> I think that many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about
I think that politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions
I think that government agencies closely monitor all citizens
These are *terrible* "conspiracy mindset" questions. I mean, these are 3/5 of the questions and they're obviously and factually true.
1. Tons of important things MUST happen in the world that the average person never hears about - there's ~200 countries and ~8B people. One in a million events are happening to people 8,000 times a day. Most people don't care about what's happening in other neighborhoods or states, much less other countries, and TV shows are in the business of showing the highly selected set of what retains eyeballs and attention, so this is obviously true.
2. Politicians couldn't possibly tell you the true motives for their decisions, the only time they even attempt anything like this is in 5 second sound bites, and "true motives" can't fit into that amount of time / information.
3. PRISM and 5 Eyes is a thing, the NSA confirmed it, and everyone just shrugged and went back to drinking their gallons of mountain dew while watching 8 hours a day of TV, or whatever regular people do. Yes, literally everything you do on your phone or computer is tracked and logged forever, and they admitted it.
I really don't know if this is evidence that these question makers are dumb or wanted their answers to slant a certain way, but it's certainly evidence that they didn't think carefully about the factual status of possible answers to their questions.
I suppose many people have quite a rosy picture of (some) politicians. Even if the questions are true from a scientific perspective, they might still serve to measure some tendency since not all people realize that and there's differences between those that do and those that don't.
What questions would you prefer? Do you think your new questions would correlate the same way? I think they probably would.
Ha - wouldn't the new questions correlating the same way imply something like "reality has a well-known conspiratorial bias?"
Or maybe you just mean people who think rigorously are such a tiny set of people they'll be swamped by the much larger portions of people operating and answering based on vibes?
I mean, I think you should go with obviously FALSE things instead of obviously TRUE things:
1. Do you believe that a single organization or group of people controls almost all the things most people watch and listen to?
2. Are all politicians human, or do you believe that any are Grays, Reptilians, immortals, androids, or other non-human life forms?
3. Does the government or any other entity or organization monitor your thoughts?
I'd personally like to think that the population answering "yes" to these would only correlate with the prior "obviously true" questions at about .2 - .3, but maybe I have too much faith in my fellow man.
Having read quite a few such studies, I think the sort of people who write them are just dumb. They do slant things a certain way but they seem to genuinely believe they're doing good scholarship. There's just a pervasive lack of seriousness hanging over universities.
The obvious point here is that most of the listed conspiracy theories are obviously true and so the question is more about what it says about all the people in denial.
What’s with a “Manichaeism” category? Did psychologists or sociologists just start using this as a catch all for highly dualistic outlooks? Kind of weird… Imagine if we started referring to a secular thought pattern as “christianity” because it shares some Christian idiosyncrasy in a broad sense.
It’s not even the most accurate religion to use. Zoroastrianism is more what the authors are aiming for, but I think Zoroastrian is still prevalent enough that it wouldn’t be PC to misappropriate the term like that. There are still some Manichaeans though, which is what makes it strange that they used that term.
There's an Anti-Gnostic who comments on blogs sometimes.
Use of the term seems to pop up in the 1900s or so if you believe Google Ngrams and increase since then, so I'm guessing there's some now-forgotten cultural battle attached to the term.
You used to occasionally see references to 'Pelagianism' with regard to excessive optimism about human nature. But yeah, you never hear anyone calling feminists 'Collyridianists'.
> 1. Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.
> 2. Even though we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway.
> 3. The people who really “run” the country are not known to the voters.
> 4. Big events like wars, the current recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us.
The problem with this formulation is that in the American context, it was clearly derived by taking "right wing conspiracy theories" and removing the explicit political terms, e.g., someone who believes in CRT would probably say no to this formulation even though CRT logically implies it. CRT believers aren't known for their logical deduction skills.
I was going to post the same thing, good to see you got there first Eugine!
I don't think it's possible for academics to research stuff that involves ideology. Even their "best" attempts are bad in blatant and obvious ways. They are just so far to the left and so hopeless at rigorous thinking that they just can't ever be sufficiently harsh on their own in-group.
