CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: WHO ARE THEY ANYWAY?

Andy, that’s who. Want to know more? Read on…

This newsletter is about conspiracy theories. So what is it about?

The whole matter is up for debate. Have you ever used the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in conversation? I bet you gave one of those fluttery backwards waves of the hand that we use to signify airy absence of regard. ‘It was dismissed as a conspiracy theory’ – there’s a sentence you might read in the news today. What does it tell us? That the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ is a ‘value-laden term’. So is ‘conspiracy theorist’.

Conspiracy theories cross the grain of conventional wisdom. They tell us that the random events we observe every day are identifiably the outcome of secret plots and schemes, the work of shadowy cabals forever trying ‘to usurp political or economic power, violate rights, infringe upon established agreements, withhold vital secrets, or alter bedrock institutions’.[i] Either that, or the power has been usurped already and the plotters are simply trying to cover their tracks. The rest of us, you and me, non conspiracy-theorists, look out of our windows at the chaos and reckon that, if the plotters have a plan, it looks a lot like not having a plan.

One historian writes about ‘stigmatised knowledge’.[ii] He means that conspiracy theories belong on the same shelf as, say, alien abduction or astrology. While plenty of people believe in them, you’re always a bit surprised to hear them admit it. Their beliefs lie outside our acceptable, socially approved, worldview. The scrawl in which conspiracy theories are written pays no mind to the lines on the page. You and I might laugh, perhaps, but – who knows? – there’s always the possibility that the last laugh won’t be ours.

Here’s a good definition, from David Aaronovitch – ‘the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended […] the attribution of a secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another’. In other words, a conspiracy theory is ‘the unnecessary assumption of a conspiracy when other explanations are more probable’.[iii]

Notice what Aaronovitch’s definition does not do. It does not imply that conspiracy theories are necessarily false - just that another explanation is ‘more likely’. That’s a useful distinction to bear in mind. After all, conspiracies do sometimes happen. We know they do. Just look at Volkswagen, or those CIA mind-control experiments in the 60s and 70s.[iv] Both really happened, even if they do sound an awful lot like ‘conspiracy theories’.

While they may, sometimes, turn out to be true, conspiracy theories are reliably implausible. It’s almost as if implausibility were a vital feature. Occam’s Razor tells us that we’re generally better off reaching for other explanations first. There’s a good reason why. Take one well-known conspiracy theory: that NASA faked the moon landings. The implausibility rests on one simple fact: it would be more difficult to fake a moon landing than have a real one. After all, a hoax would involve literally thousands of participants, including, but not limited to:

The politicians who planned it

NASA employees who agreed

The astronauts themselves

Props department who’d love to be able to advertise their brilliance to the movie industry

Ditto set designers and lighting engineers

Photographers

Engineers

Security forces

Journalists who pretended to suspect nothing even when a Pulitzer Prize beckoned

Navy men who pretended to fish the astronauts out of the sea at the end of the trip.[v]

All of these individuals would have to be involved: every single one. Every single one had a good reason to go public. Yet every single one has nevertheless stayed mum for decades. Surely one of them would have said something? Surely one of them would have burst out blabbing a decade later, after a drink or two? Did the government really keep them quiet, all of them? To believe that, we need to invoke yet another layer of complexity: a secret agency of some sort, whose job it is to enforce omerta; make sure witnesses stay schtum. No surprise, then, that many people who believe their government has covered up evidence of alien contact will also talk your ears off about those witness-nullifying Men in Black.

You can probably think of any number of conspiracy theories that fall at this hurdle. They may – just possibly – be true, but the sheer effort they would require means that the balance is clearly tilted against them. (How much trouble would it be to project holograms of aircraft flying into the World Trade Center at the exact same moment the CIA’s explosives brought the towers down? How many things could go wrong? And consider the catastrophically infinite price of failure.)

Some conspiracy theories, let’s be honest, really are just plain wrong. My own favourite example is Flat Earth Theory - and the corollary belief that, although there’s ‘no such thing as gravity’, all the physicists in the world have, for no obvious reason at all, agreed to lie to you about it. The reason objects stay on the floor when you drop them is ‘air pressure’. My brother was once unsuspectingly interviewed for YouTube channel about exactly that. When he pointed out that air pressure is a direct result of gravity, the conspiracy theorist fled (although, mysteriously, he never vanished over the horizon).

Flat-Earthers (‘Flerfers’) often believe in the ice-wall, too.

Have you heard about the ice-wall? It was built around the South Pole to prevent us from sliding off. Behind it live the super-rich, the people who control everything and laugh at us. Regular folk like you and me are not allowed to visit Antarctica in case we discover the Truth. Or so Truthers say. In actual fact, you can go online right now and buy a ticket to Antarctica, if you happen to feel like it. Buy several. Show your tickets to a Truther, though, and they’ll insist it’s fake. Or that the conspirators drug the passengers once they’re on the plane to make them think they’re in Antarctica. Or blackmail them into silence. Or something. Again, consider how elaborate such a scheme would have to be; how many conspirators would have to be involved, how many co-conspirators and co-co-conspirators.

