conspiracy theory

conspiracy theory, an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group. Such explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories increase in prevalence in periods of widespread anxiety, uncertainty, or hardship, as during wars and economic depressions and in the aftermath of natural disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, and pandemics. This fact is evidenced by the profusion of conspiracy theories that emerged in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001 and by the more than 2,000 volumes on U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy’s assassination. This suggests that conspiratorial thinking is driven by a strong human desire to make sense of social forces that are self-relevant, important, and threatening.

(Read Steven Pinker’s Britannica entry on conspiracy theories & rationality.)

The content of conspiracy theories is emotionally laden and its alleged discovery can be gratifying. The evidentiary standards for corroborating conspiracy theories are typically weak, and they are usually resistant to falsification. The survivability of conspiracy theories may be aided by psychological biases and by distrust of official sources.

Effects of belief in conspiracy theories

Exposure to media that endorse conspiracies increases belief. There is evidence that viewing the Oliver Stone movie JFK (1991) increased belief in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and decreased belief in the official account that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A further outcome was that, compared with people who were about to view the movie, those who had seen it expressed less interest in political participation. It may be that distrust of those in power predicts and is caused by belief in government conspiracies.

Researchers have investigated belief in AIDS conspiracies—the belief that AIDS was created by the U.S. government to kill homosexuals and African Americans—and attitudes toward condom use. This research has shown that the more strongly African American males believe in this conspiracy, the less favourable their attitudes toward condom use are, and in turn the less likely they are to use condoms. There is also evidence that these beliefs lead to distrust of research institutions and are a significant barrier to getting African Americans to participate in AIDS clinical trials.

Such distrust did not develop in a vacuum. Starting in 1932 and continuing for 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service working with the Tuskegee Institute studied the effect of syphilis on 399 African American men. The researchers conducting the Tuskegee syphilis study withheld treatment and allowed more than 100 men to die, despite the discovery of penicillin as a standard cure in 1947. It is clearly worth noting that governments do at least occasionally conspire against their own citizens.

Explanations of conspiracy theories

American historian Richard Hofstadter explored the emergence of conspiracy theorizing by proposing a consensus view of democracy. Competing groups would represent the interests of individuals, but they would do so within a political system that everyone agreed would frame the bounds of conflict. For Hofstadter, those who felt unable to channel their political interests into representative groups would become alienated from this system. These individuals would not accept the statements of opposition parties as representing a fair disagreement; rather, differences in views would be regarded with deep suspicion. Such alienated people would develop a paranoid fear of conspiracy, thus making them vulnerable to charismatic rather than practical and rational leadership. This would undermine democracy and lead to totalitarian rule.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Hofstadter proposed that this is not an individual pathology but instead originates in social conflict that raises fears and anxieties, which leads to status struggles between opposed groups. The resulting conspiracy theorizing derives from a collective sense of threat to one’s group, culture, way of life, and so on. Extremists at either end of the political spectrum could be expected to develop a paranoid style. On the right, McCarthyism promoted paranoid notions of communist infiltration of American institutions; QAnon, popular among fanatical supporters of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump (2017–21), alleged that prominent Democrats were part of an international cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, cannibals, and child murderers; and replacement theory claimed that prominent Democrats and other elites were attempting to replace America’s white population with nonwhite immigrants. On the left was the belief that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were an “inside job” perpetrated by government and corporate interests. Hofstadter’s approach is notable because it places the root of conspiracies in intergroup processes, which means that his theory can account for the ebb and flow of conspiracy theories over time.

Disproving conspiracies

A 1995 study by American psychologist John McHoskey attempted to provide an explanation for the difficulty of falsifying conspiracy theories. McHoskey gave advocates and opponents of the Kennedy conspiracy a balanced description of arguments for and against a conspiracy to assassinate the president. McHoskey’s prediction was that those who favoured and those who opposed the conspiracy theory would both regard that very same statement as evidence in favour of their position. McHoskey believed that this would occur because proponents on both sides engaged in biased assimilation, whereby information that supports one’s position is uncritically accepted, whereas contrary information is scrutinized and discredited. Further, because of attitude polarization, when people encounter ambiguous information, they tend to endorse their original position even more strongly than they did prior to encountering the information. This proved to be the case for both advocates and opponents of the Kennedy conspiracy.

Australian philosopher Steve Clarke proposed that conspiratorial thinking is maintained by the fundamental attribution error, which states that people overestimate the importance of dispositions—such as individual motivations or personality traits—while underestimating the importance of situational factors—such as random chance and social norms—in explaining the behaviour of others. Clarke observed that this error is typical of conspiratorial thinking. People maintain adherence to their conspiratorial beliefs because to dispense with the conspiracy would be to discount human motives in events. Clarke further suggested that the ultimate reason people make the fundamental attribution error is because they have evolved to do so. Humans evolved in tightly knit groups where understanding the motives of others was critical for the detection of malevolent intentions. The cost of making an error in identifying others’ insidious motives was small relative to the cost of not identifying such motives. Clarke proposed that people are psychologically attuned to discount situational factors over dispositional factors in explaining others’ behaviour.