I skipped the articles because paywalls so I don’t know what beliefs were measured. I’ll proceed here anyway.
I’ve mentioned that some time ago I was an invited mod at a major conspiracy-paranormal-UFO forum. My brief: be a voice of reason. I quit after a few months because EVERY conspiracy theory I saw eventually included antisemitism.
Blaming Jews is traditional in Western cultures. Surprised?
Couldn’t get into the article. Was this all about the followers of these theories or did they also ID profiles for the worse threat - the folks creating them?
What about the casual conspiracy theorist? I’ve had three guys come in to my record shop who are on their early 60s and they’re all falling for the “ antifa started the fires “ and the Dems just wanna do this and that, blah blah blah. They are all as far as I can tell sane-ish family guys, I feel like Facebook and an overwhelming amount of Fox News is doing a number on they’re already old/stand-firm/opinionated minds
This describes the CT in my life: Truly a special snowflake, always smarter than everyone else even when spouting rubbish and making disastrous life choices, and never ever the slightest glimmer of self-doubt. Despite my many pleas to not push her shit on me, she simply could not help herself — always, always, always had to be in the right, showing the rest of us dull plebes the way. She was a truly special person before she lost her mind, but the seeds were there from the very beginning.
I see it differently for a couple of reasons. First I see a difference between today’s conspiracy theorists who are very politically motivated, and yesteryears, who were for the most part skeptics and weirdos (in the best possible sense).
QAnon and the like (with a big assist from the internet) to me flipped the audience for conspiracy theories. A decade ago it was likely us atheists who were BOTH skeptical of how the world was presented to us by the powers that be AND highly skeptical of religion. (depending on the subject, It was also often with a slight wink (UFOs/Area 51, acid experiments, weather control, etc))
Today I personally see more of a kinship between conspiracy theorists and the (perhaps formerly, since it’s not as big a force as it was) religious, who both are somewhat pre-disposed mentally to take things on faith if their gut tells them it’s right (ie., the opposite of a skeptic). These are often much nastier conspiracies of the elders of zion variety.
So theres a root cause in the mental worldview of today’s conspiracy theorists that I feel has ‘scratched the itch’ that religion used to. Which to me also explains why CT has gone so mainstream. It’s taken over some of the cultural real estate that religion has lost.
YMMV
Well, what’s it called if a person gets reminded of what Freud put down and they do some crystal meth and freaking regress to childhood, hard?
I had thought I was good at pointing out things and not having my finger eaten, when…
I’m sure if I spent some time on Facebook this would be a lot more “resonant” with me but as an “extremely offline“ (or maybe just “casually offline” since I still read stuff online) person I can’t help but read “conspiracy theorist” as a vague, loaded term that basically means whatever is convenient to the person who says it about an idea they don’t like. And I don’t trust psychologists a single iota.
I read article after article about how bad big tech is (and I largely agree), but I feel like neoliberal rags like “student loan debt cancellation is bad unless it’s Biden in which case we are silent” NYT are heavily in favor of defending psychology, a neophyte science that literally stopped pathologizing homosexuality not too long ago and from my limited understanding still hold views some trans folks still take issues with.
Love that “get help” is such a pervasive retort in some neolib circles…
What’s funny is I used to rail on conspiracy theorists back when i was a big bad evil male “new atheist” and that was “problematic” back then. so, whatever!
There’s a reason people start to trust themselves more than others, despite the Dunning Krueger dimension to that.
They. If that’s even (air quotes) their real name.
For just one weekend, say you’ll manage the summer camp’s itinerary. Would love to hear about the results.
And who’s gonna trust these ‘researchers’? I do my own research!
The preprint of the paper says
All participants completed an online battery of self-report measures. Internal consistencies and intercorrelations are presented in Supplemental Tables 1 through 7.
Conspiratorial ideation. In Samples 1 through 3, the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory (BCTI; Swami et al., 2011) was administered. The BCTI is a 15-item self-report inventory of belief in specific conspiracy theories (e.g., “U.S. agencies intentionally created the AIDS epidemic and administered it to Black and gay men in the 1970s”), wherein participants endorse their level of belief via a 1 ( completely false ) to 6 ( completely true ) Likert-type scale. Exploratory factor analyses suggest that the BCTI is unidimensional (Swami et al., 2010).
