CONSPIRACY CHAPTERS 1-9 TRANSCRIPTS

Chapter 1: “We love conspiracies”

As a culture and society, we absolutely love conspiracy theories. Two separate studies cite roughly the same number – I’m pasting links to the studies I reference in this video on my website at fredpinto.com/podcast – about 50% of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy (one of the studies adds the word “disproven” – but of course, it’s not always clear when a theory is proven or disproven).

Probably the most rigorous one was performed at the University of Chicago, and the number it cites is actually a bit higher, at 55% The point is, they’re really popular, ok? There are more people who believe in conspiracies than people who vote for any one presidential candidate in the United States – although I know that’s not a totally fair comparison, Still, it gives you a sense of the scale of how popular they are. The question I want to ask here is why? What explains this? Is it true that the rich and powerful endlessly exploit us for their own gain in hidden, immoral and illegal ways? Do they really pull the strings behind all of the major world events that we know or the governments we elect part of a grand plan to dominate and control and manipulate us – whether it’s through the World Economic Forum, in hidden societies like the Illuminati, through the mainstream establishment, mainstream media so on and so forth. How far do these phenomena really go? And perhaps most crucially: if at least some of these theories are false, which appears to be likely, what does it mean that millions of people still believe them? What does it mean not just for democracy, but also for our mental well-being as individuals and as a society?

But also, on the other hand, what does it mean if some of these theories are true? This is also, I believe, quite likely. And so the question is, how can we cultivate a healthy form of skeptical thinking in a modern democracy heavily mediated by technology tools, without slipping into fantasy and delusion? How do we question things like the shared interest of the power elite, the military industrial complex, the combination of big business and big government working out how society works behind closed doors without slipping into strong beliefs about how aliens are secretly ruling us, or how some individuals control world events like puppets on a string. How do we deal with the lines in the middle of these extremes?

This is a topic I’ve enjoyed and debated with friends and colleagues for many years. I also think it’s a complex topic with far reaching consequences, not just politically, but psychologically. It deals with nothing less than our epistemology, right? Our theory of accepted truth, the messy process of how we separate truth from illusion. And it’s also a topic that’s easily deformed or turned to ridicule or, you know, subject to politically motivated arguments or just confusion. It’s easy to dismiss people who disagree with us as conspiracy theorists, right? Or to say that there’s always something wrong with you psychologically if you believe something that runs counter the official narrative. And to believe that when we do this, when we spot people and call people out for being, you know, conspiracists, that we’re being smart and sophisticated. And the reality is, I believe the topic is a lot more complex and interesting than that.

The term “conspiracy theory” is also mobilized politically all over the place. Team Red will use it to discredit Team Blue and vice versa. And those who are more politicized are attracted to the theories that confirm their beliefs. Today, people believe it’s a problem on the right. But the University of Chicago study finds this isn’t a problem, of right or left. They’re both equally likely to believe in conspiracies.

And it isn’t even a question of smart versus dumb, as there’s no evidence that people who believe conspiracies are any less intelligent. It’s a problem of motivated reasoning versus honest and skeptical determination of truth.

You’ll see it on the right and left. You’ll see it on the right when they blame the left for peddling a “conspiracy theory” about Trump’s ties to Russia, which seems to be wrong in retrospect, but you’ll equally see it on the left when they’ll call right-wingers “conspiracy theorists” for believing the government pressured Twitter to shadow ban or downplay certain accounts during the last couple of presidential elections.

My goal here is to factor out all of the politics and take a hard, rational, evidence-based look at this phenomenon. Turns out there have been some really useful studies and explorations on the topic that I think can help us understand it more clearly. And I’m going to summarize the key findings of those here. I’ve also created a little digest, including links to the sources and references to all of the studies I referred to in this episode. And if you sign up to my Guerrilla Wisdom Substack, the link is in the description of this video. You’ll get a PDF of those. So you can pick and choose where you go if you want to go deeper in any one of those. With that said, let’s get started.

Why do we love conspiracy theories so much?

 

Chapter 2: “Because sometimes, they’re true”

Ok, so first things first before we look at why so many people believe in conspiracies from a personal perspective, from a psychological perspective, there’s one major concession that needs to be made if we’re going to take this topic seriously and create a proper frame around it. It comes from the political realm and from the realm of power. More generally. And it’s definitely a major reason that people are attracted to conspiracy theories and probably always will be. And this is the first of seven distinct reasons that explain our attraction and drive towards conspiracy thinking. And it’s a major one. And it’s that sometimes it turns out that conspiracies are actually true.

There’s this funny quote by the Beat writer William Burroughs, who writes that, “Sometimes paranoia is just having all the facts.”

So there’s a popular notion in some psychology circles, particularly in academic psychology and in some mainstream political circles, that just because an idea sounds like a conspiracy, that it’s evidently untrue. And this is a surefire sign that there’s some kind of malfunction in the brain or in the thought process of the believer.

Some people just enjoy pathologizing the entire phenomenon, and it becomes the ultimate “call to insanity.” In other words, you believe in something that sounds like a conspiracy. Argument over before it even began. You’re not a serious person. Let me now tell you why there’s something wrong with you and how I can heal you from this terrible affliction.

But this is simply not true. There are a number of logical flaws and fallacies at play when people adopt this kind of reflexive skepticism, usually as a claim to expertise or authority on a given topic. Many conspiracies in the past have proven to be true. This is just a fact.

So first, the dictionary definition of a “conspiracy” is to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act, or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement. Now, you don’t have to scratch that much beneath the surface of our reality to find these secret agreements.

Now, granted, some of the more grandiose and unlikely conspiracies like those involving aliens or the Illuminati ruling the planet, are much harder to believe. But in the world of big government and big corporations, this kind of secret agreement is actually pretty frequent. If you look at the history of big tobacco or of the pharmaceutical industry or of Wall Street and big investment banks or military campaigns, our history is absolutely littered with instances of big power being exercised via hidden agreements and people finding out what happened way later.

So the great sociologist C. Wright Mills made this point in his classic book, The Power Elite, where he looks at the reality of the top rungs of power in our society. And he admits that people who believe that those who have power are omnipotent and all powerful are probably delusional to some degree. But at the same time, this is the quote “‘If those who occupy the top grades are not omnipotent, neither are they impotent. There is neither a small group who decides everything, or an absolutely shared exercise of power … the owner of the roadside fruit stand does not have as much power in any area of social or economic or political decision as the head of a multi-million dollar fruit corporation.’ ” as an example.

So it seems to be a relatively constant feature of human societies. The small number of people will be exponentially wealthier and more powerful than the vast majority of us, and it would be naive and foolish to think that those people never use their resources and power to gain more resources and more power, or that they’re never willing to cheat and lie and bend laws and bend the moral rules to get to their ends. There are many, many examples of this which I link to in the sources and references after this talk. So I won’t go into those in great detail here, but the history books are filled with them.

Here, I just want to quickly reference a couple that are still relevant today just for illustrative purposes.

The first is false flags or planned provocations by governments. Very controversial topic. Okay. The basic dynamic of a false flag or a planned provocation is some kind of a planned attack or, you know, some kind of intervention by government forces, which then leads to a response, and which then justifies the police or the military intervening in full force. So it’s an attempt to kind of control the narrative.

It’s controversial. Listen, there’s also crying wolf reality here. There’s been a lot of attempts to sort of say that this is a planned provocation. This is a false flag that have not been proven. But we know for a fact that governments have used these tactics as part of law enforcement and military goals for a very long time.

The classic example from the West is Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which started as a false flag. But we also know that Western governments have at least considered these, but are very likely engaged in them at various points in the history. So some of the big ones, there’s pretty good evidence historically for our Operation Northwoods in Cuba, where the CIA proposed an attack that would justify an invasion of Cuba. In the end, JFK rejected it. But we know that it was part of military thinking.

In Iran, the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat. The U.S. government wanted to depose the Iranian government at the time, so its plan was to carry out attacks on mosques, which would be blamed on forces loyal to the government to get more local support. The CIA destroyed the files, but there’s good reason to believe that something like this happened.

