The Psychology and Social Psychology of Conspiratorial Thinking
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed daily conspiracy theories on just about everything imaginable. Everything from COVID-19 is a hoax, the vaccine has tracking sensors, masking is harmful and a way to better kidnap children, Antifa is starting the wildfires in California, QAnon is fighting a democratic led child sex trafficking ring and the latest that the Texas Arctic blast snow was fake. And, so much more. Millions of dollars are being directed toward promoting conspiracy theories that undermines our trust in each other. What we perceive to be true on the internet can have a damaging affect on our personal relationships, whether with family, friends, or partners.
For the past few years, I’ve been interested in how people make decisions, especially under conditions of uncertainty and chaos and why we do the things we do. After the Capitol Seize on January 6th especially, many are left scratching their heads as to how this kind of behavior could occur in the our country, largely based on a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged.
I’ll unpack some of the psychology and social psychology regarding conspiratorial thinking in this article. Turns out, conspiratorial thinking is a mix of our pattern making brain, human social and tribal psychology and our desperate need to make sense of an ever increasing complex world.
Our Evolutionary Pattern-Making Brain
Our human brain is simply marvelous. Physicians tell us that babies make 1 million connections per second. According to experts, “there are roughtly about 100 billion neurons and 125 trillion synapes in just the cerebral cortex alone.” To put that in perspective, that’s roughly equal to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies,” states Stephen Smith, PhD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology. Our pattern making brain is hard wired into our thinking. Ever since we were cavemen and women, the human pattern making brain, through evolution has allowed us to quickly identify which plants were safe could eat and which animals would eat them. Additionally, if you saw another human across the landscape, you had to sum up quickly if they were friend or foe. We have trouble digesting randomness and our brains crave pattern and meaning, relying on personal stories and antedotes instead of statistics. Essentially, it’s less work because stories fill in the gaps. Stories help us “make sense” of the world around us.
Sensemaking in a Complex World
Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. … It has been defined as “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409, Organzional Science.) It’s a profoundly human trait and we do it without much thought. We inherently don’t like coincidences and we look for the hidden hand and meaning when events happen. This is why news organizations reports post event are usually wrong….they’re trying to make sense of the event and use their pattern making mechanism to do that, often using their “availability heuristic,” to fill the void of the unknown. The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples, or an available memory, that comes to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. And, this is where conspiratorial thinking begins to take shape. Given our pattern making brain and our need to “make sense” of the world, conspiracy theories take root. But, there one more ingredient that completes the triad of our pattern making brain and our social psychology which facilitates conspiratorial thinking and that is our tribal psychology.
Our Tribal Psychology
Back in the 1970’s, Henri Tajfel, a psychologist developed a theory called “social identity theory” which basically posits that humans define ourselves in large part by pledging loyalty to groups that we belong. During his research, he discovered that it doesn’t take much for people to organize themselves into groups and once they do they immediately begin to act like people in the group and then vilify people who are not. His research showed that this “us versus them” thinking can happen in mere seconds and people will do this just about over anything. David McRaney from You Are Not So Smart has a podcast that discusses Tribal Psychology in detail at https://soundcloud.com/youarenotsosmart/122-tribal-psychology
McRaney notes that “us versus them” thinking is an essential property of the human brain and once activated we can’t help ourselves but to think in a tribal way.
Moreover, according to Lilliana Mason, professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, “it’s a very natural and kind of primal psychological response” which makes humans prone to instinctively forming groups, no matter how arbitrary, minimal or meaningless.
Tajfel grew up in Poland and as a Jewish man because interested in answering the question, how can one group hate another groups so much that they could permit genocide to become a reality. After studying prejudice over 20 years, he discovered that any noticeable difference of any kind will reliably stimulate behavior that flows into tribal psychology.
McRaney notes that “one of the amazing takeaways from Tajfel’s work is that the origins of tribes and groups or clustering that leads to partisanship is often random, such as where a person was born, religious beliefs, schools attended, what kind of food they eat. These starting conditions are according to McRaney “like specks of dirt around which forms cultural pearls. “Us” is a cognitive glue, a biological adaptation that has allowed humans to work together. “Them” ensures that your group is better off than the outsiders, even if that diminishes your own potential well being.
Mason sums it up this way, “so, we need to feel that we are part of something, but we also need to feel that not anybody can be part of if it in order for us to feel important ourselves. We need to feel like we’re included in some group, and that there are outsiders. There are some people that don’t get in. So there’s something that makes you special, and the underlying idea behind social identity is really self-esteem based. So we need to be part of groups to enhance our own self-esteem, to feel good about ourselves as individuals. We have to feel that we’re being accepted by group, and that group has status. And as long as that group has status, we feel good about ourselves. When the status of that group is threatened, we start feeling bad, and then we have to do things to improve the status of a group. That’s why there’s a conflict between groups, we start fighting a lot harder, because the conflict between groups is really a fight for your own self-esteem and sense of worth.” And, this leads me to how do we know which groups are “our groups?” It’s a social psychology twist of “tribal signaling.”
