The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [114]
9. Extreme hostility about and strong suspicions of any and all government agencies or private organizations in an indiscriminate manner indicates that the conspiracy theorist is unable to differentiate between true and false conspiracies.
10. If the conspiracy theorist defends the conspiracy theory tenaciously to the point of refusing to consider alternative explanations for the events in question, rejecting all disconfirming evidence for his theory and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he has already determined is the truth, he is likely wrong and the conspiracy is probably a figment of his imagination.
Why People Believe Conspiracies
Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? I contend that it is because their pattern-detection filters are wide open, thereby letting in any and all patterns as real, with little to no screening of potential false patterns. Conspiracy theorists connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns, and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias (in which we tailor after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.
Examples of these processes can be found in Arthur Goldwag’s 2009 book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explained, noting the JFK assassination as a prime example.
Knowing what we know now … film footage of Dealey Plaza from November 22, 1963, seems pregnant with enigmas and ironies—from the oddly expectant expressions on the faces of the onlookers on the grassy knoll in the instants before the shots were fired (What were they thinking?), to the play of shadows in the background (Could that flash up there on the overpass have been a gun barrel gleaming in the sun?). Each odd excrescence, every random lump in the visual texture seems suspicious.1
Add to these factors how compellingly a good narrative story can tie it all together—think Oliver Stone’s JFK or Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, both equally fictional—and you’ve got a formula for conspiratorial agenticity.
I experienced this effect firsthand when I visited Dealey Plaza, where on any given day conspiracy theorists are at the ready (for a modest tip) to give you a tour of where the shooters were hiding on that fateful day. In the photo (Figure 9), my guide reveals that one shooter was hiding in a sewer pipe; he then showed me where another shooter was behind the fence atop the grassy knoll. For more than an hour this conspiracist connected the dots into meaningful patterns that he infused with intentional agency.
Why do people believe in conspiracies? A useful distinction here is between transcendentalists and empiricists. Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim. The problem for skepticism is that transcendentalism is intuitive; empiricism is not. Our propensity for patternicity and agenticity leads us naturally into the transcendental camp of seeing events in the world as unfolding according to a preplanned logic, whereas the empirical method of being skeptical until a claim is proven otherwise requires concerted effort that most of us do not make. Thus, the psychology of belief first and evidence second is once again borne out. Or as Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.…
Figure 9. Dealey Plaza and JFK Conspiracy Theorists
On any given