Van Prooijen observes that “Uncertainty about the future, feelings of alienation, fast-changing power structures in society, rapid technological advancement, or a deep-rooted distrust towards formal authorities can all stimulate conspiracy theories. Negative emotions elicit sense-making processes in which people assume the worst, increasing people’s suspicious feelings towards powerful, dissimilar, or distrusted outgroups”. An accelerator of these suspicions amongst vulnerable people is where manipulative leaders of these in-groups fuel these fears and stoke division for their own ends.
Depending on the severity of the uncertain times (at least perceived as uncertain by the in-group), people become hyper-sensitive and aware of potential perceived threats. This can often lead them, as Van Prooijen notes, to: “perceive patterns in what actually are coincidences, and feelings of fear and uncertainty exacerbate such illusory pattern perception. Studies for instance show that when people lack control, they not only start seeing conspiracy threats, but they also start seeing patterns in other stimuli, such as images in random noise, patterns in stock market information, and superstition”.
They then tend to connect these random occurrences into a connected pattern that is entirely false and often absurd. It is often observed that those who believe in conspiracy theories reject “facts”, however in their eyes, this is not the case – indeed, connecting the “perceived patterns” that Van Prooijen describes is often an argument used by believers that non-believers do not use facts. Conspiracy believers connect disparate, random “facts”, where there is no real connection, into an elaborate and complex story and accuse disbelievers of ignoring the “clear cause and effect” relationship amongst these pieces of information.
What kinds of people tend to believe in conspiracy theories?
As we noted in our previous essay on authoritarianism, it is much too easy to identify those who embrace a conspiracy theory as somehow being “stupid”, “uneducated” or somehow “infected” from birth with a proclivity toward conspiracy. There is really no such thing as a “conspiratorial personality”—just as it is hard to attribute all forms of authoritarianism to some widespread breakout of the “authoritarian personality.” When we offer these simplistic explanations, then we are guilty of the same distortion of cause-and-effects and the same We/They mentality that we are assigning to the conspirators. We are just as vulnerable to anxiety and regression as those we have identified as evil conspirators.
While popular media tend to portray conspiracy theory believers as somewhat crazy, but as Van Prooijen describes, “large portions of normal, law-abiding, well-functioning citizens believe these conspiracy theories. Furthermore, while conspiracy theories are slightly more common in the lower educated segment of society, they are by no means exclusive to this segment, as they also emerge among high-profile managers, actors, scientists, lawyers”. However, it is difficult to dismiss some level of “craziness” when belief in bazaar conspiracy theories and dismissal of expert scientists and experienced leaders in turn damages the conspiracy believers.
Indeed, Douglas and her associates (2016) suggest that the “drawbacks of conspiracy theories do not seem to be readily apparent to people who lack the ability or motivation to think critically and rationally. In cognitive psychology, rationality is defined as thinking, acting, speaking, reasoning or taking a decision in conformity with a normative (scientific) theory (Researchgate.net). In this context, conspiracy believers who believe conspiracy theories without question fail the “rationality” test.
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