And of course, there’s the Gulf of Tonkin episode during the Vietnam War, where the US claims there was a second attack on one of its military ships to justify a big response. It was later revealed that there was no second attack, but the response was nonetheless carried out. So again, this is an example that that’s often given.

The point is that, especially when it comes to military strategy, even Western governments have shown themselves capable of at least seriously considering and in some cases actually pulling the trigger on this kind of tactic.

There were also many examples of planned provocations or bouts of violence by government agents during political protests. Again, when the government wants to justify coming in with full force to stop a protest, this is often done.

So this is the kind of thing that has some historical and political truth to it and which would justify some suspicion sometimes in the form of a conspiracy theory to hold the government accountable when it does engage in this kind of tactic.

The second is stealth surveillance programs by the government. And the big one here is the program known as PRISM, which Edward Snowden courageously and famously revealed. I personally remember having friends before the big public reveal of these programs in 2013 saying, you know, the government is probably spying on our phones and listening to our private conversations and communications and me responding with, okay, how does it feel to be schizophrenic?

There’s just there’s no way they would need a warrant before breaching our rights to privacy and so on and so forth. And of course, I was proven wrong with it. Turns out that this program was live since 2007. And today, of course, there’s tons of evidence of government intercepts of our data, although by now most of us know the rules of the game, we know that our privacy online is super fragile and that push comes to shove. The government, sometimes even foreign governments, can pretty much access anything they want.

So there is evidence of covert conspiracies orchestrated by democratic governments. And if you dig, you can find a lot more. Again, there are more examples in the PDF.

And this leads to an interesting distinction between democratic governments and non-democratic governments. When you go to non-democratic governments or less democratic governments like the ones that we have in China, Russia, Iran, some places in Africa, so on and so forth, actual wide-ranging conspiracies are almost the norm.

We have this underlying assumption in the West when we engage in conspiracy thinking that powerful people even need to lie to us. In Iran or China or Russia. It’s not a conspiracy that they’re spying on you or that they’re killing their political rivals. They’re doing it. They’re doing it openly. They don’t need to hide it. In fact, they may even have an incentive in people believing that they’re omnipotent and that they know and control even more than they actually do. And that’s because the people don’t have the actual ability to remove them from power. So the more people believe that the government knows and controls everything, even when it doesn’t, the more they can self-censor and hide and not engage in anything that’s threatening to the establishment.

That’s why there’s something particularly Western about conspiracy theories of our leaders and the rich and powerful feel at least some iota of accountability towards us that would justify some need for them to even hide these things from us. So anywhere you have a very active and indeed public activity around the topic of conspiracies, you also have a tacit recognition of a quasi-democratic state of affairs. It’s like, Hey, things are not supposed to be this way. There are rules that we need to protect. I have the right to complain about the fact that these rules are not protected. I have the right to talk and challenge those who have power, even do so loudly on social media, even when I’m wrong.

Also, we in the West, one of the reasons there are more false conspiracy theories in the West is because we don’t face the same kind of consequences for our political activism than people in countries like again, China, Russia, Iran, others. We can afford to get it wrong. We can even afford to do it for fun and for sports and for clicks on social media.

When people complain publicly and loudly in Iran, for instance, you know that their complaints are real because they’ve got skin in the game. They face much more dire consequences for their beliefs. So this is probably why there are also more false conspiracy theories in currency in the West than in more repressive regimes, because we have this a much more open public square where there is much less repression. And I think it’s important for us to remember that.

Now as we start looking at conspiracy theories and different kinds of conspiracy theories and the levels of belief that people have in them, we have to be careful and please pay close attention to the details of certain positions when we discuss this topic.

Believing or not believing something is ultimately a matter of accurately evaluating reality, and really, what kind of proof or evidence do we need to declare ourselves satisfied with a belief? Or vice versa, what kind of proof or what kind of deficiency do we need to show when we say we’ve disproved a belief? Is one piece of evidence going in the direction of your desired belief proof of your belief? Is it just a numerical exercise? So when there’s more pieces of evidence that stack up for your belief than against it? What about the credibility of the evidence and how credible, one piece of credible evidence could be more powerful than 100 pieces of shoddy and selective evidence? So obviously, the credibility of the evidence, the nature of the evidence is also important.

Because it’s easy, super easy. Nothing is easier than to selectively stack evidence in support of a belief and then claim that you proved it. We have to also consider what kind of attention have you given to contrary evidence? Because if you haven’t, maybe you’re just engaged in confirmation bias. We’ll get back to that point later on in the capsule. And obviously, if you’ve done this, if you’ve demonstrated that you simply wanted to believe in something, that reduces the credibility of your of your position, even if it ends up being true, because the process you followed was not a reliable one. So broken clock being right twice a day, right? Like you can stumble upon the truth, but you’re not a reliable source of the truth because the process that you followed was selective. It was motivated. You didn’t look at the evidence as a whole. And so the credibility of people who think this way is rightfully brought down a couple of notches. And then also, what does it mean when you say that you’ve disproved the theory? So somebody brought a theory to the table. Now you’re this you’ve disproved that. If someone hasn’t been able to prove a theory convincingly, in your mind, does that mean it’s necessarily disproven? Does it take one piece of selective evidence against the position to disprove it?

So usually in law and in science, you know, the two disciplines that take evidence and demonstration of proof the most seriously, the standard to disprove a proposition is usually quite high because you have to first steel man, once something has been basically established with some direct evidence, you have to take it seriously, and you’d have to address all the ways in which it could be true first, even the ones your opponent isn’t making.

In other words, you have to first steel man a credible position before you can rip it down and say that you’ve disproved it. And too often what we have instead in our society is just motivated reasoning both sides. So one side using selective evidence to prove a belief. Who wants to believe the other side shouting selective evidence against it. And there’s just no real value in a public discourse of this nature. It’s just confirmation bias versus confirmation bias. In a healthy society, positions would be taken first on the strength of some direct, strong evidence and then the burden would shift to those who want to disprove it, and they should have a higher not a lower standard, because once you’ve established something, you’ve established some kind of a truth. If people want to come in and disprove it, they should have a heavier burden of proof to do that.

So just to take probably the two best-known conspiracy theories as an example, because they prove different parts of this in different ways. So we’re gonna take the moon landing and the JFK assassination.

And just before I start, I just want to clarify, I have zero dog in this race. I personally care 0% as to which theory is true. I just personally like to know the truth, but my identity doesn’t rely on the findings here. My political views don’t really strongly rely on any of it. I will go where the evidence goes. I will gladly entertain any conspiracy, and I try to say like this with all conspiracies, because my ultimate desire is to know the truth, to know what actually happened. So if it turns out that these dark things are true, I have an incentive to know.

So I personally would love to know if aliens are in secret contact with our elites and through these naked drug ceremonies controlling us like Alex Jones of claims I would love I would love to know if that’s true. But I also don’t want to go around believing this and living my life based on the fact that this is true, if it’s nonsense. So the starting with the moon landing, there’s obviously a theory that the moon landing was a fake. It’s a hoax. It’s a film put together by the government. But the burden on those who claim this theory is pretty high, because there’s a lot of direct, credible, real evidence for the belief that the moon landing of 1969 actually happened. So at the very least, we have the first witness accounts of the astronauts involved. We have literally hundreds of thousands of people that were involved in the space program. I suppose they could all be agents of the government. But the odds that there are no leaks with such a large number of people after all these years, again, pretty low. The evidence you’d have to bring has to be really convincing. We have moon rocks that have been verified as lunar in labs all over the world. So again, the amount of coordination we would need. So the theory that it’s true has been proven again to a pretty decent degree. There’s not zero evidence for it. Again, you’re allowed to say, you know, all of this is fabrication, all of this is fake. But because there is already credible, real evidence for the official story, the burden of proof is on you. You have to produce evidence disproving the official story. If you haven’t done so after all these decades, we can probably lean on the direction of saying you haven’t disproven the official theory.

