a hot air theory.
The advent of the pandemic and its impact on polarized politics in the United States and other countries has made a deep understanding of conspiracy theories urgent, as false beliefs — such as that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention serve a political purpose, one way or another — they can lead millions of people to ignore the advice of public health specialists.
The loss of knowledge of the veracity of the facts
“It's actually a perfect storm in the sense that the theories are aimed at those who are afraid of getting sick and dying or infecting someone else,” says Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the business school of Regina University in Saskatchewan (western Canada). ). “And these fears mislead people to such an extent that they lose track of the veracity of the content they read online.
In the new study, titled Looking Under the Tinfoil Hat and published online in the Journal of Personality, Bowes and Scott Lilienfeld led a team that conducted a series of standardized personality assessments of nearly 2.000 adults.
The study was carried out in two phases. In the first, the team rated each person in the sample based on their level of propensity for conspiracy theories. Participants were asked to rate the likely veracity of broad statements such as “Some UFO sightings and rumors are
planned or staged to distract the public from actual contact with aliens” or “The government uses people as scapegoats to hide its involvement in criminal activities”.
Volunteers were then asked to do the same for statements about specific events, such as "American agencies intentionally created the AIDS epidemic and fed it to black and gay men in the 70s."
The high percentage of personalities prone to conspiracy theories
The study includes participants recruited both online and in person in Atlanta. About 60% scored low on an ideal conspiracy scale, meaning the majority resist such theories; the remaining 40% scored above average or well above.
In the second phase, the research team gave participants several standard personality questionnaires. One analyzed general and fairly stable traits, such as awareness and sociability; another collected information about moods such as anxiety and anger; a third faced extremes, such as narcissistic tendencies.
To obtain one or more personality profiles, the research team measured which aspects of personality are most strongly correlated with high levels of susceptibility to conspiracy theories. The results were equally relevant both for the associations found and for those not found.
For example, qualities like meticulousness, modesty, and altruism have little to do with a penchant for conspiracy theories. There is no apparent relationship with levels of anger or sincerity; self-esteem doesn't even come into it.
“We know that personality tests aren't very good at measuring things we don't understand very well,” Bowes said. “The result will not be immediately clear, especially the first time you look at it”
Psychotism
Among the personality traits closely related to conspiracy theories there are some common aspects: conceit, impulsiveness, self-centeredness, lack of compassion (the overconfident collector of injustices), a high degree of depression and anxiety (the moody, confined by circumstances or age). Another characteristic emerged from the questionnaire dedicated to the assessment of personality disorders, namely a pattern called "psychoticism".
Psychoticism is a key feature of the so-called schizotypal personality disorder, characterized in part by "bizarre beliefs and magical thinking" and "paranoid ideas". In the language of psychiatry, it is a more subtle form of advanced stage psychosis, which presents recurring hallucinations typical of schizophrenia. It is a pattern of magical thinking that goes far beyond ordinary superstition, and, in social terms, the person often gives the impression of being inconsistent, strange, or "different."
The culture ground of conspiracy theory
In time, there may be some scientist or therapist who will try to make a more accurate diagnosis about devotees of the Big Lie. For now, according to Pennycook, just know that when people are despondent, they're much more likely to accept content without doing a lot of research into its sources.
“As a rule, people don't want to spread fake content,” he points out. “But at a time like this, when people are worried about the virus, headlines like 'Vitamin C cures COVID' or 'It's all a lie' tend to circulate widely. Eventually, these things get to the nut, who then shares them with his network of like-minded personalities.”
Conspiracy theories about secret government conspiracies will never go out of style and, to some extent, protect against outright conspiracies, official and unofficial. In some ways this can be a good thing
Benedict Carey has been a science reporter for The New York Times since 2004. He has written three books: How We Learn, about the cognitive science of teaching, Poison Most Vial, and Island of the Unknowns, all about scientific mysteries for high school students.
