Conspiracy theory forums

[David]

A new forum had been made to contain what has increasingly been posted to the site lately, namely conspiracy theories. I will post some definitions of the term below. Posts falling within this category will be moved to the new forum.



Conspiracy theory

A conspiracy theory is a theory that claims an event or series of events is the result of secret manipulations by two or more individuals or an organization, rather than the result of a single perpetrator or natural occurrence. Conspiracy theories often defy an official or dominant understanding of events, and proponents sometimes substitute zeal for logic.


Psychology of conspiracy theory

Humans naturally respond to events or situations which have had an emotional impact upon them by trying to make sense of those events, typically in values-laden spiritual, moral or political terms, though occasionally in scientific terms. Events which resist such interpretation?for example, because they are, in fact, senseless?can provoke the inquirer to have recourse to ever more extreme speculations, until one is reached that is capable of offering the inquirer the required emotional satisfaction. Once cognized, confirmation bias and avoidance of cognitive dissonance may reinforce the belief. In a context where conspiracy theory has become popular within a social group, communal reinforcement may equally play a part. As sociological historian Holger Herwig found in studying German explanations of World War I:

Those events that are most important are hardest to understand, because they attract the greatest attention from mythmakers and charlatans.


Epistemic bias

It is also possible that certain basic human epistemic biases are projected onto the material under scrutiny. According to one study humans operate a 'rule of thumb' by which we expect a significant event to indicate a significant cause.The study offered subjects four versions of events, in which a foreign president was (a) successfully assassinated, (b) unsuccessfully wounded, (c) wounded but died of a heart attack at a later date, and (d) was unharmed. Subjects were significantly more likely to suspect conspiracy in the case of the 'major events'?in which the president died?than in the other cases, despite all other facts available to them being equal.

A further epistemic 'rule of thumb' that can be misapplied to a mystery involving other humans is cui bono? (who stands to gain?). This sensitivity to the hidden motives of other people might be either an evolved or an encultured feature of human consciousness, but either way, appears to be universal. If the inquirer lacks access to the relevant facts of the case, or if there are structural interests rather than personal motives involved, this method of inquiry will tend to produce a falsely conspiratorial account of an impersonal event. The direct corollary of this epistemic bias in pre-scientific cultures is the tendency to imagine the world in terms of animism, by which inanimate objects or substances of significance to humans are fetishised, understood to harbor benign or malignant spirits.


Political frustration

Conspiratorial accounts are emotionally satisfying when they place events in a readily-understandable, moral context. The subscriber to the theory is able to situate moral responsibility for an emotionally troubling event or situation onto a clearly-conceived group of individuals. Crucially, that group does not include the believer, with the effect that he or she is excused any moral or political responsibility for remedying whatever institutional or societal flaw might be the true source of the dissonance. Where acting in such a responsible way is taboo or beyond the individual's resources, the conspiracy theory thus permits the emotional discharge or closure such emotional challenges (after Erving Goffman ) demand of us all.

Like moral panics, conspiracy theories thus occur more frequently within communities which are experiencing social isolation or political disempowerment. For example, the modern form of anti-Semitism is identified in Britannica 1911 as a conspiracy theory serving the self-understanding of the European aristocracy, whose social power waned with the rise of bourgeois society.The apparent growth in the popularity of conspiracy theories since the 1960s might be understood in this light. Any such growth might equally be understood as an expression of a tendency in news media and wider culture to understand events through the prism of individual agents, as opposed to more complex structural or institutional accounts.