- Conspiracy theories have permeated the history of humanity from our earliest hunter-gatherer days through to modern times. We are less likely than our ancestors to be killed by enemies, and are relatively well-protected by the legal system, to name just a few differences. However, the fact that our environment has changed doesn’t mean that our evolved, ancestral brain has changed along with it. This is the basic idea of an evolutionary mismatch: over the past 12,000 years, the way in which human beings live has changed quickly and dramatically. But on an evolutionary scale, 12,000 years is just a fraction of time, and our inborn predispositions have not changed by much. Our brains are adapted to a stone-age environment but we live in modern times.
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- Of interest here is that people not only differ in conspiracy beliefs but also in how prone they are to interpret ambiguous social signals as evidence of conflict with other groups. For instance, collective narcissism – an unrealistic belief in the greatness of one’s own group – is a good predictor of aggression towards other groups. Likewise, people differ in how much they value authority, order and tradition, a trait known as authoritarianism, which is closely coupled with prejudice about different groups. Research indicates that those with high levels of collective narcissism, or authoritarianism, are also likely to believe conspiracy theories. Put differently, personality traits that predispose people to prejudice, discrimination and hostility towards other groups go hand in hand with a tendency to believe conspiracy theories. Some people see hostility and conflict with other groups where others see none. Perceiving conflict with other groups drives conspiracy beliefs.
Assuming that lower cognitive ability does predict right-wing authoritarianism (see the linked comment), I think it's interesting that authoritarianism then seems to predict a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.
Does this mean that conspiracy theories are an adaptation mechanism that compensates for lower cognitive ability, if – at their heart – conspiracy theories are a survival mechanism based on the fact that it's usually less costly for your "threat detection" to give false positives than false negatives? If you don't have the processing power to suss out what the hell's going on, then being suspicious might save your ass one day when you can't really work out eg. someone's intentions.
It's a conspiracy , until proven it was right all along. So it's easy to point and laugh at Flat-earther, chemtrailer, antivaxxer, and see how smart we are in following the "official narrative" while they dont I begin to suspect, all those dumb-conspiracies we make fun of on Reddit and fb, are a ploy to hide the real conspiracy, and teach us to always side with the "official truth" If you base an analysis on a correlation... you're in for trouble: Spurious correlation will show you how wakkaduddle you might turn out. Is it fun, to speculate about correlation? Hell yes.. is it a good scientific approach?!? Right-winger adore doing it: they have a field day explaining how blacks, crimes, and low intelligence are correlated Yeah! It's always fun when "low intelligence" correlate with THEM 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980′s during the “Latin American Crisis”, and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency. That’s a cover up lasting several decades Banks have been involved in systematic criminal behavior, and have manipulated every single market Governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for fifty years to protect the nuclear industry. Governments have colluded to cover up the severity of numerous other environmental accidents. For many years, Texas officials intentionally under-reported the amount of radiation in drinking water to avoid having to report violations The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this.) But the public didn’t learn about it until many years later. Indeed, the the New York Times delayed the story so that it would not affect the outcome of the 2004 presidential election The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office. Dick Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And it has now been shown that a handful of people were responsible for willfully ignoring the evidence that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction. These facts have only been publicly disclosed recently. Indeed, Tom Brokaw said, “All wars are based on propaganda.” A concerted effort to produce propaganda is a conspiracyAssuming that lower cognitive ability does predict right-wing authoritarianism
I think the problem is dumb conspiracies are always outlandish and real conspiracies tend to be banal. Secret government plot to brainwash millions? False flag attacks? Exciting! Ordinary people trying to avoid responsibility for their actions? Normal. It's way easier to just steal money or cook the books than get the shapeshifting lizards to help you win the election. Even in the case of 9/11, sure, there was a group to profit off of it but in reality it was just the excuse to start a war and make a boat load of cash. The link between Iraq and 9/11 was extremely tenuous at best - it would make sense to hop at any excuse to try and remove Saddam. The real scary thing about government and/or societal institutions isn't that there's a secret force controlling everything. It's that we're just kind of organizing ourselves. Part of it is authority but a lot of it is just a desire to participate.I begin to suspect, all those dumb-conspiracies we make fun of on Reddit and fb, are a ploy to hide the real conspiracy, and teach us to always side with the "official truth"
In fact, there is documented evidence that the CIA will always hide the banal under the outlandish. When Bell was testing the US' first jet fighter, their pilots wore gorilla masks so that any observers not within the circle of trust would have to not only overcome the "I saw a plane flying faster than possible" hurdle, but also the "and it was being flown by a gorilla" hurdle. Project Mogul really was weather balloons with instrumentation to observe Soviet nuclear tests but within two days of one coming down in Roswell, it was little green men. There was a time when more than half of the board members of UFO organizations in the United States were CIA operatives. And once you remove all the previously-classified-but-now-documented U2 and A12 flights from Project Blue Book, all 12,618 "ufos" go away.I think the problem is dumb conspiracies are always outlandish and real conspiracies tend to be banal.