With the JFK assassination, where over 60 years after the death of former President John F Kennedy, polls show that 70% of people in America still believed the assassination was the result of a larger plot. And a convicted assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, wasn’t acting alone in the case of the JFK assassination. After all these years, there’s no real direct evidence for the lone gunman theory. Lee Harvey Oswald never directly admitted that he was a lone gunman. Even if he had, that wouldn’t necessarily be greatly convincing. Again, I have no dog in this race. I don’t really care all that much either way. I’m just a Canadian lawyer. But there are all sorts of theories here, right, involving some of them, the CIA, some of them the KGB, Fidel Castro, the Mafia, Lyndon B. Johnson, and so on and so forth. But that initial burden to prove the theory of the lone gunman has simply not been discharged very convincingly. So in my view, conspiracies about who was involved can still be actively held in a very broad and wide speculative space. Maybe they need a little bit less evidence to make truth claims that should be listened to.

Now, I know here that there was a commission, the Warren Commission report on this. I don’t want to get in the weeds of this here, but there were very fundamental flaws with the evidence that it relied on to make its determinations. The Warren Commission was extremely political. Again, I’m not going to get into it too much, but in my opinion, there were enough flaws and political interference in the establishment and operation of the Warren Commission to cast serious doubt on the conclusion that the lone gunman theory was conclusively proven. And this is with the benefits of a full spotlight, a very, very expensive government inquiry, which makes it even more meaningful that there was no clear evidence for the lone gunman theory. Now, I’m not affirming 100% one way or another here. I’m just saying it’s quite a bit of credible direct evidence to support the initial, let’s call it the official account of events. So the moon landing, or even the fact that 911 was perpetrated by Islamic terrorists without getting into that into more detail. There’s a lot of direct evidence there. While there is none conclusively proving the initial theory or credibly proving the initial theory with the JFK assassination, so that Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone.

Or to give another example, more recent that COVID emerged from animals in wet markets and not from a lab leak. The direct evidence there was not strong enough that we should not look at the lab leak theory and take that really seriously. So for this reason, you can’t lump all conspiracies in the same category, especially after the passage of time and after we’ve sort of seen what kind of evidence there was for the official account, what kind of evidence there is for the conspiracies.

And when the initial burden. This is really the important point here. When the initial burden has not been discharged properly, those who hold alternative theories don’t have as heavy a burden to justify their suspicion. And we should openly and actively entertain these conspiracies as part of potentially containing the truth. So 70% of Americans are not crazy, in my view, to believe that there may have been foul play in the JFK shooting for that very reason. The intelligence of crowds sometimes. And so for these reasons alone, to quickly summarize that power exists that the wealthy and powerful in the past have engaged in hidden strategies to expand their power, and that the burden for really disproving a theory, and I’m not talking completely outlandish theories involving aliens. I’m talking theories that can at least be supported by some direct evidence is quite high.

We should be skeptical of people who quickly or regularly dismiss those they disagree with as conspiracy theorists with mental problems, as you’ll often see in the mainstream media or in academia. And here’s the major point here, because at least some conspiracy theories end up being correct and because it’s impossible to know in advance which ones are and which ones aren’t, there’s at the very least, some overlap between conspiracy thinking generally and a tradition of skepticism and critical thinking that’s actually really central to a functioning democracy where we want to hold people who have power accountable. There’s a disputed terrain for truth. Let’s not forget this. There is room for valid, wide ranging disputation of events, of government decisions, hidden agendas and so on and so forth. And it’s important not to easily dismiss conspiracies and make oneself look serious and skeptical unless we’ve done the work. Consider the evidence, and we’re making a rational, evidence-based truth claim.

 

Chapter 3: Because they’re emotionally addictive

At the same time, we also know that many people who believe in conspiracies don’t simply just follow the trail of facts. There are other reasons that people passionately believe that royals are secretly lizard people or that the Sandy Hook shooting was a staged event, or that it was planned by the Zionists or any number of outlandish conspiracies. And before we can get into the more complex internal reasons explaining these beliefs right off the bat, I think there’s a very immediate and emotional aspect that makes conspiracy so attractive.

Just like human beings can get addicted to substances like sugar and alcohol, we can also get addicted to certain emotions and feelings and attentional patterns, and we get locked into these holding patterns where we enjoy feeling a certain way, or we’re compelled to feel a certain way and so we will seek out experiences and information that supplies those feelings.

So there’s a branch of neuroscience called “Affective Neuroscience” that studies the relationship between the emotions and the brain. And researchers have identified SEVEN PRIMARY EMOTIONAL SYSTEMS in the brain, the positive ones being SEEKING, CARE, PLAY, and LUST and the negative ones being FEAR, SADNESS and ANGER.

Conspiracy theories instantly evoke many of these sometimes, positive ones and negative ones at the same time, and they create a kind of an instant powerful cocktail of emotions that people can become very attracted to.

So first, the obvious one, and it’s kind of a playful one, is that conspiracy theories are often surprising and fun and kind of very dynamic and interesting to think about. They naturally stimulate our curiosity. We live in a spectacle society. There’s a huge demand for entertainment and conspiracy theories are super entertaining. They’re shocking, they’re often outrageous. They have this “wow” effect the instantly stimulate us. There’s a reason the tabloids love them so much. I mean, it’s just fun to speculate about all the nasty things that powerful people are doing behind our backs, whether it’s Hillary Clinton running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza store or the CIA being secretly involved in killing a president or an alien master race, communicating with our leaders through naked drug ceremonies to enslave us. I mean, these could be premises for some pretty entertaining movies. And so conspiracy theories often have this attractive, salacious, surprising, fun aspect to them. Then right after these fun emotions of play and curiosity, these are triggering all four of the negative emotions at the same time. So fear, sadness, anger, disgust. Because with conspiracies, the story is always about how those at the top are pulling the strings in invisible ways to ultimately control and oppress us, and about how disempowered we really are, how society’s really just one big lie and are supposedly leaders are just always deceiving us. So a lot of fear, a lot of cynicism, a lot of anger, disgust, contempt. This is a powerful cocktail of negative emotions which the brain can become really attracted to because feeds are natural negativity bias where which evolved out of our needs to detect threats in our environment. So I cite a study in the PDF showing that people who were exposed to intense negative events early in their lives may develop an addiction to negative experiences as adolescents and adults, and this can become a central organizing feature of their personality. So that’s really important because if you have the habit of interpreting events in your lives in a negative way because of experiences that you’ve had in the past, conspiracy theories can become a very attractive way, to sort of explain world events.

But it’s not just negative, right? Beyond just the kind of tabloid, superficial style of like, fun. These theories also have a more fringe, out there, interesting curiosity about them. So similar to when we have discussions about things like UFOs, ancient civilizations, new technologies, psychedelic drugs, the metaverse, the A.I. take over, the things that we’re genuinely curious about in a healthy way. You know, conspiracy theories come in and promise to tell us the truth about these things and the fact that it’s a hidden truth that the establishment wants to hide from us makes it all the more attractive. And it’s this constant back and forth between fun and curiosity on one hand, and the extreme darkness of the negative emotions of disempowerment and anger on the other, that gives this topic a lot of its energy and power. So another study I cite shows that people who have experienced the “hedonic extremes” in their lives so big ups and big downs can also become susceptible to addiction, Right? So big highs and big lows are associated to the phenomenon of addiction. And it seems to me that this is something that conspiracies can offer in droves.

So overall, this cocktail of emotions is very compelling and it can hijack our rational brains. And no wonder in an age of social media and shock media and clickbait. People are drawn to them, whether the information they contain is true or not. And this is an important point because a lot of people often try to debate people who believe in conspiracies rationally, or they’ll just mock and ridicule them. But contrary to the belief of some, one of the most consistent findings when it comes to research covering conspiracy theories and the University of Chicago study, I referenced earlier also shows this, that there’s really no evidence that people who have conspiracy theories are any less intelligent or any less knowledgeable than people who don’t have them. It’s not about the reason and the facts. There are often deeper emotional reasons behind belief in conspiracies. So the emotions and energies that drive the phenomenon and indeed drive a lot of our attentional patterns online, many of you will have seen The Social Dilemma, the documentary, and how social media companies weaponized the use of emotions like outrage and anger to get people addicted to their platforms. A lot of these same patterns and emotional factors are also key drivers of belief in conspiracies.