Tribal Signaling
Going back to the beginning, when our ancestors were evolving, we lived in clans, troops and it was to our advantage to know who is part of the clan, troop or tribe, or essentially who was friend or foe. The way we dressed, ate and moved about were our signals to others. Today, we divvy up into our clans, groups, troops and tribes using Facebook, Twitter, political memes, religious groups and so on. Since it is very easy for us to form our identity around just about anything, we leave the world of compromise and debate, of evidence and rationality to become more and more polarized by tribal signaling.
You know who is part of your group by the hats they wear, the flags they fly, the food they eat, the churches they attend, the clothes they wear, the tattoos they don and so on. This kind of signaling is known as “sacred carriers.” Sacred Carriers are meaning laden physical objects around which groups of people gather to foster an environment where some are considered the “in-group,” and some are considered the “out-group.” Through such “sacred carriers,” group members can more effectively identify with one another and solidify their links with the “in-group,” and subsequently identify those not welcome as the “out-group.” These objects hold the same place in group identification as ego does in personal identification.
Enter Dan Kahan, at professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School who helps put this tribal signaling into perspective.
Kahan states that “there are these issues that become fused with identity, so that the positions actually are like badges of membership in, and vouchers of, loyalty to these identities defining affinity groups. Where you have an issue like that, the individual interest in conforming to the view of the group is going to dominate by far the interest the person has in getting the right answer.
The reason why misinformation and political lying will continue to be a problem is that both are tribal signaling.
In other words, our tribal psychology, helps conform perceptions and interpretations to the values that define our cultural identities.”
And all of this points to one essential truth: Kahan says that the evidence is clear that “humans value being a good member of their tribe much more than they value being correct. We will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers.”
Unfortunately, masking or not masking has become a “tribal signal,” of political identity which has life threatening consquences.
Conspiratorial Thinking
A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.
Given the lead in to the topic of conspiratorial thinking, you might have guessed that gathering around a conspiracy theory not only helps us “make sense” of the complex and increasingly chaotic world but it also helps solidify our place in our in-group. Once social concerns are at play, our trial psycholgy kicks in and we’re ripe for conspiratorial thinking. In episode 198 of You Are Not So Smart dedicated to “Reflections and Insurrection,” McRaney notes that it turns out, most of us believe in some strange goings-on behind the curtains. More than half of Americans think there was more than one person involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example. A 2014 study found that more than half of Americans believe in at least one medical conspiracy — a list that includes things like doctors giving children vaccines they know to be dangerous or the idea that the Food and Drug Administration intentionally suppresses natural cancer cures because of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. The more specific conspiracies you ask about in polls, the higher the percentage of Americans that believe in at least one, everyone has a pet conspiracy to call their own.
More recently, the psychological and social mechanisms that led to the the storming of the Capitol, sprang from a widespread belief in a conspiracy theory that the “election was stolen,” or “the Big Lie,” s and still persists among millions. Other recent conspiracy theories used for sensemaking and social identity are QAnon, the belief that a group of Satan-worshipping elites run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media and that the global pandemic of COVID-19 is a hoax.
Melanie Smith, head of Analysis at Graphika stated to the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (October 15, 2020) “[w]e must be clear-eyed that conspiracy theories can radicalize followers to commit acts of domestic terror. My team and I first created a network map of QAnon Twitter accounts in 2018, what we found was the most dense conspiracy community we had ever studied. This means that the accounts engaging with QAnon theories at this time represented an extremely tight knit and insular community that relied upon mainstream, right-wing accounts to boost its messaging and content. By the end of the following year, 2019, it had been increasingly scattered and autonomous. These accounts also became prolific in their sharing, often employing spam-like patterns of behavior to amplify certain pieces of false and misleading content. Offline support for QAnon has also increasingly mobilized. We tend to consider online conspiracy movements as restricted to the confines of the internet, and this is no longer the case with QAnon.”
The list of conspiracy theories throughout history is long and involves various diciplines. Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theory covers everything from aviation to sports. Psychologists attribute finding a conspiracy where there is none to a form of cognitive bias called illusory pattern perception.
