Thinking Problems - Conspiracy Theorists

This is the beginning of, hopefully, a short series of articles on odd thinking.  In line with what I think will emerge as the general theme, the first thing I need to do is define what a “conspiracy theorist” is.

 

For me, it is a matter of perspective, the vantage point from which the conspiracy theorist views a problem, or what they perceive of as a problem.  It isn’t merely that the person believes that there are conspiracies in this world.

 

There have been conspiracies.  Real conspiracies.  The attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and whatever the other hijacked plane had as its target (that is the hijackers conspired, together with their masters) involved a conspiracy.  There was a conspiracy involved in the coverup of the Watergate burglaries.  There was a conspiracy by Tom Cruise and some other less famous people in the Operation Valkyrie attempt to assassinate Hitler.  There was a conspiracy involved in hiding the effect of tobacco on health.  Volkswagen people conspired falsify emissions data.

 

While these were all real, they were, in a sense, minor conspiracies.  That is to say that they involve only a relatively small number of conspirators and those conspirators only intended to directly impact a relatively small number of people.  For example, the attack on the Twin Towers certainly involved the intentional murder of everyone on the planes, and everyone in the direct impact zone, but they were unlikely to have been confident that they’d bring down both buildings entirely with so many people inside and there was absolutely no intention to conduct the attack in such a way as to make it secret from the whole world.  They didn’t, for example, board the planes with latex masks and voice modifiers, all pretending to be Tom Cruise.

 

There are some massive conspiracies that are real.  Like the Santa conspiracy, perpetrated by almost all western parents (although they might use different code names to maintain the pretence, like Tomten in Sweden, or Sintaklaas in the Netherlands).  Or the concerted effort to make people believe that “Turkish delight” is not disgusting.

 

Knowing that these sorts of conspiracies are real does not make one a “conspiracy theorist”.

 

To be conspiracy theorist, in my definition, requires a pathological mode of theorising that implies one or (usually) more grand conspiracies.  A grand conspiracy involves either a massive number of conspirators or a massive number of victims of the conspiracy (usually everyone bar a few very special people in the know) – or both.  A conspiracy theorist may also have a couple of more mundane conspiracy theories in his arsenal.

 

Note that the implication of a grand conspiracy does not need to be explicit.  To take a ridiculous example, some people think that the Berenstain Bears used to be called the “Berenstein Bears”, but something happened to change the name.  Believing this does not seem at first blush to involve a conspiracy.  However, if you think a little further, the explanations required for the Berenstain Bears to have been called the Berenstein Bears in the past all involve a conspiracy.

 

Perhaps there was a concerted effort to replace all copies of the books and other merchandise with the “new” spelling – which would require massive numbers of people who know the truth and are concealing it from the rest of us (for no apparent reason).

 

Perhaps there is an alternate reality in which they do have a different name and memories from that reality has bled into ours.  This involves other instances, like that for this the phenomenon is named.  Some people remember (incorrectly) that Nelson Mandela died in jail in the 1980’s before he was released to later become the President of South Africa.  Other examples include Froot Loops (which were once called Fruit Loops but only a very long time ago), the Monopoly Man’s monocle (he doesn’t have one), Mona Lisa’s missing smile and any one of a huge number of more personal misrememberings.

 

My personal one is that I used to live three houses from someone who worked at a local car dealership, and I did the afternoon paper-round that covered that car dealership.  I moved away to go to university and during those years, the dealership changed its name.  When I came home to visit a few years later, I mentioned the dealership by its old name and was met with blank stares.  My family and friends all believed that the new name had been its name forever.  (However, a state document that I dug up from the internet shows that the old name that I remember was there from as early as 1964 and they were deregistered 20 years after I finished university.)

 

Clearly, the simplest explanation here is that people have imperfect memories (and change blindness).  The conspiracy theorist explanation is that there are alternative realities that impinge on our – and scientists who are aware of this fact have been hiding it from everyone (for no apparent reason).

 

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A conspiracy theorist does not need be a person who generates a grand conspiracy.  They don’t even need to modify or update a grand conspiracy.  A conspiracy theorist can do those things, of course, alone or in company with like-minded people, but not everyone is so creative.

 

The absolute minimum required to be a conspiracy theorist is a tendency towards grand conspiracy theories – either implicitly or explicitly.

 

This last caveat is important.  As mentioned above, conspiracy theorists, and those on the very edge of becoming a conspiracy theorist – the conspiracy curious – will posit explanations for events that they don’t comprehend in such a way as to imply a grand conspiracy.  They might explain it away by pointing to social forces, but they are still subscribing to an implicit grand conspiracy.  Examples of this often involve science and lone “whistle-blowers”, such as with climate change hoax believers and alien visitation.

 

To believe that climate change is a hoax, someone needs to believe that all the scientists working in the area are making up and/or concealing data and that they have either fooled or co-opted politicians along with the media.  The conspiracy theorist can then rely on a small group of “whistle-blowers” or “heterodoxes” for access to “true” information.  If the heterodox is from a relevant, or sufficiently adjacent, field then all the better.

