“Bad Thinkers” or Desperate Copers? Why Americans Really Believe Conspiracy Theories.

In his Aeon Article “Bad Thinkers”, Quassim Cassam tries to explain why people embrace conspiracy theories. Referring to a fictional example (Oliver, who believes that 9-11 was an inside job) Cassam says:

“Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is … there is something wrong with how he thinks.”

Oliver has “bad intellectual character”, Cassam says. The result, simply put, is a particularly endemic gullibility.

For an article that attempts to explain why so many people embrace conspiracies, this strikes me as a disappointingly simplistic explanation.

I myself have given this problem a lot of thought. I have engaged at length with people who believe conspiracies, from chem-trails to anti-vaxxers, all in an attempt to understand why they embrace not only the seemingly ridiculous theories, but the fringe “experts” who propose them.

I don’t at all believe that it can be explained simply by the “bad intellectual character” of gullibility.

What I observe in conspiracy theorists is a potpourri of three distinct, nearly universal factors.

First: Where coherence fails, confirmation takes over.

In an age of endlessly conflicting, even contradictory information, people necessarily choose their sources in part (or mostly) on how much those sources validate their own pre-existing worldview.

We see this happening before our eyes: in a time of pandemic, conservatives have become anti-maskers (because they distrust the government and tend to believe science has been politicized), while liberals have become ardent mask proponents (because they prefer top-down regulation and tend to view science with near-religious zeal). In both instances, people have chosen their trusted sources based exclusively on how those sources validate their existing political ideologies.

Conservatives tend to exhibit this trait rather more than liberals, since they tend to view “mainstream media” as politically liberal (not without reason) and science as weaponized against them (also not without reason).

This has resulted in conservatives embracing increasingly fringe, dubiously-credentialed “experts”. The quicker and more thoroughly these experts are censored and debunked, the more conservatives believe they must be espousing the truth. The most preposterous conspiracies will often be shared alongside the admonition: “Quick! Watch this video before YouTube takes it down again!”

Second: Never underestimate the Allure of Secret Truth.

Some people are simply inclined to be suspicious of broadly accepted facts. To them, the truth is not an open book embraced and understood by most. Instead, it is a secret treasure, hidden away by the nefarious and/or ignorant.

In their mind, the truth is only revealed to the elect few (like them) who are brave enough to seek it out, no matter the cost to their own reputation, security, or even their life.

And realistically, there have been just enough examples of government cover-ups and genuine conspiracies to give fuel to those clinging to such a worldview.

For acolytes of the flat-earth theory, for example, criticism, mockery, and official debunking are all viewed as exactly the sort of push-back that the truly enlightened should expect from the backward, ignorant, and tyrannical. Persecution is a badge of honor.

People of all political persuasions and social ideologies can exhibit the “secret truth” mentality. It explains 9-11 conspiracies, JFK assassination theories, Bigfoot, UFOs, and endless other fringe ideas.

For the believer in secret truth, the more arcane the conspiracy, the better, because even fewer people will believe it, thus making them even more rare and elect for uncovering it.

This mentality might, in fact, fall under the rubric of Cassam’s “bad intellectual character”. And yet I don’t believe that the “secret truth” fallacy is a flaw in and of itself. It’s just normal human curiosity overfed into heresy, fueled by a desperate need for significance.

Think about it: how many flat-earth conspiracy theorists do you know who are, in every other respect, fully actualized, healthy, and well-rounded human beings?

Third: Gullibility is less prevalent than deliberate blindness.

It’s all too easy to say that people who believe conspiracies are gullible. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, that they are too stupid to see the stupidity of their beliefs.

I don’t believe that conspiracy theorists are gullible (or stupid) as much as I believe they’ve become so overwhelmed with the chaotic complexity of the world, and the self-cancelling nihilism of modern media, that they’ve chosen to deliberately blind themselves to all but the parts that seem to make sense.

This is an understandable (if perhaps unhealthy) reaction. We shouldn’t mock them for putting on blinders. If anything, it might encourage us to examine which blinders we’ve put on ourselves.

For example, those of us who loudly proclaim that we never watch Fox News (or CNN) are simply fooling ourselves into treating our own blinders as a virtue.

So no, I don’t believe Cassam’s theory about people who believe conspiracies is any improvement over previous explanations. In fact, I believe his theory of “bad intellectual character” is a sort of smug self-congratulation, diminishing the complexity of humans, and the real difficulty so many people experience navigating a world that has become, in their lifetimes, a bottomless morass of conflicting, propagandized information and tribal extremes.

Viewed through these three lenses, on the other hand, we see how conspiracy thinking might worm its way into our own worldview, influencing how we consume media, interpret “facts”, and choose our trusted sources.

By understanding what motivates the more extreme examples of conspiracy theorists, we might more empathize with them because we see how, to perhaps only slightly lesser degrees, we all exhibit the exact same tendencies.