Illusory Pattern Perception and Apophenia
Illusory pattern perception is a pretty simple concept. It happens whenever we find a meaningful pattern in random stimuli, drawing correlations and even causation where none has actually occurred. Overall, a study in 2017 called “Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural,” generated some pretty compelling evidence that our need to make sense of the world by generating patterns really goes into overdrive in those who veer towards conspiracy theories.
In 2008, Michael Shermer coined the word “patternicity”, defining it as “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise” For many, connecting the dots in a complicated and increasingly chaotic world is important and self-soothing to their personal belief systems.
Pattern recognition is a cognitive process that involves retrieving information either from long-term, short-term or working memory and matching it with information from stimuli. However, there are three different ways in which this may happen and go wrong, resulting in apophenia. Apophenia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data and unconnected events or stimuli.
A conspiracy theory helps people perceive meaning and is discussed at length on the internet by people who are not bona fide data scientists, journalists, government officials or whistleblowers in an organization or investigative committees of regulators. They’re completely independent sources, individuals who self-nominate and put themselves forward as being in possession of the truth.” (Marshall Allen, May 17, 2020, “Immune to Evidence”: How Dangerous, Coronavirus Conspiracies Spread, ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/immune-to-evidence-how-dangerous-coronavirus-conspiracies-spread)
According to Jesse Walker in the book, The United States of Paranoia, the faces in the egg and car “pictures are the result of apophenia, the process of projecting patterns onto data. More specifically, they are pareidolia, in which those patterns are perceived as meaningful shapes or sounds. It is pareidolia that allows us to see a man in the moon, to hear a Satanic incantation when “Stairway to Heaven” is played backward, or to conjure the image of your subconscious choice while taking a Rorschach test. Indeed, pareidolia makes the whole world a Rorschach test. The Web is filled with delightful pareidolia-themed photo sets, where unexpected forms appear in mountains, pasta, fire, clocks, clouds.”
People often adopt conspiracy beliefs as a balm for deep grievance. The theories afford some psychological ballast, a sense of control, an internal narrative to make sense of a world that seems senseless. Michael Barkun describes a conspiracy theory as a “template imposed upon the world to give the appearance of order to events”.
Inoculation and Deradicalization
So, what can be done?
The Conspiracy Theory Handbook” says you can fight back. One big takeaway: Focus your efforts on people who can hear evidence and think rationally.
Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School, who studies cultural cognition, stated that “if we want a democracy based on policies, based on facts, we must work to depoliticize evidence-based issues before they go out into the public. There are all sorts of ways we might could do this. We could maybe produce press releases that are designed to appeal to one tribe or the other, and then put them out at the same time — put two kinds of releases out for all the different languages that people speak with their tribes. You know, you really need some empathy here because people can’t change their minds when they are trapped in tribes that believe one way or the other. They can’t accept the evidence even when they want to, even when they know in their hearts that they are incorrect. The main thing he suggested was that when you are engaged in an argument and you want to share facts, try your best to only share information from sources the other person considers friendly to their tribe. Any link you share from a source they consider are friendly to the other to them, unfortunately, it might be rejected outright.”
Ella Rhodes in The Psychologist, explains the “inoculation approach draws on the medical analogy. Just as injecting someone with a weakened dose of a virus triggers antibodies in the immune system to help confer resistance against future infection, the same can be done with information: by exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation, or the strategies used in the production of misinformation, mental antibodies can be cultivated that help people from being persuaded by fake news in the future. We have shown this in a variety of studies and contexts. It is very much premised on the idea that prevention is better than cure, especially given what we know about the continued influence effect of misinformation. It is a proactive rather than reactive approach.”
Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions, or cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the motivation a person has to maintain consistent beliefs in their thought processes and when inconsistency occurs or when new information contradicts their personal beliefs, they actively do things to reduce the unpleasant psychological state. Overcoming cognitive dissonance can be a hurdle, it is not impossible. Kundnani describes below several deradicalization methods.
We are living in a time where arm chair pundits can translate facts and evidence into political ones and the desire and appreciation to be correct holds less weight than being a good member of the group. Conspiratorial thinking will always be an issue to consider and address, however, if we can become more knowledgeable about inoculation and deradicalization, we may be able to reduce conspiratorial thinking’s harm.
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Angi English is the former Chief of Staff at the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and a HSx Founding Scholar for Innovation at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (HSx 1701). She has a Master’s in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (MS 1303/1304)and a Master’s in Educational Psychology from Baylor University. She’s also a graduate of the Executive Leader’s Program at the Naval Postgraduate School (ELP 1201). She is a Certified Part 107 Unmanned Aerial Systems pilot and serves as an Advisory Member of the DRONEREPONDERS and a Brand Ambassador for Women Who Drone. She lives in Austin, Texas.