Beyond CRT, the supposedly general formulation would give low scores to most of the mainstream left wing conspiracies:
1. The patriarchy i.e. that men conspire in secret to keep women down.
2. That communist regimes always fail because of sabotage by the CIA, not due to the internal contradictions of communism.
3. That Google/Facebook sell your personal data.
4. That Trump is a Russian spy.
5. That social media companies deliberately try to "addict" users (vs the actual situation in which they just make a product people like to use)
And then we have the problem - which to his credit Emil does acknowledge - that believing in more conspiracy theories is rational if there are actually a lot of conspiracies. The left engages in constant conspiracies against the public, and especially against the right wing public. COVID was nothing but left wing conspiracies against the public! It would be irrational for right wing people to not believe more in conspiracies than the left.
The idea that African and diaspora nations like Haiti fail due to European meddling behind the scenes is universally accepted on the left and center. I often think things should be assessed in a predictive/forecasting way, but sycophants can sort of will things to be true by making them publicly accepted regardless of the reality
Black Americans are by far the group with the highest belief in conspiracy theories, incredibly bizarre ones at that. And as you say, people who do these studies are quick to malign low status groups by characterizing all negative perceptions of their hallowed institutions as conspiracy theories. It's like how if you say they're pushing anti-white policy or gender ideology, you're a conspiracy theorist. Yet when they openly say they're doing it, that's a good thing.
My measure of conspiracy thinking would be like classic paranoia where schizophrenics are thinking people are constantly out to get them and are thinking about them all the time, but for a lot of right wing things it's a symbolic representation of their sentiments toward the ruling class not a very strong attachment to imagining concrete highly systematic plans by a group that is in firm control of everything. Sometimes these sentiments are totally right, like with anti-white policy, and sometimes they are wrong and more the product of group dynamics but ultimately it doesn't matter because the left presents it in terms of intersectionality like with climate change
On this and other topics, conclusions drawn about Trump supporters, and about the beliefs held by Trump voters, are problematic because of the term "like" ("people who like Trump", etc.). "Like" is uniquely problematic in regard to Trump.
For the last ten years, a lot of people who vote enthusiastically for Trump as president also despise him personally, but believe that, in the last generation or so, the political class in the U.S. has become so degraded, corrupt, and detached from reality that the outsider Trump, however simplistically he thinks, is in far closer touch with reality that any other possibility in sight.
Doubtless many such people, if they were asked if they "like" Trump, would have to think twice before they replied anything but "F--- no, what do you think I am!".
Some polls have recently begun to distinguish between the two kinds of Trump supporters--the ones who think that would be good presidential material under any circumstances, and those who vote for him because, with the issues so urgent and so clear, and with no other choices in sight, beggars can't be choosers.
"In 2024 (but not in e.g. 1980) Republicans have somewhat more uneducated and low intelligence voters, who are more irrational and prone to believing crazy things." The right has always had its share of high-IQ conspiracy theorists, and the Satanic Panic of the 80s had more to do with religiousness than stupidity.
What is religiousness? If religiousness is heritable, what exactly are the personality traits which make people more or less religious? Is it possible that there is a schizophrenia spectrum (like the autism spectrum), ranging from diagnosable to highly functional?
Conservatives in America tend to be more religious, and the same factors which lead to religiousness also lead to conspiracy-mindedness. However, in countries where free market ideals are not associated with religiousness -- quite the opposite -- the "right" would be less conspiracy-minded.
While I agree that the idea of the existence of conspiracies must be approached objectively, and not snarkiliy dismissed out-of-hand, the core of the phenomenon--widespread belief in conspiracies--is a result of the common man feeling an increasing sense of vaguely defined personal threat.
The sources are not identifiable, but in order to feel a level of comfort, a source must be identified. This allows one to feel that the threat has been identified and that something can be done to avoid the threat. But what's happened increasingly is that various actors--biased news media, political personalities, influencers simply after followers, etc.--have perceived that by offering up conspirators, and supplying some sort of rationale for *why*, exactly, and *how*, these conspirators are after the common man, they can manipulate public opinion to their benefit.
