People can be prone to believing in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on intuition, feeling antagonism and superiority towards others, and perceiving threats in their environment. Narcissism, a conviction about one’s superiority and entitlement to special treatment, is a robust predictor of belief in conspiracy theories. Recent developments in research have found that reasons for believing in conspiracy theories can be grouped into three categories: the desire for understanding and certainty.
Belief in conspiracy theories reliably and consistently predicts a range of implausible beliefs and irrational behaviors, which supports the Gullible Conspiracist Hypothesis and behavior. Conspiracy theories are not delusions but can cause psychological distress. The phrase “not mentally ill, but not mentally healthy” often refers to the belief that conspiracy theories originate from gullibility, and true rational skepticism is not supported.
Multiple studies indicate that conspiracy theories might not be dismissed as gullible, and researchers should not characterize them as such. These studies support the notion of populist gullibility, an increased tendency of people who score high on populist attitudes to accept obscure or implausible information. The role of paranoia, gullibility, and the needs for dominance, control, and uniqueness are discussed.
People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition. Conspiracy believers can therefore not be dismissed as gullible and researchers should not characterize them as such.
📹 Why You Can Never Argue with Conspiracy Theorists | Argument Clinic | WIRED
Alex Jones is not the only guy making a career out of conspiracy theories. They are everywhere on the internet and here’s why …
📹 Why Are Evangelical Christians Gullible?
Evangelical Christianity provides an especially fertile soil for the propagation of conspiracy theories. In this video, I discuss this …
Very interesting. I think part of the issue is that evangelicals write books or papers for people who have not read the people they are critiquing. So, you can read books that will tell you what to think about various philosophers and theologians. Recently someone at church gave me a booklet published by the Christian Institute. The Christian Institute is an organisation which seems to be trying to introduce the US culture wars to the UK. The people who write for it are generally credible academically, and play down their extreme ideas, such as the Sharon James who wrote this book calling the theory of evolution an ideology; that’s quite a subtle dismissal. Anyway the booklet is called Critical Theory: Challenging Truth and Reality. I had not come across the idea it espouses, which is something called Cultural Marxism. It is a conspiracy theory which traces things like critical race theory back to the supposed widespread influence of the Frankfurt school of Marxism. Reading it, and trying to make sense of it, led me to reflect on the proneness of Evanglicals to conspiracy theories, and although I studied sociology years ago, I am pretty sure the person who gave me the booklet will not have read or would not be familiar with the ideas of Gramski, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre etc. I may send him a link to this article.
This is interesting in light of previous research on conspiracy theorist that didn’t find one common personality trait or demographic that was more susceptible to conspiracy theories than others — rich/poor, educated/uneducated, young/old, black/white, etc. it didn’t matter. (I wish I had the source, but I heard this at least 10 years ago on a science news program on BBC Radio which is no longer online, apparently.) The only thing they discovered was that people who believed in one conspiracy theory were much more prone to believing others, even if they were completely contradictory. So once you find a gateway into the conspiracy web, you’re very likely to get tangled up in many more, which I guess does track with evangelicals. Alex O’Connor (formerly “Cosmic Skeptic”) just posted an very interesting interview with Tanya Marie Luhrmann, an American psychological anthropologist who studies “modern-day witches and charismatic Christians” and one thing she mentions is that evangelicals are typically more receptive of authority than the average person, so it’s not hard to see how the natural suspicion of American conservatives (not just evangelicals) of government which has been harnessed by Trump and other right-wing Republicans leaders through sowing the seeds of government conspiracy has primed a significant part of the evangelical community for a deep plunge into the conspiracy world. And once you’re in, it’s really hard to get out again, and the contagion spreads as new conspiracy theories arise.
The problem seems to be that Evangelicals unlike most Christians see the Bible as inerrant. This means that most are young earth creationists which means that they find a lot of places uncomfortable such as schools and universities. if they are at war with modern science and most education institutions then they become more vulnerable. Very fine article by the way.
IF one accepts an idea until there is a defeater for the idea, then it is easy to have accepted a lot of falsehoods which can’t readily be defeated especially given the parade of excuses that can be deployed to maintain whatever belief. This would seem to explain the rampant levels of conspiracy theories. It is also why I am against the idea of acceptance pending a defeater. I support acceptance predicated on what is sustained. If one has accepted something that seemed reasonably sustained, then the moment there is a disagreement over that whatever, then there needs to be an appeal to the actual something. If nothing is found to support such, then such should reasonably be dismissed as an error of some sort.
I think that most churches only allow teachers and pastors that have a strict focus that stems from their particular Bible College; they have little expertise in science, biology, or philosophy. Hence, churches may be easily led to conspiracies. Christians need to defer to experts in their fields (as you say, people with terminal degrees), or at least start to include them in their thinking. In my church, everything is okay as far as worship and general pastoral advice goes, but where issues such as climate and vaccines come up, everyone leans on their guru of the week–“experts” like RFK Jr., Joe Rogan, or Jim Carey. I see climate as a complex physics problem that primarily needs to be addressed by climatologists, not politicians or gurus. Similarly with vaccines: Look to experts in public health and or research virologists. But asking a friend what they think is so much easier. Or worse yet, “I’ll do my own research.” Oh, yeah?
I was with you for most of your examples, but an “anti-supernatural bias” definitely does exist. The idea that certain interpretations aren’t motivated by a philosophical opposition to the miraculous is ridiculous, as ridiculous indeed as would be the idea that Christians don’t have a “pro” Bible bias when they approach the same questions of date, authorship etc. This is not a malevolent conspiracy among non-Christians, it’s simply the obvious truth that when you confront a claim that you believe you have prior reasons to believe is impossible (or extremely improbable ) then you are going to be extra skeptical and likely to favour alternative explanations. Literally everyone does this, because it’s just how reasoning and psychology works. The conspiracy theory would be to believe that atheists or materialists are some special class of human beings immune from the same psychological forces & flaws at work in everyone else. Apart from that specific example, some of your others I too am skeptical towards but I think you do some of them a dissersive by labelling them simply as proto-conspiracies. Proposing potential common psychological motivations behind certain groups doesn’t count as a conspiracy theory, else you very own article here would count as a conspiracy theory, since you psychologically explain these proto conspiracies by appealing to the “conspiracy” that evangelicals are characterized by strong to in-group/out-group us vs them thinking etc. In order to merit the pejorative term conspiracy theory you would also need to be confident that a sane, reasonable human being seeking the truth could not errantly but rationally come to these conclusions through simple observation and analysis etc.