 

Chapter 4: Because we want to disbelieve the official narrative

So our first couple of reasons started sort of on the outside, the reality of power in the world. Big governments, big corporations. The fact that because of that, some conspiracies are true and have been true historically, and then also with a very powerful and instant emotional impact that conspiracies have on a lot of people, which may explain why some people become attached or even addicted to them, regardless of their truth content, just like people can get addicted to negative news or angry social media commentary in general.

And so now we’re slowly starting to work our way in with our third of seven reasons. And here we’re going to start putting the spotlight on internal psychological factors that vary a little bit more from individual to individual. And to start with, this reason here is there’s multiple different studies that point to the same finding, namely that people who have certain psychological traits or tendencies are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and those without those traits and tendencies. Okay. So first of all, at the extremes, there are clinical conditions like schizophrenia or schizotypy, that are associated with conspiracy, think thinking. But these are not very common in the grand scheme of things in the general population. Again, the statistic we looked at initially was around 50% of Americans believing in conspiracy, so millions and millions of people believe in conspiracies. There are not that many people statistically speaking, that are schizophrenic or that suffer from schizotypy. So I won’t really focus on them. But definitely, if someone has one of these conditions, this may explain why they’re attracted to some explanations involving connections that may or may not exist, or to paranoid feelings and ideas. And one interesting tidbit actually in one study on schizotypy that I mentioned in the PDF is that belief in conspiracies was found to be more common among people who believe the world is a dangerous place. So people who have that belief that the world is a dangerous place will tend to be more attracted to conspiracy theories as a way of explaining that more generally. So that was in a paper about schizotypy and how it leads to, you know, more people with that condition will believe in conspiracies. But there was also a finding around that belief in general, the belief that the world is a dangerous place. But there are also the personality traits that emerge from the big five personality tests. So the ocean model, just quickly, for those who don’t know. Openness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, introversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. So those are the sort of five big personality traits that many, many studies have found are associated to various different outcomes. And there’s a particular profile that emerges from the big five personality tests that are associated with the belief in conspiracies and that make the belief in conspiracies a lot more common. So let’s take a look at those. So there’s a researcher called Shauna Bowes, a researcher out of Emory University, and her and her colleagues surveyed about 2000 people and found that those who scored low in agreeableness and also who scored low in conscientiousness, so two out of the big five personality types have low scores in both of them were more likely to embrace both general conspiracy theories. So statements like the government is hiding something from us and concrete ones too. And so, for example, at the Apollo, moon landings were fake. So that’s a really interesting finding, right? People with low scores in agreeableness and in conscientiousness are prone to conspiracy thinking. And that sort of makes sense when you think about it. Low agreeableness means you don’t just want to “Agree” with the official narrative You tend to look for reasons to disagree with statements, so not agreeable. You’re looking for faults in arguments that others are presenting to you and so forth. And low conscientiousness also means you aren’t very orderly or careful with the details. You’re not so concerned about the details and about the sequencing of the details. And it seems that from a strictly a big five personality trait perspective, believing in conspiracies is at least partly a function of having a tendency to disagree or disbelieve in general, but also not being too fussy or orderly about the details.

So a good example of this is the difference between actually believing something on one hand on the strength of evidence, or because you have real clear reasons why you believe it and simply wanting to disbelieve the official narrative on the other.

So some people who hold conspiracy theories will sometimes believe contradictory things at the same time, which shows that it’s not so much that they actually believe in one theory as much as they actually actively seeking ways that would allow them to disbelieve or disagree with the official mainstream narrative. So in one amusing study, people who believe that Princess Diana was murdered were also the very same people, were also more likely to believe that she faked her own death. Right? So is she alive? Is she dead? Contradictory findings. Right? And these are the exact same people, who rated both of these scenarios as more likely than the official story sort of car crash theory and obviously these two stories can’t both be true at the same time But participants who were more likely to believe one were also more likely to believe the other, even though they’re sort of contradictory with one another. Right. You can’t be both dead and alive at the same time. So it seems that these people are brought together by a sense that something just isn’t right. Something’s wrong. Something’s being covered up by the government. So any alternative to the official story is preferable to it. There seems to be this raw desire to discredit the official story more than there is a coherent belief that’s based on the details and the evidence and how much this all makes sense. So it’s not so much a coherent belief as it is a desire to disbelieve. So, yeah, again, this reason, low agreeableness and low conscientiousness combined will mean that you are more at risk of believing in conspiracies and the solution isn’t necessarily to force yourself to become more agreeable, but maybe to shore up and build up your skepticism and your engagement with the details into something a little bit more robust and healthy. Something I’ll be returning to at the end of the capsule.

 

Chapter 5: They mimic a sense of meaning

The next reason that conspiracies can be so attractive is that they mimic or imitate a sense of coherence and meaning about the world and how it works. And that, it turns out, is a very powerful thing that a lot of people feel that they lack today. So obviously we live in an increasingly complex, uncertain world, a world that violates our expectations all over the place or proves our predictions wrong. It’s just getting harder and harder to predict the future with everything that’s happening. Right? Think about the speed of technology. AI macro world events like COVID or the war in Ukraine and covering up our confusion about the world with conspiracies can help restore a basic sense of coherence. Right? We have this very deeply rooted need for coherence and certainty. It’s ultimately connected to our need to find meaningful patterns and to understand the world and also our need for safety and our need to live in a predictable environment.

And when the world becomes unpredictable or too complicated, or changes too fast, it’s tempting to just grasp for an explanation and explain what’s going on, whether it’s true or not. So obviously, there are many very a lot of different kinds of variations to this. Sometimes we can adopt an explanation without necessarily believing in it very strongly and being open to the evidence that goes against it. And on the other side of the extreme, you’ve got the phenomenon of apophenia or what Michael Shermer, who wrote a book about conspiracy theories he calls it Patternicity, which is described as the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. And this is notoriously the case with loosely held conspiracy theories. A lot of the facts, and sometimes even most of the facts or even all of the facts that they use will be accurate. But it’s the causal connections between those facts that are a little sketchy and not correctly established. So, yes, there are unethical, powerful people out there. Yes, they would like to sort of pull the strings behind world events. And yes, there are negative outcomes in life, and there are these powerful people benefiting from world events. But these phenomena are not always related to or connected to one another.

And also a point I’ll come back to later is that incentives may explain the level of coordination between powerful actors more than an active conspiracy, which would have to include something like an intention, right? Actual actions, actual collusion.

Sometimes the world is such that people and corporate entities with power can take advantage of situations better than people without it. And it seems like they’re benefiting from, let’s say, COVID or from a war or from the emergence of a new technology. And they are benefiting from it. But it’s not because they’re connected to a conspiracy that made these things happen in the first place. It might be because their financial incentives are to benefit and their ability to promote their interests is, you know, that ability so, so powerful, so significant. So incentive and power may be able to explain these connections more than an active conspiracy. But regardless, conspiracy narratives can fulfill our need for certainty and security. The people believing them can still believe them.

For instance, when events seem random or dark and unpleasant, there’s a study around this as well. When we experience random events or events that we simply don’t understand. The drive towards believing conspiracy theories is very powerful. The conspiracy theory model gives us an endless supply of coherent explanations. This is why this happened. This is why this happened. Right. More and more events are explained by powerful people in the shadows, pulling the strings. And if people question this, either they’re in on the coup or maybe they’re just like a naive sucker. Right? And this process can go on endlessly, regardless of the evidence, regardless of the logical connection between the different evidence points.