In short, there is a market for conspiracy theories to answer the common man's need to understand *why* he feels so threatened in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Now, note the irony of this: a vast range of manipulators, with few common goals other than self-aggrandizement, closely resemble a vast conspiracy to deceive, but in pursuit of their goals, which rely on "spin" (deception to some degree), they might be mistaken for an organized grand conspiracy.
I know some people who'd be labelled as conspiracy theorists (as in, they tend to believe a lot of theories at once), and I myself would be classed as a conspiracy theorist by some. None of us feel particularly threatened by anything, nor do any seem to feel generalized paranoia, as you suggest, nor are most conspiracy theories actionable in any way.
Really, no psychoanalysis is needed here. The core of the phenomenon is that there actually are lots of conspiracies and our institutional systems don't try to find them or punish the conspirators. How many COVID related conspiracy theories were later proven either true or highly plausible, and how many of the conspirators were ever punished? None? The power structures don't care, they actually reward conspiracy and punish the lack of it. So when people see something that doesn't seem to make sense given their priors, they assume the real explanation is a conspiracy. It's quite rational.
"None of us feel particularly threatened by anything, nor do any seem to feel generalized paranoia, as you suggest,..."
If you don't feel threatened, then why do you care about COVID-related anomalies? If there's no threat why bother?
I'm not suggesting that there are no interested parties out there who attempt to enhance their interests at the possible cost of mine, I just don't see much evidence of organized conspiracies to do so. What I see is that if two or more powerful parties want to portray themselves as wholesome family enterprises, e.g., so as to manipulate credulous families spend your money in support of them, they probably never met with each other, discussed, planned, and coordinated any of this: they are both independently using what they found has worked best to achieve their ends.
That's what I think I see out there mostly, and it does not preclude the existence of actual conspiracies, with mutually acknowledged conspirators . But these are much more rare and tend to last only until members of the conspiracy feel that they're better off going it alone.
Parties who think that cynical manipulation is a useful practice tend to screw each other at some point, making actual conspiracies short term, often.
And don't misunderstand where I'm coming from. I'm *not* lightly dismissing any of this; I *am* threatened and put-upon (how does taxing unrealized gains sound to you> how does doing away with the basis step-up? If *that* doesn't scare you...) I just don't see many shadowy figures in the background. Just well--heeled interests trying hard to lie to me and others like me, on their own hook.
Even their ACTS measure doesn't really capture the systemic racism conspiracy theory. Really need a dedicated indicator for that I think to make the study truly informative. Gender ideology too. "Males can be females." I imagine once those are measured well, the differences in political ideology conspiratorial belief relationship they found for the composite would disappear.
Anyone whose socio-political position is "Public belief in conspiracies is low status so I don't act like they real" should be put down for being a disingenuous piece of shit.
The real conspiracy is that people like this are encouraged to survive to the next generation and breed.
Well, I think the various studies show that conspiracy belief is positively correlated to fertility. Perhaps because proneness to believing wacky shit about 5G towers also makes one extra careful with whether the spouse is cheating, and being a careful mother etc.
Honestly, I think it's probably that both fertility and conspiracy belief are negatively correlated with SES. Poor people are more likely to think the world is conspiring against them, and are more likely to have kids.
I forgot to incorporate the best study.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.13017
By the same authors, who then reanalyzed an even larger compilation of studies to find more support for the same conclusion I arrived at. Mea culpa.
> I think that many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about
I think that politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions
I think that government agencies closely monitor all citizens
These are *terrible* "conspiracy mindset" questions. I mean, these are 3/5 of the questions and they're obviously and factually true.
1. Tons of important things MUST happen in the world that the average person never hears about - there's ~200 countries and ~8B people. One in a million events are happening to people 8,000 times a day. Most people don't care about what's happening in other neighborhoods or states, much less other countries, and TV shows are in the business of showing the highly selected set of what retains eyeballs and attention, so this is obviously true.