‘That’s just what they want you to think.’ It’s a common phrase among Truthers and their brethren. It leads us to another interesting aspect of conspiracy theories: their self-reinforcing nature. Any evidence against a conspiracy is, perversely, evidence in favour of it. Tell a Truther that pictures taken by NASA prove that the Earth is round and they’ll tell you that proves NASA is part of the conspiracy. Tell them Lee Harvey Oswald was a lousy marksman who’d never get recruited for the sharp end of an assassination and they’ll tell you that the Army faked his record. Sensible people can only shrug and turn their minds back to Occam’s Razor. The probabilities are far from equal. A rational gambler can always see where to place the bets.

Truthers fall prey to the so-called ‘converse fallacy’. It’s easier to illustrate than to explain:

Premise 1: If there’s a cover-up, official reports will undermine our claims

Premise 2: Official reports undermine our claims

Conclusion: Thus, there’s a cover-up.

Hence, the ‘glaring absence of evidence’ for conspiracy theories becomes evidence for them.[vi]

Here is the historian, Lewis Namier: ‘The crowning attainment of historical study is an historical sense – an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen’.

And things do not usually happen like this, not as a result of conspiracies. Remember that President Richard Nixon couldn’t even manage to get a handful of tapes wiped. That’s how successful real conspiracies tend to be. Could the lizard people really cover up the fact that they control the world? Could NASA really fake the moon landings? Could Adolf Hitler have secretly founded a Volkswagen factory in Argentina? Forget about it.

All of which makes us ask: Who are these believers? Who are the Truthers? I bet you have a mental image. You do, don’t you? A conspiracy theorist looks a bit like Mel Gibson in the movie, Conspiracy Theory. And he, in turn, looks a bit like your cousin Andy.

You know the one. Andy. There are more Andys than you think. A lot more.

As of March 2020, 43% of US citizens believed that ‘an extrajudicial deep state was secretly embedded in the government’. Twenty percent believed that Barack Obama faked his citizenship when he became President.[vii] Here’s UK’s Daily Star: ‘nearly half of Brits (48%) admit to believing in at least one weird plot — the most popular being that the moon landing was filmed in a television studio’.[viii] Well, we already dealt with that one. Conspiracy theories are like Saga customers on a coach trip. You don’t get one without a lot of others (and all of them come with baggage).[ix] That’s probably where the stereotype of the tinfoil hat-wearing paranoiac comes from – a person who’s susceptible not just to one, but to all kinds of ideas to which we ourselves perhaps respond with what we consider to be appropriate scepticism.

Saga customers on a coach trip don’t necessarily get along all that well. I mean, have you seen them? Yet incompatibility is no concern for the real, dedicated conspiracy theorist. Those who believe most strongly that Princess Diana faked her own death, for instance, also believe most strongly that she was murdered. Those who believe that Rosicrucian’s run the world also believe that it’s run by lizard people.

Psychologists know why. ‘Our ideas are deeply entangled,’ one author writes, ‘and accepting even one dubious belief can mean a spiral of impacts on other concepts’.[x]

Take the belief that vaccines cause autism. In order to add that to your ‘web of belief’:

‘you must weaken confidence [in scientific authorities], and increase the force of other higher-order beliefs so they can supply adequate alternative justification. To those who follow the debate over vaccines, these higher order justificatory beliefs are all too familiar: natural is better than unnatural; scientists are in the pocket of Big Pharma; mainstream media can’t be trusted; you are the best judge of what’s good for your body.’[xi]

Certain people - in the words of one researcher - are just ‘generally prone to explain societal events through assumptions of conspiracy formation’.[xii]

You’d think we’d be able to spot them, wouldn’t you? Surely they’d stand out in a crowd like Father Christmas or Mr T.

Think about Andy. You know, your cousin with the dirty hair, the low-vitamin pallor, and the hurried demeanour of someone whose cooking is done exclusively with the microwave. Yes, that Andy. The guy who keeps saying ‘set-up’ and ‘patsy’ and ‘this goes higher than you think’. Psychologically speaking, what do we know about Andy and his mates?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. Andy’s a ‘he’, for one thing (he’s Andy, not Andie). Around 55% of men in the US and 52% in the UK believe at least one conspiracy theory.[xiii] For women, the percentage is a little lower - 48%.

Another thing about Andy: he’s called Andy. They’re all the same, you know, these Andys. No fewer than 72% of men called Andy believe at least one ‘bonkers conspiracy theory’.[xiv] Nine of the ten top Truther-names are male. Among women, only Lorraine makes the list.