There’s another series of experiments by a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who finds that finds that the tendency to perceive illusory patterns so to connect stimuli that aren’t related is part of the cognitive machinery behind beliefs in conspiracy theories. Now, it’s important to note coherence doesn’t mean that you even have to like the explanation. In fact, here, people find the coherence, often through a really bad story. It’s essentially the belief in a hopeless future or in the futility of life as it is because, who cares? Because the powerful are just going to pull the strings and do whatever they want to do. Which is true, by the way, right? In a non-conspiratorial way and sometimes in a conspiratorial way as well. But even a bad story is better than having no story at all. Right. It allows us to say, okay, we know how the world works. And even if it’s a threatening reality, I know what the threats are and I know where the threats are coming from. Right. So it gives us a sense of order, a sense of meaning, a sense of understanding of how the world works. This is also connected to what psychologists call an explanatory style. So a manner of explaining things. And then people will interpret events in their lives using that explanatory style. But it’ll be they’ll also be more likely to explain, you know, social events, political events this way. So there could be different ways that it makes life coherent for us. Right. Either having this ready-made bag of explanations for why things are the way they are, or sometimes giving us a great fight, a great and just battle to fight like Alex Jones does. Right. So it can range from the passive explanation of we are the victims and we are just like the passive observers of these stories to the heroic battle where we are the saviors or we are the chosen ones, we are the ones who are, you know, finding out what’s wrong and we’re going to do something about it. But in both cases, it gives us the appearance of order and the illusion that we understand a complex and essentially uncertain and rapidly changing world.

 

Chapter 6: They make us feel like a truth insider

The next reason is less about our overall need for coherence and meaning and more connected to our individual egos and specifically our need to feel special and instead, conspiracies can make us feel good about ourselves like a truth insider.

 

So they give us the sense of being competent or knowledgeable or even better for our egos are kind of super intelligent, all knowing, super perceptive person. This can give us a little bit of an ego boost and a little bit of pride that we’re special. We’re not like everybody else who believes the mainstream media like mindless sheep. We know something other people don’t know. We know what’s really going on. You can’t fool me.

And in this way, conspiracy thinking can act as a form of narcissism. And Dr. Karen Douglas of Kent University in the UK who studies conspiracy theories, shows there’s a strong connection between narcissistic tendencies and a likelihood to believe in conspiracies. A recent study in 2021 found that participants who were higher in narcissism scores were also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories as well, seemingly because they’re more likely to hold unusual beliefs. Also, they like to have these different beliefs. But there was also interesting that there was some evidence also suggesting that it was both forms of narcissists that were more likely to believe in conspiracies, but in different ways. So you have essentially two forms of narcissism. You’ve got the one that most people know, like grandiose narcissism, this need to feel special and unique and to get special privileges. But there’s also this other form of narcissism called vulnerable narcissism, where people feel particularly vulnerable or weak or fragile or like the victim. So it’s interesting, the study in 2021 showed that vulnerable narcissists believe in conspiracies because they also suffer from paranoia. So they’re often very fearful and feel targeted by external agents. And so they’ll be likely to believe in conspiracies, whereas those who are high in grandiose narcissism believe in them because of a desire to be unique.

So again, what I mentioned before like this need to feel smart to be in the know, to know things that other people don’t know. But in both cases, interesting ranking high in narcissism scores meant that one was more likely to believe in conspiracies. So it’s quite interesting how, you know, very often we see these two forms of narcissism as being kind of at odds with one another. But there are some similarities between them, and belief in conspiracies is one of them.

So ego dynamics can operate both out of fear. So the feeling that we’re particularly vulnerable, particularly weak, particularly needing the protection of an external agent or out of self-inflation, right? This feeling that we’re special, that we’re unique, we want to be seen by others as being wise or smart, or in the know or to some degree, normal, but like with extra knowledge on top of people, right on top of what normal people have. And these tendencies to think along these lines are strongly associated to conspiracy thinking. And this link between narcissistic tendencies and the belief in conspiracies is very well demonstrated in many studies. Again, many of those will be available in the PDF Companion to this podcast and has links on my website as well.

 

Chapter 7: They lighten the burden of responsibility

The next reason. So the sixth out of the seven reasons we have is that thinking that everything is a conspiracy and that the odds are stacked against us can lighten the burden of personal responsibility that we all bear for the outcomes in our lives.

So it’s hard and painful to point the finger at ourselves for the outcomes in our lives. And as human beings, we’re often attracted to explanations that blame an external agent as a way of liberating ourselves from that pressure. So conspiracies always involved blaming others, right? Especially all-powerful others who allegedly control everything. And when we do this, we simultaneously liberate ourselves from the weight of personal responsibility and from making ourselves accountable for our outcomes. We all we all bear some responsibility for the outcomes in our lives, especially as we get older and our past decisions start stacking up against one another. But if the rich and powerful are pulling the strings and just controlling everything, I no longer feel the need to feel quite as responsible or quite the same burden. And so it could basically function as a form of escapism, as an escape valve to this kind of sense of personal responsibility.

A global liberal elite wants us to own nothing and be happy, and that’s why I’m not successful in my business or the rich and powerful stack the odds in their favor, so this is why I don’t have a job. If it’s somebody else’s fault, it’s not mine. If someone else is in charge, it’s not up to me to improve my life or to improve society at large even.

In this case, it’s kind of like the opposite of Jocko Willink’s extreme ownership, right?, where you adopt a mindset that every outcome in your life is your responsibility. The subtext here, too, blaming others is a very disempowering truth and it’s also others who have the power to actually change and improve your life. I found one study showing that an external locus of control so the tendency to blame an external agent for the outcomes in our lives, as well as having feelings of powerlessness, predicted belief in conspiracies. Of course, this doesn’t mean that conspiracies always function this way and doesn’t even mean that the beliefs are wrong necessarily. But in individual psychology they definitely can: thinking this way is one of the reasons that some people are drawn to conspiracy thinking.

 

 

Chapter 8: They create a sense of community and belonging

And finally, the last reason we love conspiracies is that conspiracies drive a sense of tribe and community in a lonely world. We live in a world of increasing social isolation for a lot of people, of “Bowling Alone” in the title of the great book by American sociologist Robert Putnam, who shows that civic and family life in America has been steadily declining since the 40’s, and especially so in the digital era. Through conspiracies, people can create a kind of “in-group” dynamic that pits the group against mainstream society. And this has a powerful appeal for people thirsty for the sense of community and human bonding that they’ve lost. It’s similar to cult dynamics except they’re way less costly. You can have it, but also remain in the comfort of your own home on your couch, taking no real personal risk. Again, Karen Douglas’ research shows that conspiracy narratives can fulfill our need for social belonging. And if you think of the QAnon folks, for instance, these people were often loners in front of their computers, socially isolated, without strong connections or family or friends. And with the QAnon conspiracy, all of a sudden, they had a tribe. They had friends that had these intensely held beliefs together. And all of a sudden, they were connected to a meaningful struggle. And this amazing sense of belonging that they were all craving. And this was likely a powerful reason why they were also invested in the conspiracy.

 

Chapter 9: Toward Healthy Skepticism

So the initial question was why do we love conspiracy theory so much? And after taking a good hard look at the research, I’ve reviewed seven separate reasons that explain the popularity of conspiracy theories and a little bit of evidence supporting each one of them.

Starting from the really general. So the reality of power dynamics in human society, the fact that the rich and powerful can and have in practice conspired behind closed doors and hidden their designs to increase their power to do things they’re not supposed to do, to not admit what the reality was in terms of we talked about planned provocations, we talked about false flags, we talked about the surveillance. We talked about all sorts of stuff in the political realm. So some suspicion and conspiracy thinking is welcome and even healthy in a modern democracy.

Then I looked at the general emotional attractiveness of these theories from both positive emotions like surprise, curiosity, fun to play, to negative emotions that can be just as attractive, like anger or shock outrage, all of which, this cocktail of emotions gets magnified in a spectacle society such as ours, where we love entertainment, we love powerful emotions, and we saw that people who’ve had really strong hedonic experiences, so really strong positive experiences and really strong negative experiences are a little bit more likely to be addicted to information and to explanations that bring back these positive and negative emotions.

Then I went a little bit more internal and I reviewed five reasons that were a little bit more niche and psychological in nature, and that really vary a lot with the individual, right? So any time you talk about psychological factors, you can generalize up to a point, but individual psychology really starts to become a lot more important. So the first one, how having low scores in agreeableness and in orderliness on a Big Five personality test means that we’re more likely to engage in conspiracy thinking. And we look for ways to disagree with the official narrative, even if the facts don’t exactly line up for our theory. It’s kind of a structural flaw that we have or a structural kind of feature that we have in individual psychology that will make conspiracy thinking a little bit more attractive to us.

