The Webs We Weave
How conspiracy theories can spin out of control
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
Frederick Douglass
No one wants to be considered a fool. To be considered a fool is an alienating experience. It is humiliating. This is likely why, as Mark Twain once said, “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” To be convinced one has been fooled is to accept one’s fallibility, and that takes a difficult level of humility for many of us. This is also why it is so hard to convince someone who believes in untrue conspiracy theories that what they believe is wrong.
It is important to note first that not all conspiracy theories are false. The phrase “conspiracy theory” today has gained a negative connotation and even a stigma for those that are accused of being conspiracy theorists. Some conspiracies do, in fact, turn out to be true. Historic events such as MKUltra, Watergate, and the more recent PRISM story of secret surveillance by the government of American citizens all turned out to be true - the last one shown by the evidence stolen and revealed by Edward Snowden.
Even before Watergate was exposed as a real scandal, however, it spawned its own conspiracy theories. Desperate loyalists to President Nixon railed against the Watergate burglary as something created by a secret cabal within the government involving the CIA, the Pentagon, or other unnamed actors. They insisted it was all just an effort to destroy Nixon and his presidency. In fact, they had some reasonable evidence that supported their claim. At least two of the Watergate burglars had worked for the CIA which bolstered their claims.
There are many reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories. Many researchers on the subject have suggested that anxiety may play a role. In a 2015 study in the Netherlands, participants who were primed to feel a sense of anxiety or lack of control over their situation were more likely to believe in conspiratorial ideas. Another study at Princeton in 2017 found that rejection by other peers also led people to be more prone to believing in conspiracies. A third study in 2018 researchers at the University of Minnesota and Lehigh University found that participants who felt that American values were eroding were more likely than others to agree with conspiratorial statements, such as that “many major events have behind them the actions of a small group of influential people.”
Often, it is all too easy to write off people who believe in conspiracy theories as having some mental defect or lesser cognitive functions. Recently two German psychologists set out to test this hypothesis. In a December 2024 commentary published in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review, Roland Imhoff and Tisa Bertlich ran a series of studies testing various aspects of the belief in conspiracy theories and its relationship to cognitive abilities. In these studies, they distinguished between what they called “plausible” and “implausible” conspiracy theories. Plausible meant that there was at least some verifiable evidence that supported the claims made by the theory. Implausible theories had either no or much more spurious evidence to back them up.
What they found was that with plausible theories, there was no real evidence of a connection between belief and cognitive abilities. They did find, however, that those participants who scored lower on cognitive skills testing did, in fact, have a greater tendency to believe in implausible conspiracies. As an example, take the conspiracy theories that the Earth is flat or that Reptilians actually run the U.S. government as two actual examples of what would usually be considered implausible theories. The tendency to buy into these types of implausible theories is what one 2015 study actually called the “bullshit receptivity scale.” (The actual title of the study was called On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit.)
One of the biggest problems with conspiracy theories is the ability to actually identify them as conspiracy theories. Several studies in recent years have explored various methods for helping people identify conspiracy theories for what they are in the hopes that this would lead to a better ability to discern whether they are true or false. Anyone who has tried to convince a conspiracy theorist that theories are “bullshit” knows that just providing facts and evidence to debunk the theory rarely achieves the desired goal. This has been termed the “backfire effect.” As Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, has said, “If you think there are powerful forces trying to conspire and cover [things] up, when you’re given what you see as a cover story, it only shows you how right you are.”
We see this in the current conspiracy theories surrounding the Epstein files. This is a case of the President amplifying a conspiracy theory to the point where it has gotten out of his control. In this situation, he is dealing with a plausible theory, because there is ample evidence (including criminal convictions) that horrible crimes were committed, and that there was a criminal investigation that produced information that was not made public. Now that his followers have bought into that conspiracy theory (regardless of whether any of it is true), there is simply no convincing them of the opposite. This is a classic example of the backfire effect.
The problem is, simply giving people the tools to be able to identify a conspiracy theory when they see one does not seem to affect their belief in the theory. In a 2024 study by JP Prims, visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois, she found that people are generally not very good at identifying conspiracy theories as such. She called this “conspiracy blindness.” She found that priming them with a working definition of what a conspiracy theory is was enough to significantly improve their ability to get beyond this blindness and improve their ability to identify conspiracy theories. While her research did not find any significant difference in the ability to identify conspiracy theories with changing their beliefs in them, she suggests that simply identifying it as such might lessen the spread of the theory in that one might want to avoid the stigma of being seen as a conspiracy theorist.
Having a citizenry that can not only identify conspiracy theories for what they are, but can accurately and consistently discern their veracity is of vital importance on many levels. In a 2022 article in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, the authors Daniel Jolley, Mathew D. Marques, and Darel Cookson highlight four major dangers that can come from belief in false conspiracy theories. They are public health risks, intergroup relations social exclusion, democratic engagement, and violence and extremism.
The dangers to public health are very prevalent today. We see this in the conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, as well as vaccines in general. This has caused people to act in ways that not only potentially harm themselves, but put others at risk, as well. the authors of the 2022 article mentioned above found that belief in conspiracy theories even prevented many sufferers from depression to seek antidepressant medications.
They also found that conspiracy believers tended to isolate themselves from those that did not share their beliefs. They tended to congregate with others who believed the same conspiracies. This comes particularly problematic when the conspiracy is directed towards some “other” group such as antisemitic theories about Jews running the world or Hispanics overrunning the country.
Conspiracy believers were also found to be much less civically and democratically engaged. In other cases they specifically participated in a specific way that supported their conspiracy beliefs. For example, they found a significant connection between those that believed conspiracy theories with those that voted for Brexit in the UK. The German studies mentioned earlier found a similar connection. People who have a hard time differentiating implausible from plausible theories also seem to have a hard time seeing the value in democratic principles.
The scariest dangers of conspiracy theories, however, are their tendency to promote extremism and the potential to lead to violence. The conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen promoted by Donald Trump led to the violence at the Capitol on January 6. A 2019 FBI report showed that out of 52 lone terrorist cases reviewed, 24 of them (46%) discussed or consumed information about conspiracy theories. Several mass shootings have also been attributed to such theories such as the gunman to killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 who feared that Jews were facilitating illegal immigration.
For many of us, it feels like conspiracy theories are either a new thing or something that has gotten much worse in recent years. Although the research does not support that, the constant media attention to them and the fact that the President himself is so prone to spreading them keeps the concept fresh and ready for our availability bias heuristic to keep in top of mind.
So, how do we combat this public danger? A 2023 study by Cian O’Mahony, Maryanne Brassil, Gillian Murphy, and Conor Linehan has four suggestions:
Avoid appealing to emotions and affect - attempting to manipulate the emotions of a conspiracy theory believer had very little effect on changing beliefs.
Counterarguments are not effective - facts and reasoning do not seem to change beliefs once a person has been exposed to a conspiracy theory.
Prevention is the best cure - getting out in from of conspiracy theories when possible has been shown to be effective at preventing their adoption and spread.
An analytical mindset and critical thinking skills - engaging the person’s critical thinking skills and teaching them methods of testing and evaluating conspiracy theories overall is the most effective way of combatting the spread and adoption.
One thing that is clear from all of the research is that it is far easier to prevent conspiracy theories from taking hold than eliminating them once they have sprouted. Right now, the Trump administration is learning this the hard way.