2. Politicians couldn't possibly tell you the true motives for their decisions, the only time they even attempt anything like this is in 5 second sound bites, and "true motives" can't fit into that amount of time / information.
3. PRISM and 5 Eyes is a thing, the NSA confirmed it, and everyone just shrugged and went back to drinking their gallons of mountain dew while watching 8 hours a day of TV, or whatever regular people do. Yes, literally everything you do on your phone or computer is tracked and logged forever, and they admitted it.
I really don't know if this is evidence that these question makers are dumb or wanted their answers to slant a certain way, but it's certainly evidence that they didn't think carefully about the factual status of possible answers to their questions.
I suppose many people have quite a rosy picture of (some) politicians. Even if the questions are true from a scientific perspective, they might still serve to measure some tendency since not all people realize that and there's differences between those that do and those that don't.
What questions would you prefer? Do you think your new questions would correlate the same way? I think they probably would.
Ha - wouldn't the new questions correlating the same way imply something like "reality has a well-known conspiratorial bias?"
Or maybe you just mean people who think rigorously are such a tiny set of people they'll be swamped by the much larger portions of people operating and answering based on vibes?
I mean, I think you should go with obviously FALSE things instead of obviously TRUE things:
1. Do you believe that a single organization or group of people controls almost all the things most people watch and listen to?
2. Are all politicians human, or do you believe that any are Grays, Reptilians, immortals, androids, or other non-human life forms?
3. Does the government or any other entity or organization monitor your thoughts?
I'd personally like to think that the population answering "yes" to these would only correlate with the prior "obviously true" questions at about .2 - .3, but maybe I have too much faith in my fellow man.
I mean, we could run a survey with these. Zimmer ran a survey recently with a lot of theories, but maybe not these questions specifically.
https://openpsych.net/paper/78/
Having read quite a few such studies, I think the sort of people who write them are just dumb. They do slant things a certain way but they seem to genuinely believe they're doing good scholarship. There's just a pervasive lack of seriousness hanging over universities.
The obvious point here is that most of the listed conspiracy theories are obviously true and so the question is more about what it says about all the people in denial.
What’s with a “Manichaeism” category? Did psychologists or sociologists just start using this as a catch all for highly dualistic outlooks? Kind of weird… Imagine if we started referring to a secular thought pattern as “christianity” because it shares some Christian idiosyncrasy in a broad sense.
It’s not even the most accurate religion to use. Zoroastrianism is more what the authors are aiming for, but I think Zoroastrian is still prevalent enough that it wouldn’t be PC to misappropriate the term like that. There are still some Manichaeans though, which is what makes it strange that they used that term.
There's an Anti-Gnostic who comments on blogs sometimes.
Use of the term seems to pop up in the 1900s or so if you believe Google Ngrams and increase since then, so I'm guessing there's some now-forgotten cultural battle attached to the term.
You used to occasionally see references to 'Pelagianism' with regard to excessive optimism about human nature. But yeah, you never hear anyone calling feminists 'Collyridianists'.
> 1. Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.
> 2. Even though we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway.
> 3. The people who really “run” the country are not known to the voters.
> 4. Big events like wars, the current recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us.
The problem with this formulation is that in the American context, it was clearly derived by taking "right wing conspiracy theories" and removing the explicit political terms, e.g., someone who believes in CRT would probably say no to this formulation even though CRT logically implies it. CRT believers aren't known for their logical deduction skills.
I was going to post the same thing, good to see you got there first Eugine!
I don't think it's possible for academics to research stuff that involves ideology. Even their "best" attempts are bad in blatant and obvious ways. They are just so far to the left and so hopeless at rigorous thinking that they just can't ever be sufficiently harsh on their own in-group.
Beyond CRT, the supposedly general formulation would give low scores to most of the mainstream left wing conspiracies:
1. The patriarchy i.e. that men conspire in secret to keep women down.
2. That communist regimes always fail because of sabotage by the CIA, not due to the internal contradictions of communism.