 

If pushed, the conspiracy theorist will claim that it’s not a conspiracy on the part of any one person or group, merely that scientists and politicians are captured by “a prevailing narrative” and there are social pressures to conform to that narrative (along with some form of social contagion that spreads the narrative).  However, this is implying that all the scientists involved (bar the celebrated heterodoxes) will ignore evidence and/or fabricate evidence to support the sanctioned narratives, and put out papers for peer review with all those who read the papers getting perfectly into line to ignore real evidence and/or accept fabricated evidence so long as it supports a mutually agreed narrative that has been arrived individually en masse.  The effect of this social pressure, it is argued, is to conceal the truth from everyone (including those who are deluding themselves) making this an implicit grand conspiracy.

 

A key element to being a conspiracy theorist, maybe even a defining element, is some level of apophenia – or what could be called “hyperactive pattern recognition”.  This the ability and/or willingness to see patterns even when there aren’t any, or to effectively create patterns by linking together disparate elements and/or enhancing the importance of trivial elements.

 

To some extent, our brains just simply do this.  We don’t have perfect access to all of existence, so we fill in the gaps, and much of the time this works sufficiently well to keep us alive.  Note that staying alive is key to what our brains are doing, so this will introduce a bias into our thinking.  We don’t need to make perfect decisions, we need to avoid making wrong decisions that will kill us.  It’s better to be scared by 90% of strange noises, when it’s nothing, rather than miss the critical 1% when it’s a lion or your neighbour stealing your ass.

 

However, it’s a balance.  If we are constantly on edge, and frequently wasting resources on protecting ourselves from a breeze, then we will have a lower likelihood of passing on our genes.  It’s likely that there is spectrum across which people are sufficiently aware of threats without crippling themselves and at the tail ends we have people who are quite unaware (the sort of people who fall for obvious scams) and people who border on paranoia (including conspiracy theorists).

 

A useful way to address the claims of someone who you might suspect of being a conspiracy theorist is to ask yourself: “If this a rational sounding story and what else would have to be true for the claims to be true?”  If the claims involve or imply that some group is maliciously concealing a truth from the whole world, especially if that group contains a vast number of people, then there’s a fair chance that you are dealing with a conspiracy theorist, even if they have no interest in overt conspiracy theories about who killed JFK or what 5G is “really” all about.

 

Of course, there are times when there is a conspiracy that doesn’t amount to a conspiracy theory.  For example, there might be an actual conspiracy on the part of a wedding party to conceal the fact that the bride slept with the best man but that’s not going to amount to a conspiracy theory.  However, if there were a claim that there was conspiracy to conceal that the bride is actually a reptiloid alien in a human suit (and thus to conceal the knowledge that aliens exist [presumably knowledge that is suppressed by people at the very highest levels], that these aliens are visiting Earth [ditto] and that they are interested in committed, long-term interspecies relationships with humans) … well, that’s probably a claim made by a conspiracy theorist, or one of the drunker uncles.

 

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Earlier, I did say that being a conspiracy theorist is a matter of perspective.

 

Imagine that we are looking at this image, which can be thought of as representing facts:

 

What can we make of this?

 

I can tell you that we should make nothing of it.  It’s taken from a set of 50 pairs of random numbers in Excel (using RAND()), which are assigned as x and y values between 0 and 1, and then randomly assigned as Red, Green, Blue or Purple (25% likelihood each).  These were then graphed, and I tidied it up by removing the dots that were on the edge for aesthetic appeal.

 

But if we didn’t know that, then we could ask what the dots mean.  The proper answer in that case is “We just don’t know.”  If pushed for a hypothesis, we might say that they look like randomly placed dots.

 

However, if we were conspiracy theorists, we might want to know the answer to “why?”  Why are there fewer Red than Blue?  Why are three dots clustered very close together?  Why are there three pairs of dots close together that appear to make the same sort of line about 30 degrees from vertical?  Why is there an apparently line made up of two Red, three Blue and one Purple?  Why is there a rocking horse in the top right corner?  And as conspiracy theorists, we might not accept the answer that there is no reason because conspiracy theorists also tend to have a bias towards assigning agency to events.  There are few coincidences for a conspiracy theorist and “things happen for a reason”.  There’s an interesting question with respect to the crossover between conspiracy theorists and magical thinkers, a question which has been studied formally.

 

It’s entirely possible that some people will see patterns in the image that I simply can’t see – because I can easily accept that there’s no underlying meaning to it and I stop looking.  A conspiracy theorist might keep looking until they find something, irrespective of whether it’s there or not.

 

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So, in conclusion, a “conspiracy theorist” is a person who has a tendency towards believing in conspiracy theories, who holds positions that imply conspiracy theories, who has a relatively high level of hyperactive pattern recognition and/or who is overly enthusiastic in the assignment of agency to events.