Next, we saw how our need for coherent explanations about the world and how it works in a, you know, a modern, confusing, rapidly changing society that we have that will also make us more likely to look for explanations of the world that we can understand, because that’s connected to our need for safety, our need for coherence. And, you know, when we don’t feel like we have a lot of coherence and a lot of understanding of the world, conspiracies come in and they start providing readymade explanations and a sense of understanding about the world, even if it’s illusory or even if it’s unattractive, even if the theory’s actually negative. At least it gives us a sense of understanding what the threats are and where the threats are coming from.

And we saw how explanations that involve blaming an external agent are so attractive as this allows us to lower the weight of personal responsibility in our lives, which can feel overwhelming for some people, right? If we can cast blame towards external factors, which conspiracy theories often do, you know the weight of personal responsibility that we carry for the outcomes in our lives becomes lowered.

And finally, how conspiracies can create a sense of tribe and community in an often lonely and isolating world. We start to be connected with others around these powerful shared beliefs. Sometimes we start believing in a heroic journey together, like we often see with people in cults. Sometimes it’s just more of a passive thing than the explanation.

So these factors can obviously combine and, you know, connect with each other in very personal ways. Right. And in connection with world events, the news cycle through, there’s so many ways in which these factors can kind of kind of come together with an actual individual and start driving them towards a particular theory. A lot of this will depend also on our personal histories, on our, you know, personal psychological makeup, our interest level in politics and world affairs, the issues we’re interested in, our upbringing, so on and so forth.

And I guess the first insight that emerges from this analysis is that we shouldn’t automatically pathologize conspiracy thinking, right? Remember the first point, sometimes conspiracies are true, sometimes we don’t know if they’re true. Sometimes the official narrative the government or big corporations have is self-interested or is reflective of an agenda that they have. And sometimes it’s not supported by very much direct evidence. Right. So because of that, we need to maintain a little bit of openness and hypothesizing around these conspiracies, again, in respecting history and what we’ve seen happen in the past from the centers of power ultimately.

But very clearly because of the psychological factors at play and how quickly our media space and our society is evolving, there’s also a very real risk of falling inside of a deep rabbit hole and believing things that aren’t true. And so as a society, we need to start promoting a healthy, calibrated form of critical thinking, a skepticism that isn’t just automatic or ornamental, but systematic, that’s humble, highly responsive to the evidence.

And the consequences of not getting this right, so the consequences of unchecked or unhinged conspiracy thinking go beyond just the mental health of the individual that has them. This can also create dangerous group dynamics, as we saw during the January 6th uprising, or as you see in the context of many cults, This can lead to huge swathes of the electorate basing their electoral decisions on false information or unsupported suspicion. So what happens to a democracy when millions of people start voting based on these theories? Your democracy itself becomes eroded to some degree.

So this is clearly a complex topic that we need to respect. We can’t just quickly develop one idea around it and say, Well, that’s what conspiracies are. They’re always nonsense. They’re always, you know, sign that a sign that something’s wrong with the individual. They’re always this is how the world works. Very, very, I think, simplistic and reductive to look at the topic and just reduce it to a single cause or a single explanation.

But again and again, because of the stakes here, it’s important to get it right. And the real core of it is what I just talked about, skepticism, right? When is skepticism healthy and when is it not healthy? How is it being exercised? What are the markers of healthy skepticism, which is critical and vital to, I would say, not just a healthy democracy from a social perspective, but even personally in your personal psychology, having a strong, balanced, honest form of self-evaluation, critical thinking and skepticism is extremely important. And obviously, when we start talking about social topics, it’s extremely important as well.

So we started with the false skepticism. The people who dismiss anyone who believes anything that resembles a conspiracy. So that’s, I think, a reflexive, easy, cheap form of skepticism. That’s really just an appeal to power or an appeal to expertise. I think it could be extremely shallow in the way that it works. But there’s also the false skepticism of the person who deeply believes that they understand how a complex world works based on shoddy evidence or motivated reasoning. Right. And so that’s really that that term motivated reasoning or confirmation bias, that’s the obvious case of what skepticism is not right in many ways, it’s the logical opposite of skepticism. Confirmation bias is not the reason that people believe in conspiracies. The reasons are the ones that we just went over the seven reasons. But it’s the argumentative technique that people use to sort of glue together or hold and maintain their theories, whether or not they’re true. Every time you’ll see a belief being held that ends up being inaccurate. Most likely there is some confirmation bias occurring. There’s an old adage if the facts don’t fit the theory, change the theory. That’s what we’re supposed to do. But all too often it’s easier to just change the facts, right? It comes from a 1958 article in the Journal of Product Engineering, and that’s what we’ll do, right? If the facts don’t fit the theory well, I’ll just find some new facts. Confirmation bias is simply deciding what we want to believe first and then second step, stacking the evidence in favor of it, and downplaying evidence that goes against it in a systematic way.

That’s why it’s also called motivated reasoning. It’s reasoning that acts that acts as logical and fair, but is really motivated by a desire to believe something for a reason unconnected to the logical process.

So, for example, if you want to believe 911 was an inside job, you’ll start citing the expertise of structural engineers who have the opinion that the World Trade Towers went down like a controlled demolition. But you’ll neglect or downplay or explain away the expertise of the vast majority of structural engineers who can explain how the buildings went down as a result of the massive beams holding up the buildings, melting from the intense heat of the aircraft full of fuel, so on and so forth. I’m not a structural engineer. I don’t claim to have expertise in this domain, but I can look at it very objectively and say, okay, well, there are some structural engineers who say that, you know, this was a controlled demolition, but they’re far more structural engineers saying the opposite. So, I mean, I’ve got to sort of way, I’m not going to step into that debate and pretend that I’m a structural engineer and that I understand these things. But I’m also looking at the evidence both for and against and trying to come out of it with, okay, what’s my best approximation of the truth here?

As lawyers, we know confirmation bias very well. Our entire industry is based on confirmation bias because people are inherently biased in favor of their side in a legal dispute. And what they do is they stack evidence in their favor. And in doing so, we notice sometimes people start losing touch with reality a little bit. And if you do this too much and if you’re not, you don’t have a lot of integrity at looking at the other side, you’re going to find it very hard to gain the favor of an unbiased and independent judge as a result.

But folks in cognitive science have developed a newer term for this. They call it myside bias. And one of the most consistent findings is exactly in line with the University of Chicago study I cited at the beginning. And it’s that intelligence is not a protection against it. So does a researcher, Keith Stanovitch, who studied the phenomenon of myside bias and looked at it across a variety of different paradigms and expressions. Again, I’m putting some links to that. And it was very revealing to see that the magnitude of the myside bias that we have, shows very little relation to intelligence.

So again, having high verbal intelligence or having high technical intelligence even does not protect you against confirmation bias. In fact, may make it even more of a challenge because you have more tools and a better ability to justify to come up with selective evidence. And you can start stacking up more and more evidence because you’re so smart.

So intelligence doesn’t really give us a protection against confirmation bias or myside base. It’s important to think of this because very oftentimes, intelligent people have an easy time coming up with justifications or rationalizations for things. And so it’s something a little bit deeper that we need to do if we want to start having a little bit more separation from our views or the reasons why we believe certain things.

So a small heuristic that people use all the time when engaging in motivated reasoning or in confirmation bias is the Can I Must I heuristic. So when we want to believe something, we’ll ask, “can I believe this?” And we start looking for any shred of evidence that would support it. And over time, we can start collecting this evidence in a one-sided way and be like, Wow, look at all the reasons I have.

On the opposite side. When we don’t want to believe something will ask, “Must I believe this?” All of a sudden, we start scrutinizing it really hard looking, squinting to find any flaw that we can with it or any evidence that goes against it. Right. And lo and behold, we can find evidence for that as well. So it’s the frame that we use that will determine, you know, with the results of our many little thought experiment are going to be.