3. That Google/Facebook sell your personal data.
4. That Trump is a Russian spy.
5. That social media companies deliberately try to "addict" users (vs the actual situation in which they just make a product people like to use)
And then we have the problem - which to his credit Emil does acknowledge - that believing in more conspiracy theories is rational if there are actually a lot of conspiracies. The left engages in constant conspiracies against the public, and especially against the right wing public. COVID was nothing but left wing conspiracies against the public! It would be irrational for right wing people to not believe more in conspiracies than the left.
The idea that African and diaspora nations like Haiti fail due to European meddling behind the scenes is universally accepted on the left and center. I often think things should be assessed in a predictive/forecasting way, but sycophants can sort of will things to be true by making them publicly accepted regardless of the reality
What you label as conspiracy theory is merely early adopters having advanced knowledge of what will be considered 'public knowledge' in the future
This is a Slave planet. The Others refer to it as a Farm
Malcolm Collins claims we're a slave race and are happier saving others.
I'm like, "Speak for yourself, dude."
Thanks for the article.
Conspiracy allegation is better than conspiracy theory. In most true conspiracies, the government is involved.
Like the case of the word racist, the term conspiracy theory has been used as derision and has lost its meaning.
Black Americans are by far the group with the highest belief in conspiracy theories, incredibly bizarre ones at that. And as you say, people who do these studies are quick to malign low status groups by characterizing all negative perceptions of their hallowed institutions as conspiracy theories. It's like how if you say they're pushing anti-white policy or gender ideology, you're a conspiracy theorist. Yet when they openly say they're doing it, that's a good thing.
My measure of conspiracy thinking would be like classic paranoia where schizophrenics are thinking people are constantly out to get them and are thinking about them all the time, but for a lot of right wing things it's a symbolic representation of their sentiments toward the ruling class not a very strong attachment to imagining concrete highly systematic plans by a group that is in firm control of everything. Sometimes these sentiments are totally right, like with anti-white policy, and sometimes they are wrong and more the product of group dynamics but ultimately it doesn't matter because the left presents it in terms of intersectionality like with climate change
On this and other topics, conclusions drawn about Trump supporters, and about the beliefs held by Trump voters, are problematic because of the term "like" ("people who like Trump", etc.). "Like" is uniquely problematic in regard to Trump.
For the last ten years, a lot of people who vote enthusiastically for Trump as president also despise him personally, but believe that, in the last generation or so, the political class in the U.S. has become so degraded, corrupt, and detached from reality that the outsider Trump, however simplistically he thinks, is in far closer touch with reality that any other possibility in sight.
Doubtless many such people, if they were asked if they "like" Trump, would have to think twice before they replied anything but "F--- no, what do you think I am!".
Some polls have recently begun to distinguish between the two kinds of Trump supporters--the ones who think that would be good presidential material under any circumstances, and those who vote for him because, with the issues so urgent and so clear, and with no other choices in sight, beggars can't be choosers.
"In 2024 (but not in e.g. 1980) Republicans have somewhat more uneducated and low intelligence voters, who are more irrational and prone to believing crazy things." The right has always had its share of high-IQ conspiracy theorists, and the Satanic Panic of the 80s had more to do with religiousness than stupidity.
What is religiousness? If religiousness is heritable, what exactly are the personality traits which make people more or less religious? Is it possible that there is a schizophrenia spectrum (like the autism spectrum), ranging from diagnosable to highly functional?
Conservatives in America tend to be more religious, and the same factors which lead to religiousness also lead to conspiracy-mindedness. However, in countries where free market ideals are not associated with religiousness -- quite the opposite -- the "right" would be less conspiracy-minded.
While I agree that the idea of the existence of conspiracies must be approached objectively, and not snarkiliy dismissed out-of-hand, the core of the phenomenon--widespread belief in conspiracies--is a result of the common man feeling an increasing sense of vaguely defined personal threat.