Rate of beliefs differ. Some less-popular conspiracy theories attract only around 1% of the population (the lizard-people may be a good example - and have you heard about The 300?[xv]) Other, more successful, conspiracy theories attract anything up to 71%. That may be good reason in itself to wonder whether we can ever hope to create a ‘profile’ of a conspiracy theorist to compare, say, with the FBI’s ‘profiles’ of serial criminals.[xvi] What would it even mean to ‘profile’ 71% of the population? It would make more sense to profile the remaining 29%.

Even so, we might yet have our suspicions about Andy…

We might suspect, for instance, that he doesn’t get out much. We might imagine him spending a lot of time in the basement, alone with his unravelling globes of string, his teetering ziggurats of newspaper clippings, his databases and cascading spreadsheets. It sounds as if Andy is extremely introverted, doesn’t it? (I mean, even more than your regular Substacker.) We’ll see next week that we’d be wrong about this.

What other suspicions might we have? For sure, academic psychology tells us that Andy may feel alienated from the ‘System’ and disenchanted with The Man.[xvii] No surprise there, though, is there? File that in the Uninteresting Findings drawer.

Do you suspect Andy may belong to a minority group? You might not be wrong. It’s very likely. Perhaps that relates to Andy’s sense of powerlessness. Members of minority ethnic groups often feel exactly that way. One author writes this: ‘low social class may lead people to blame the psychological or realistic problems that they face (e.g., alienation from the societal elite, unemployment, and relative deprivation) to the existence of malevolent conspiracies’.[xviii] Conspiracy theories may offer Andy a panacea. They represent ‘a kind of hidden or forbidden knowledge, possession of which may give the holder a sense of power that they might otherwise not feel in their everyday lives’.[xix] They are bandages for Andy’s ego.

That is where our study of Andy should pause. Next time, I’d like to share a couple of interesting pieces of research into the subtler aspects of Andy’s personality and mental skill set. They won’t be what you think, I promise.

I look forward to seeing you there, Crime & Psychology fan. Meanwhile, please help keep this newsletter going by banging a big blue button below. Smack it like it insulted your souffle. Thank you!

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[i] Douglas KM, Uscinski JE, Sutton RM, Cichocka A, Nefes T, Ang CS & Deravi F: ‘Understanding conspiracy theories, Political Psychology, 40 (S1), 2019, pp. 3-35

[ii] Barkun, M: A Culture of Conspiracy – Apocalyptic visions in contemporary America, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

[iii] Aaronovitch, David: Voodoo Histories – The role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history, Jonathan Cape, London, 2009, p5, italics added

[iv] Marks, John: The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ – The story of the CIA’s secret efforts to control human behaviour, Allen Lane, London, 1979

[v] Aaronovitch, David, op cit, pp1-3

[vi] Grimes, David Robert: The Irrational Ape – Why we fall for disinformation, conspiracy theory & propaganda, Simon & Schuster, London, 2019, p34

[vii] Uscinski, JE & Enders, AM: ‘The coronavirus conspiracy boom: nearly a third of people we polled believe that the virus was manufactured on purpose. Why?’, The Atlantic, April 30, 2020

[viii] Wagstaff, Eve: ‘Men with one name in particular are more likely to believe Flat Earth conspiracy', Daily Star, 3rd September, 2024, Available at: Men with one name in particular are 'more likely to believe Flat Earth conspiracy' - Daily Star

[ix] van Prooijen J.-W., & Acker M: ‘The influence of control on belief in conspiracy theories: Conceptual and applied extensions’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29, 2015, pp.753–761

[x] Grimes, David Robert, op cit, p16

[xi] Alan Jay Levinovitz, quoted in Grimes, David Robert, op cit, p16

[xii] van Prooijen, J. -W: Why Education Predicts Decreased Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Appl. Cognit. Psychol., 31, 2017, pp50–58.

[xiii] Oliver JE & Wood TJ: ‘Conspiracy theories and the paranoid style(s) of mass opinion’, American Journal of Political Science, 58 (4), 2014, pp. 952-966

[xiv] Wagstaff, Eve, op cit.

[xv] Coleman, John: Conspirators’ Hierarchy – The story of the committee of 300, America West Publishers, USA, 1992

[xvi] Douglas et al, op cit

[xvii] Byford, Jordan: ‘Conspiracy theories’, in Ailsa Strathie, Jim Turner & Meg John Barker (eds): Living Psychology – From the everyday to the extraordinary, The Open University, Milton Keynes, 2023, pp219-261

[xviii] van Prooijen, J. -W,op cit.

[xix] Crocker J, Luhtanen R, Broadnaz S & Blaine BE: ‘Belief in US government conspiracies against Blacks among Black & White college students – powerlessness or system blame?’ Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 1999, pp941-53