In Sample 4, participants completed two self-report measures of conspiratorial thinking: the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS; Brotherton, French, & Pickering, 2013) and Vaccine Conspiracy Theories Scale (VCBS; Shapiro et al., 2016). The GCBS is a 15-item self-report measure of beliefs in general conspiracy theories that yields a total score in addition to five factor scores: Government Malfeasance (e.g., “Government agencies have been secretly involved in the assassinations of their own citizens”), Extraterrestrial Threat (e.g., “Evidence of alien presence on Earth is being covered up”), Malevolent Global Conspiracy (e.g., “A small, secret group of people is actually in control of the world economy”), Personal Wellbeing (e.g., “Cures for certain deadly and common diseases exist, but are being deliberately withheld”), and Control of Information (e.g., “New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed”). In this study, we used the GCBS total score in all analyses (but see Supplemental Tables 8 and 9 for the correlations between the GCBS subdimensions and study outcomes). Participants indicated the degree to which they agreed with each item on a 1 ( definitely not true ) to 5 ( definitely true ) Likert-type scale. The VCBS is a 7-item self-report measure of belief in vaccine-related conspiracy theories (e.g., “The government is trying to cover up the link between vaccines and autism”), and participants indicated their agreement with each statement on a 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 7 ( strongly agree ) Likert-type scale.
I don’t imagine that the peer review process had anything to add, but the published version is definitive; preprints aren’t
The new York Times helpfully adds
The study had two elements. First, the team rated each person on their level proclivity for conspiracy theories. Participants were asked to rate the probable veracity of general statements such as “Some U.F.O. sightings and rumors are planned or staged in order to distract the public from real alien contact” or “The government uses people as patsies to hide its involvement in criminal activity.” The volunteers were then asked do the same for statements about specific events, such as “U.S. agencies intentionally created the AIDS epidemic and administered it to Black and gay men in the 1970s.”
You can take the GCBS test online, should you suspect yourself.
Perhaps a better term is “Personality Deviations”, or just “deviants”?
Me, I am mulling just calling them “Character Eristics”, after the modern interpretation of Eris, goddess of discord.
The thing about religions is that as far as conspiracy theories go, they are exclusionary and will try to inoculate their followers against competing theories. But it can only go so far, lest the person being inoculated also rejects the desired conspiracy theory.
they would occasionlly hve guest speakers warning us to be on the lookout for people trying to sell us on complicated systems of belief
Just going to humbly submit that my bank, my sports team, my employer, etc has never felt a need to educate their given flocks on this topic. There are Southern churches as robust social institutions, and the value of joining one is self evident: they have the best gyms in town, good people, stuff to do. Then there’s churches that are selling a cult of victimization out on the edge of town, and they attract a certain kind of mind.
This topic has reminded me of this excellent post from a previous thread:
Of course, the history of conspiratorial thinking in public life has a long and colourful history:
Ok, this is a caricature of a certain type. But what about people who are truly just trying to figure out what’s going on.
I mean, someone conspired to do 9/11. Someone conspired to fake the Gulf of Tonkin attack. Someone conspired to game the ratings agencies and create and burst a massive asset bubble in 2008. Someone conspired to cook the intelligence on WMD in Iraq. Someone conspired to send weapons grade anthrax to US Senators in 2001. We may not know WHO these conspirators are, but they exist.
It’s basically impossible to investigate any of these events (which changed the course of our history and the mentality of our society!) without dealing with conspiracies of various sizes and types. By no means were all these things done by one shadowy group who is orchestrating world events in a god-like way, but they were done by SOMEONE, right?
What about people who carefully and sincerely investigate these things? Are they conspiracy theorists?
this is 40+ years in the past but, iirc, those guest speakers had been brought in as a response to revivalist speakers at some of the larger churches in town (first baptist, calvary baptist) who were selling the illuminati or the rapture to their, at least temporarily, enlarged flocks. looking back at it from today it seems almost quaint for a church to try to sell sanity as a reason for worshipping with them.
Not all conspiracies are theoretical. Here’s a PDF someone drew up recently categorising them (room for argument about what fits where, but a reasonable starting point):
It appears in more recent history that a specific group of people was deliberately targeted thanks to the wonders of surveillance capitalism.
The difference between real “conspiracies” (if they can even be called such) and what is meant by “conspiracy theories” is largely the number of people that would need to be involved. The 9/11 hijackers were a small group of people, and as far as we can tell, the anthrax sender was a single person. It isn’t unreasonable to imagine that they could keep their actions a secret. Compare that to the thousands (or even millions) of people needed to fake the moon landing or fake 9/11 with explosives. All of whom apparently have kept their silence for decades.