So if we start using “can I must I” in as a heuristic underlying our arguments and if we start using that always in the same way, right. So if I’m looking at a particular issue, I don’t know the environment or the war on terror or, you know, big tech, and I’m always applying the “can I must I” heuristic in the same way, that’s an indication that we might be engaging in confirmation bias or myside bias and are no longer trading in objective truth but in motivated reasoning.

Now, we may have good reasons for believing what we believe, but those reasons will not be connected to the results of our reasoning, and we should probably simply be honest about it. The reason I believe this truly is this. It’s not all the evidence that we come out with, and how we present it after engaging in confirmation bias is suspect, because the process is one-sided. It’s not an open-ended, fair, skeptical evaluation of truth.

And so obviously the obvious point here is we want to adopt the same standards of evidence for a proposition as we use against it. It doesn’t work if, when wanting to disprove the official narrative, you’re this uber-skeptical cynic, really hard to convince. But when it comes to trying to prove your theory, you’re naively connecting the dots in the flimsiest way with the smallest piece of evidence. Okay? Have the same, or at least a similar standard of evidence for both directions.

And so the first that really, in being a healthy skeptic, is examining honestly whether we’re engaging in confirmation bias and the reasons why we’re doing this. As a fun exercise, you can flip the “can I must die” and see what emerges from it. If you’re applying, “can I” flip it and say, “must I” and see, okay, like what am I responding to here? What evidence against my proposition have I not looked at just as an exercise of personal humility, you don’t need to show it to anyone, but doing this can help us create a little bit more separation with our own beliefs, a little bit less emotional attachment to our positions, and allows us to start scrutinizing them a little bit more rationally.

The second critical step in becoming healthy skeptics is to really understand the difference between a hypothesis and a belief or a conclusion. The comedian Steven Wright had has an expression that I love, he says, “a conclusion is just the place where your mind got tired of thinking”, okay, so understand the difference between a hypothesis and a belief and the main difference between a hypothesis is and a belief is the degree of certainty that you derive out of a certain proposition. And also as a function of that, the degree to which you’re responsive to the evidence that comes out both for and against it.

And very simply, a hypothesis is pre-evidence, right? It’s just like, okay, I think this might be what’s happening here. I think this might be what’s happening here. And you’re allowed when you’re when you’re engaging in a hypothesis, you’re allowed to be intuitive, you’re allowed to go with your hunches, try to connect the dots creatively, go with your underlying model of how reality works. That’s fine. It’s completely fine, but you don’t necessarily derive a lot of certainty around that hypothesis, right? It’s pre-evidence, right?

A belief, ideally or a conclusion should be post evidence or post scrutiny. It’s only after you’ve really scrutinized your hunches and the positions for and against that you should be comfortable deriving a lot of certainty, right? Otherwise, you can still hold on to your hunches, but as hypotheses and not as beliefs, and you derive less certainty from them and be responsive to evidence that goes for and against or maintain a little bit more of an open mind. Right?

And part of the reason that the scientific method works this way is that beliefs are expensive. Once we start believing something or once we’ve concluded something declared ourselves, once our mind got tired of thinking or like this is the conclusion, we start to base our decisions on that belief. We start to base our lives on this belief. We start to neglect things that go against it. We start to spin narratives around it. And so we want to make sure before we adopt the belief, we need to have solid reasons. We want to have tested it with logic and with the best evidence available to us. And we obviously want to make sure that we aren’t subscribing to some kind of fantasy, right?

So we want to really calibrate the amount of certainty that we have around conclusions to the evidence and to the process that we’ve gone through before. We’ve elaborated them. So when it comes to conspiracies being skeptical, it just means bringing that skeptical thinking to everything right, to the official mainstream story, which people have, a lot of rebellious people, low agreeableness people love doing, but also to your own stories, your own hypotheses, right? The things you want to disprove, but also to the things you want to believe.

The third critical aspect to being healthy skeptics and I discussed this quickly earlier, is forcing ourselves to notice the difference between intentions and incentives. The Comedian, for some reason, comedians have great, great little zingers and great little thoughts about conspiracies. So the great comedian George Carlin had a good formulation of this when he said you don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. Right? So some conspiracies love to say just follow the money as if people or companies or governments doing things in a coordinated way always means that they’re in cahoots behind closed doors. But that’s not how it works. When people have an incentive to act a certain way, unconnected people without a conspiracy can start taking actions. And even if they’re not in communication or coordination with one another, they can start acting in a way that will benefit them from a financial, from a power perspective.

And this doesn’t mean that we don’t criticize them or hold them into account, but there are opportunities to criticize and hold powerful people into account that don’t require conspiracy thinking. Maybe they’re just opportunistic. Maybe they’re just using their power to get more power. Maybe they’re just not respectful of laws and moral norms. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily in a conspiracy with one another. Right? Again, that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out or oppose them. But when you invent a conspiracy where none exists, I almost feel like sometimes we want to make everything cinematic. We want to make everything like a movie script. We want to turn it into a narrative, Oh, these people are with these people behind closed doors. When you do this, when you invent a conspiracy where none exists, you lose credibility. You make it easier for people to easily disagree with you. And then even the valid criticisms of the people in power lose a little bit of steam. So, you know, the lab leak theory during COVID, you don’t have to prove some elaborate conspiracy between the US government and the Chinese government. You don’t need to go there. It’s institutions doing what’s good for them. And then sometimes comedies of human errors. Things can happen in a way that that isn’t necessarily cinematic or scripted or easy to understand. Like the conspiracy model pretends. So always remember the difference between intentions and incentives.

The fourth is to adopt some simple logical heuristics to just check yourself. So we all have these. The Myside bias is an example. We have these cognitive biases that are that make it easy for us to adopt certain positions for reasons that are unconnected to the underlying reality. So if you start believing something that sounds like a conspiracy, like I said earlier, you can do the exercise where you flip the “can I must I” perspective, right? Or you can also another form of this is you can require more evidence if the conspiracy would require more steps in order to be true rather than less steps. Literally, lay out the steps that would need to be true. The things that would need to be true for the conspiracy to actually work in the real world. This is a classic mistake that behavioral psychologists show, and I put it in the PDF is that when we add a feature to the series of steps, the sequence of steps that’s typical or that corresponds to a stereotype, we start thinking that the odds of it being true increase, but in truth, adding a step to the sequence lowers the probabilities. So lay out the steps. The more steps would need to be true. For the conspiracy to be true, the more evidence you need, the less likely it is to be true.

There’s also the simple heuristic You probably heard the term exceptional claims require exceptional evidence, so you wouldn’t need necessarily a ton of super original evidence or direct evidence for a conspiracy to the effect that the government engaged in some kind of a planned provocation during a protest that it didn’t like, or eavesdropped on the population, or that it was really in the power of some big corporation when it developed a certain regulation. Because we’ve seen these things before.

This is these are an accurate description of how power actors behave in the world, but a claim, for instance, of alien control of our elites, or even a claim that the government would intentionally kill thousands of its own citizens to justify a war, like the 911 truther claims these would be a lot more exceptional. They would require more evidence to be true, because of their exceptional nature.

There’s another one I like here in terms of just these little logical heuristics, is that the smaller the circle inside where the conspiracy happens and the more perfect or absolute the power that they have on the outside world, the more evidence we need, the more skeptical we should be towards it. So the smaller the controlling groups, three people deciding everything in the world, the more direct evidence I would need to believe it. Right? Because it would be exceptional. The world just seems more complex and multipolar than that. There are many competing centers of power corporate, governmental, military, super wealthy individuals in many different places around the world. And it would seem unlikely that they’re highly coordinated, all of them in a conspiracy involving just a few people.

So you hear the Klaus Schwab, the George Soros stuff at the WEF. These guys are really pulling the strings behind everything and controlling absolutely everything. They’re pretty awful at it. Their desired outcomes like, own nothing and be happy, are ridiculed by millions of people. And there’s simply not how the world works right? So claims like this would require more evidence. Now, that doesn’t mean they don’t have influence, and they don’t have power, right? It just means that they’re not pulling the strings behind world events the way that some conspiracy theories believe. So claims like this require more evidence before they can lead to strong belief because of their exceptional nature. So for everyone, just adopting some helpful logical rules and little tests just to kind of check the belief.

