Here’s Why We Sometimes Believe Nonsense
Are the Royal Family actually lizards?
There is a now-famous picture showing the same Washington Post story two years apart — the same, that is, but for the headline. In the first, it reads: ‘Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked’. In the second: ‘Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed’. WashPo was so quick to sneer at those who thought a lab leak might be behind the spread of Covid-19 that it tried to change its headline on the sly once a Congressional committee found that that particular theory was plausible.
So not all unlikely theories are ‘conspiracy theories’. Generally speaking, to qualify as the latter, the theory must suggest that a secret cabal is at work behind the scenes. According to that definition, Andrew Wakefield’s bogus claim that vaccines cause autism would not count as a conspiracy theory, even if The Lancet, a respected medical journal, somehow managed to publish that claim, leading to an explosion in cases of children with measles, mumps and rubella, which cause blindness and death.
Andrew Wakefield’s bogus claim that vaccines cause autism would not count as a conspiracy theory.
But conspiracy theories do exist and prove tricky to dislodge from the minds of those who hold them. One reason why we are liable to believe rubbish is because we are drawn to the unknown. Those morbidly interested in threatening or risky situations are far more likely to come to believe conspiracy theories. What’s more, there is a certain thrill in feeling we know something others don’t: it sets us apart from the dull majority, whom we see as naïve, even sheeplike in their willingness to believe what they are told. ‘You think the Moon landings actually happened, do you? That Al Qaeda did 9/11? How foolish you are — and how clever I am to have seen through the veil.’
Those most in need of this sense of superiority are, unsurprisingly, those who feel inferior. Indeed, the more powerless we feel, the more likely we are to turn to conspiracy theories, which promise us explanations for the chaos through which we are struggling to chart a course. To accept the randomness of events entails accepting that we have no control. If we already suspect ourselves of being a plaything of fate, this truth is hard to take.
The more powerless we feel, the more likely we are to turn to conspiracy theories.
An example. Flat-earthers earnestly believe that the world, shown centuries ago to be (almost) spherical is as flat as a week-old Diet Coke. They could walk to the coast and watch a ship vanish over the horizon, or look up at the Moon or Sun and ask themselves why our home-world looks so different. But the sense of being right and others wrong is too intoxicating when you feel like the world walks all over you. Would you give that up?
Conspiracy theories also bind people together. They create a sense of belonging to an exclusive group of enlightened souls, cast to the side by a gullible mainstream. The importance of criteria for exclusion to group cohesion is one of the most common findings in sociology. The criterion here is simple: if you don’t believe, you are not one of us: you are one of them. Unsurprisingly, the more disconnected we feel, the more likely we are to buy conspiracy theories.
If you don’t believe, you are not one of us: you are one of them.
Of course, it does not help that we tend to favour information that confirms what we already believe. Confirmation and assimilation bias conspire at once to shield us from information that threatens our beliefs and to highlight information that validates them. Algorithms do this, too. It is, in fact, astonishing how well YouTube pushes us along the path towards increasingly outlandish content the moment we have watched something mildly unusual.
So why do we believe nonsense? Why do some of us think the Royal Family are lizards, that blood-harvesting Satanists run the world, that the Titanic was sunk in an insurance scam? Mainly because we are lonely and afraid, insecure, doubtful of our agency and our ability to live well in a world that seems random.
