I recently read some research that concluded that belief in conspiracy theories was related to lower intelligence (1).
I am fascinated by the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. I find it astonishing that people can so ardently hold on to a belief when this belief doesn’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. Take for example those in the UK who believe that coronavirus is a hoax. To pull this off everybody working in the NHS (which employs 1.2 million people) would have to be in on it. As would the government and non-governmental MPs. The civil service. The army. The media. The relatives of all the people who are pretending to be dead. And probably the families of all of us involved in the hoax too because I think it unlikely that we could keep this up for over a year without blabbing to our nearest and dearest.
At this point this is not so much a conspiracy as an entire nation bullying the handful of people who aren’t in on the joke.
The fact that lower intelligence equates with belief in conspiracy theories intuitively makes sense. The world is incredibly complex and is difficult to understand. However, it is much easier to understand if you boil everything down to the belief that some arch-villain is orchestrating all the bad things rather than bad things being the unpredictable outcome of billions of normal people punting about the world with their own ideas, beliefs and agenda, as well as the fact that all of us are subject to natural forces that are completely beyond our control. It is much easier to accept that the ‘lizard people did it’ than to try to understand several millennia of complex geo-political interactions.
With particular regards to the coronavirus pandemic, the first question I would ask is: who is benefitting from this economic, social and health catastrophe? Arguably, Jeff Bezos. But by now even he must be fed up of having to crush and dispose of the brown Amazon boxes in which the vestiges of our lifestyle are now delivered.
Asking these questions is exactly what conspiracy theorists don’t do. There are quite a number of research papers demonstrating that people who believe in conspiracy theories do not engage in analytical thinking. This is obvious really as almost all conspiracy theories fall apart when subjected to a modicum of rational analysis.
How then do you get a conspiracy theorist to think analytically? With difficulty is probably the answer. But the study that I alluded to in the first paragraph also demonstrated that people who believe in conspiracy theories also go in for the kind of ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ that circulates on social media. They demonstrated this by exposing study participants to phrases such as ‘hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty’. At first glance this seems to be saying something profound but is in fact a sentence constructed of randomly selected buzz words. Never-the-less, the conspiracy nuts loved it.
This offers an opportunity to use the conspiracy theorists own witlessness against them. We simply need a phrase that sounds profound and also casts aspersions on conspiracy theories, something like ‘conspiracy beliefs shackle the soul yearning to be free’. Circulate enough of this stuff on Facebook and we might make some headway.
Adam Staten is an author of fiction and non fiction. His first novel, Steadfast, is based on his experiences serving in Afghanistan. His second novel, Blood Debt, is set during the period leading up to the Norman Conquest.
References:
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285206383_On_the_reception_and_detection_of_pseudo-profound_bullshit