A fifth one’s an easy one. It’s more data driven and empirical in nature. And I love this one because I have a lot of friends who believe in conspiracy theories and I put them to the test. And if I’ll engage in, I love, I would love some of these conspiracies to be true. I would find them really interesting and entertaining, and I would want to update my map of the world. What I tell people is, okay, let’s make a prediction here. So this is the fifth one. Just make predictions and keep track of them. Because what often happens is that people have super strong beliefs that remember during COVID, okay, this means, telling you this what the government governments were waiting for that since they’re tracking our every move through these apps, through the control mechanisms and so forth. This is a brave new world. That’s it. Like, okay, well, let’s make a prediction. How long do you think the COVID measures will last? And I remember myself making the prediction. I think I don’t see them lasting for more than five years. Like that was like the safe sort of prediction. I would need to see this happening for a number of years before I’m like, okay, wow, like this conspiracy has a real chance of being true. Turns out now you’ll see. That’s it. This is it, This is it. Well, what ended up happening was two years later, the measures, even in the most restrictive states, all went down. And so, but what likely happens in these cases where people want to believe these narratives is that they will simply replace their past prediction with a new prediction. Oh, well, now this is going to happen next and this is going to happen next.

So if you have tons of certainty around understanding a complex social issue that involves some kind of a conspiracy, simply make a prediction, make a prediction, and then track it and keep a log of your predictions. Maybe you are Nostradamus in modern times. Maybe you are that brilliant in being able to predict things. Or maybe you’re deriving a little bit too much certainty from your limited understanding of phenomena, and tracking your predictions will help you put the belief back into hypothesis mode, which again, it’s great. Let’s go to hypothesis mode. We know powerful people do sketchy things, okay, so maintain it as a hypothesis, but not as a strong belief.

Again, doing this will hopefully over time, if you start tracking these different predictions and you see the extent to which they’re true or not, hopefully will lead to a little bit more openness to contradictory evidence and to other narratives, I think that’s always the goal here is just to be more open minded about what the real truth is.

And the final one is it requires a little bit more perspective and leverages some of the knowledge of the research that I’ve outlined in the five sort of personal psychology causes. It seems like one of the patterns here is that when certain basic human needs are unmet, this can lead to more attractiveness towards conspiracy theories, whether they’re true or not, or just in general belief in things that are wrong. So we saw being lonely and disconnected from a human community or not having a strong sense of purpose and meaning, understanding how the world works and how that’s coherent for you as an individual or not accepting personal responsibility for the outcomes in your life and wanting to blame external agents, or not being really engaged with the details and really being very conscientious with our beliefs. So lack of critical thinking. So if you just look at this evidence, write the things that will lead to systematically more belief in conspiracies, whether or not they’re true. This suggests a kind of a corrective agenda of taking these mental health needs really seriously and making sure that you’re not engaging in these unhealthy mind habits. Again, so making sure you have a strong sense of community that’s not necessarily tied up to political beliefs or to eschatological beliefs about the end of the world, cultivating a strong sense of meaning and purpose in life, understanding how all of this, your whole adventure on your on Earth is coherent and meaningful to you.

Cultivating these critical thinking skills. A little bit of skepticism, a little bit of critical thinking before just adopting a belief, right? Or developing an internal locus of control. So accepting personal responsibility for your life and for the outcomes in your life. Also in line with the research on narcissism. So the vulnerable narcissists need to learn how to rationally challenge their fears, right?

There’s the great discipline of CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy that teaches you how to challenge a little bit some of your black-and-white thinking or your catastrophizing, or there’s a series of cognitive biases that CBT teaches you to challenge, right? A lot of times connected to the emotion of fear or for grandiose narcissists. Again, the critical thinking, be honest. When is this? When are you trying to make this about you? You’re just trying to be special and unique and get clicks on social media. If that’s the case, just check yourself a little bit. Go back to the evidence, slow down, have a little bit of humility. So developing more resiliency, more honesty, more humility, purpose, connection to a human community, these healthy habits of the mind, in general, can help us make sure that our skepticism and our critical thinking are channeled in the right way. And that we don’t just subscribe to beliefs in a way that’s undercooked based on flimsy evidence, based on cognitive biases. So you can see this is clearly a complex and multifaceted topic. The people who mock anyone who believes in something that sounds like a conspiracy or who just quickly conclude that there’s something wrong with their mental health and often not engaging with them in a full and honest way. Maybe they have their own products or truths to sell, and I’m very skeptical of people who act this way.

In this era where truth is often weaponized, where governments and corporations are getting more and more powerful at the top, where the mainstream media doesn’t really apply scrutiny. you know, the loss of investigative journalism, the media more often acts as an ideological mouthpiece. Same of online-only news platforms as well. You’ve got some really honest and humble individuals out there playing out that function of healthy skepticism, real investigation. But I feel like that function has sunk to the individual level in these days.

So you know, with all of this, it’s tempting to just reach for a conspiracy that pretends to explain it all, that relieves the burden of truth, that makes us feel good, that helps us create a tribe, all these benefits that we looked at. But the truth is simply too precious for us to sort of reduce it to kind of wholesale confirmation bias, and losing touch with alternate realities that might also be true. It’s just too expensive in your life to adopt false beliefs. And so we have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable with uncertain information. Right? To hold out our hunches as a hypotheses and maybe also keep the fun energy around conspiracy thinking, right? And keep scrutinizing the evidence or without latching on to a definite, absolute position. And when the evidence starts being strong enough, when it’s valid, then we can switch on to perhaps activism, collective action and more serious claims, political claims, legal claims and so forth. And I would say this is especially the case adopting a little process like this for truth acquisition.

It’s especially the case if it turns out that you have some of the personality traits or tendencies that are shown to increase the likelihood in believing conspiracy theories. So the low agreeableness, low conscientiousness or perhaps some narcissistic traits or tendencies in your personality or, you know, a strong need for safety and understanding of the world. So if you have some of these traits or tendencies, I think you would need a process like this a little bit more than the average person.

So viewed this way, conspiracy thinking can and should be a healthy part of a democratic debate? As a society, I believe they can be generally good. We can also reduce them to January 6th, but it doesn’t have to be just that. And in general, it’s not just that. But we want individuals to play with conspiracies a little bit more carefully as hypotheses. Again, as a background to checking those in power. On a time scale, we can start with these hypotheses, have a lot of fun with them. But I also like the longer we’ve had a hypothesis and it hasn’t been proven by fact, the more skeptical we should be about them. And conversely, the more facts start, you know, stacking for a particular hypothesis, the more we can start to move on the spectrum towards a belief.

Just a point on basic compassion. Okay? It is true that some people are engaging in this kind of conspiracy thinking for personal reasons because they’re struggling mentally and so forth. And it’s funny that our gut reaction to that is just to judge and attack these people. But, you know, I don’t think we should do I don’t think that’s  the best way to do it. I think we should look at things in terms of as a society from a broad perspective, we’re engaged in this very tricky and complex search for truth, but also personal well-being.

And in the end, you never know. Like even the most crackpot person of the crackpot theory, they may be right. It’s very hard to completely rule something out. It’s very hard to disprove 100% something. So even the most outlandish theories. Let’s have some fun with them. Let’s not believe them too strongly, but they can be part of the marketplace of ideas. And even if it turns out that these people are wrong, they’re still members of the broader community. I still think that we should still have some empathy. And if they’re struggling, maybe they need help more than they need judgment, of course. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll accept what they’re saying as being true necessarily.

So I hope you enjoyed this capsule. It’s part of my attempt to take a rational, evidence-based, research-based look at complex topics that I find there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of different perspectives that may either fit a culture war perspective, Team Red against Team Blue, or where a lot of the key details are just kind of swept aside in social media chatter.

You can download the PDF again with all of the sources and references and also all of the slides in this talk, and let me know if there are other topics you’d like me to cover in the future. Until then, I wish you the best. Thank you.