The sources are not identifiable, but in order to feel a level of comfort, a source must be identified. This allows one to feel that the threat has been identified and that something can be done to avoid the threat. But what's happened increasingly is that various actors--biased news media, political personalities, influencers simply after followers, etc.--have perceived that by offering up conspirators, and supplying some sort of rationale for *why*, exactly, and *how*, these conspirators are after the common man, they can manipulate public opinion to their benefit.
In short, there is a market for conspiracy theories to answer the common man's need to understand *why* he feels so threatened in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Now, note the irony of this: a vast range of manipulators, with few common goals other than self-aggrandizement, closely resemble a vast conspiracy to deceive, but in pursuit of their goals, which rely on "spin" (deception to some degree), they might be mistaken for an organized grand conspiracy.
"It's a strange world, Sandy."
I know some people who'd be labelled as conspiracy theorists (as in, they tend to believe a lot of theories at once), and I myself would be classed as a conspiracy theorist by some. None of us feel particularly threatened by anything, nor do any seem to feel generalized paranoia, as you suggest, nor are most conspiracy theories actionable in any way.
Really, no psychoanalysis is needed here. The core of the phenomenon is that there actually are lots of conspiracies and our institutional systems don't try to find them or punish the conspirators. How many COVID related conspiracy theories were later proven either true or highly plausible, and how many of the conspirators were ever punished? None? The power structures don't care, they actually reward conspiracy and punish the lack of it. So when people see something that doesn't seem to make sense given their priors, they assume the real explanation is a conspiracy. It's quite rational.
"None of us feel particularly threatened by anything, nor do any seem to feel generalized paranoia, as you suggest,..."
If you don't feel threatened, then why do you care about COVID-related anomalies? If there's no threat why bother?
I'm not suggesting that there are no interested parties out there who attempt to enhance their interests at the possible cost of mine, I just don't see much evidence of organized conspiracies to do so. What I see is that if two or more powerful parties want to portray themselves as wholesome family enterprises, e.g., so as to manipulate credulous families spend your money in support of them, they probably never met with each other, discussed, planned, and coordinated any of this: they are both independently using what they found has worked best to achieve their ends.
That's what I think I see out there mostly, and it does not preclude the existence of actual conspiracies, with mutually acknowledged conspirators . But these are much more rare and tend to last only until members of the conspiracy feel that they're better off going it alone.
Parties who think that cynical manipulation is a useful practice tend to screw each other at some point, making actual conspiracies short term, often.
And don't misunderstand where I'm coming from. I'm *not* lightly dismissing any of this; I *am* threatened and put-upon (how does taxing unrealized gains sound to you> how does doing away with the basis step-up? If *that* doesn't scare you...) I just don't see many shadowy figures in the background. Just well--heeled interests trying hard to lie to me and others like me, on their own hook.
Even their ACTS measure doesn't really capture the systemic racism conspiracy theory. Really need a dedicated indicator for that I think to make the study truly informative. Gender ideology too. "Males can be females." I imagine once those are measured well, the differences in political ideology conspiratorial belief relationship they found for the composite would disappear.
They've had various 'third genders' for hyperfeminine men in other (non-Christian) cultures--Indian hijra, Thai kathoey.
Treating gender as entirely a matter of subjective preference is new as far as I know.
Haniana assures us that just ideology, not conspiracy theory.
I would argue that is an incorrect assurance. Especially with respect to men can be women.
Anyone whose socio-political position is "Public belief in conspiracies is low status so I don't act like they real" should be put down for being a disingenuous piece of shit.
The real conspiracy is that people like this are encouraged to survive to the next generation and breed.
Well, I think the various studies show that conspiracy belief is positively correlated to fertility. Perhaps because proneness to believing wacky shit about 5G towers also makes one extra careful with whether the spouse is cheating, and being a careful mother etc.
Honestly, I think it's probably that both fertility and conspiracy belief are negatively correlated with SES. Poor people are more likely to think the world is conspiring against them, and are more likely to have kids.
But, this is a falsifiable hypothesis!
Based and wary-pilled.
Honestly, imagine a noble class that *wasn't* suspicious of what their underlings, peers, and superiors were doing.
They'd have been selected against ages ago.