Conspiracy Theorists Aren�t Really Skeptics

[Garrison Hilliard]

The fascinating psychology of people who know the real truth about
JFK, UFOs, and 9/11.

By William Saletan



To believe that the U.S. government planned or deliberately allowed
the 9/11 attacks, you’d have to posit that President Bush
intentionally sacrificed 3,000 Americans. To believe that explosives,
not planes, brought down the buildings, you’d have to imagine an
operation large enough to plant the devices without anyone getting
caught. To insist that the truth remains hidden, you’d have to assume
that everyone who has reviewed the attacks and the events leading up
to them—the CIA, the Justice Department, the Federal Aviation
Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, scientific organizations,
peer-reviewed journals, news organizations, the airlines, and local
law enforcement agencies in three states—was incompetent, deceived, or
part of the cover-up.

William Saletan
WILLIAM SALETAN
Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other
stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

And yet, as Slate’s Jeremy Stahl points out, millions of Americans
hold these beliefs. In a Zogby poll taken six years ago, only 64
percent of U.S. adults agreed that the attacks “caught US intelligence
and military forces off guard.” More than 30 percent chose a different
conclusion: that “certain elements in the US government knew the
attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various
political, military, and economic motives,” or that these government
elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks.”

How can this be? How can so many people, in the name of skepticism,
promote so many absurdities?

The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really
skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor
a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t
about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of
elites.

Conspiracy chatter was once dismissed as mental illness. But the
prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars
to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an
empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many
people embrace this way of interpreting history. As you’d expect,
distrust turns out to be an important factor. But it’s not the kind of
distrust that cultivates critical thinking.

In 1999 a research team headed by Marina Abalakina-Paap, a
psychologist at New Mexico State University, published a study of U.S.
college students. The students were asked whether they agreed with
statements such as “Underground movements threaten the stability of
American society” and “People who see conspiracies behind everything
are simply imagining things.” The strongest predictor of general
belief in conspiracies, the authors found, was “lack of trust.”

But the survey instrument that was used in the experiment to measure
“trust” was more social than intellectual. It asked the students, in
various ways, whether they believed that most human beings treat
others generously, fairly, and sincerely. It measured faith in people,
not in propositions. “People low in trust of others are likely to
believe that others are colluding against them,” the authors proposed.
This sort of distrust, in other words, favors a certain kind of
belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of
conspiracy.

Once you buy into the first conspiracy theory, the next one seems that
much more plausible.
A decade later, a study of British adults yielded similar results.
Viren Swami of the University of Westminster, working with two
colleagues, found that beliefs in a 9/11 conspiracy were associated
with “political cynicism.” He and his collaborators concluded that
“conspiracist ideas are predicted by an alienation from mainstream
politics and a questioning of received truths.” But the cynicism scale
used in the experiment, drawn from a 1975 survey instrument, featured
propositions such as “Most politicians are really willing to be
truthful to the voters,” and “Almost all politicians will sell out
their ideals or break their promises if it will increase their power.”
It didn’t measure general wariness. It measured negative beliefs about
the establishment.

The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these
experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it’s a
tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or
causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia. In mild
form, it’s a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution
error—ascribing others’ behavior to personality traits and objectives,
forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance.
Suspicion, imagination, and fantasy are closely related.

The more you see the world this way—full of malice and planning
instead of circumstance and coincidence—the more likely you are to
accept conspiracy theories of all kinds. Once you buy into the first
theory, with its premises of coordination, efficacy, and secrecy, the
next seems that much more plausible.

Many studies and surveys have documented this pattern. Several months
ago, Public Policy Polling asked 1,200 registered U.S. voters about
various popular theories. Fifty-one percent said a larger conspiracy
was behind President Kennedy’s assassination; only 25 percent said Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone. Compared with respondents who said Oswald
acted alone, those who believed in a larger conspiracy were more
likely to embrace other conspiracy theories tested in the poll. They
were twice as likely to say that a UFO had crashed in Roswell, N.M.,
in 1947 (32 to 16 percent) and that the CIA had deliberately spread
crack cocaine in U.S. cities (22 to 9 percent). Conversely, compared
with respondents who didn’t believe in the Roswell incident, those who
did were far more likely to say that a conspiracy had killed JFK (74
to 41 percent), that the CIA had distributed crack (27 to 10 percent),
that the government “knowingly allowed” the 9/11 attacks (23 to 7
percent), and that the government adds fluoride to our water for
sinister reasons (23 to 2 percent).

The appeal of these theories—the simplification of complex events to
human agency and evil—overrides not just their cumulative
implausibility (which, perversely, becomes cumulative plausibility as
you buy into the premise) but also, in many cases, their
incompatibility. Consider the 2003 survey in which Gallup asked 471
Americans about JFK’s death. Thirty-seven percent said the Mafia was
involved, 34 percent said the CIA was involved, 18 percent blamed Vice
President Johnson, 15 percent blamed the Soviets, and 15 percent
blamed the Cubans. If you’re doing the math, you’ve figured out by now
that many respondents named more than one culprit. In fact, 21 percent
blamed two conspiring groups or individuals, and 12 percent blamed
three. The CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans—somehow, they were all in on the
plot.

Two years ago, psychologists at the University of Kent led by Michael
Wood (who blogs at a delightful website on conspiracy psychology),
escalated the challenge. They offered U.K. college students five
conspiracy theories about Princess Diana: four in which she was
deliberately killed, and one in which she faked her death. In a second
experiment, they brought up two more theories: that Osama Bin Laden
was still alive (contrary to reports of his death in a U.S. raid
earlier that year) and that, alternatively, he was already dead before
the raid. Sure enough, “The more participants believed that Princess
Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was
murdered.” And “the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden
was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in
Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.”

Another research group, led by Swami, fabricated conspiracy theories
about Red Bull, the energy drink, and showed them to 281 Austrian and
German adults. One statement said that a 23-year-old man had died of
cerebral hemorrhage caused by the product. Another said the drink’s
inventor “pays 10 million Euros each year to keep food controllers
quiet.” A third claimed, “The extract ‘testiculus taurus’ found in Red
Bull has unknown side effects.” Participants were asked to quantify
their level of agreement with each theory, ranging from 1 (completely
false) to 9 (completely true). The average score across all the
theories was 3.5 among men and 3.9 among women. According to the
authors, “the strongest predictor of belief in the entirely fictitious
conspiracy theory was belief in other real-world conspiracy theories.”

Clearly, susceptibility to conspiracy theories isn’t a matter of
objectively evaluating evidence. It’s more about alienation. People
who fall for such theories don’t trust the government or the media.
They aim their scrutiny at the official narrative, not at the
alternative explanations. In this respect, they’re not so different
from the rest of us. Psychologists and political scientists have
repeatedly demonstrated that “when processing pro and con information
on an issue, people actively denigrate the information with which they
disagree while accepting compatible information almost at face value.”
Scholars call this pervasive tendency “motivated skepticism.”

Top Comment

People cant accept how easily one lone gun man or a few guys with a
bomb can totally change people's lives. More...

527 CommentsJoin In
Conspiracy believers are the ultimate motivated skeptics. Their curse
is that they apply this selective scrutiny not to the left or right,
but to the mainstream. They tell themselves that they’re the ones who
see the lies, and the rest of us are sheep. But believing that
everybody’s lying is just another kind of gullibility.

Read more in Slate on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/11/conspiracy_theory_psychology_people_who_claim_to_know_the_truth_about_jfk.single.html

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