This Is Why It’s Impossible to Argue With Conspiracy Theorists
The United States has become the land of conspiracy theorists. From QAnon followers to those who believe the moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick on a soundstage, these people are growing in numbers, and they’re becoming increasingly resistant to logic.
On December 4th, 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Welch drove from his home in North Carolina to Washington D.C. to rescue children being held in basement cages. With his AR-15 style rifle, he broke into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria and concert venue. His plan was to free victims of a satanic, international pedophilia ring run by high-powered Democrats, a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. After firing 3 shots, he gave himself up to police and explained that he had found no evidence of children or cages. The building didn’t even have a basement.
What pushed Welch to such insanity? Why does 25% of the US believe the coronavirus was a Chinese biological weapon? After Trump and associates lost over 60 court cases, why does nearly half of the US believe there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election? An NPR poll indicated that 27% of Americans gave some credence to 9/11 conspiracy theories; 28% questioned the moon landing; 49% were worried about vaccines giving them autism; and 41% were not sure Obama was born in the US. Why are so many people willing to accept such spurious ideas?
There are 8 possible explanations, each of which is explored in detail below.
1. Conspiracy Theories Are Based on Fear
At the heart of every conspiracy theory is a secret group of nefarious people trying to control the world. When Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed wildfires in California on a Jewish space laser, she was referring to the conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds control the global economy and manipulate the public. When QAnon followers stormed the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021, they thought they were soldiers fighting a war against the deep state. Edgar Welch thought he was fighting satanic Democrats. Flat Earthers are convinced NASA and other space agencies have convinced the global public that the world is round to scam billions of dollars, to keep people servile, and to hide the existence of God. So you can’t use reason against someone whose beliefs are governed by fear, our most primal emotion. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
A study from the University of Kent explored this idea much further. The authors suggested that believing conspiracy theories “may promise to make people feel safer as a form of cheater detection, in which dangerous and untrustworthy individuals are recognized and the threat they posed is reduced or neutralized.” So when people feel that they’re not in control of their lives or that something is being stolen from them, they are more likely to accept conspiracy theories, regardless of how plausible they are.
The authors of another study suggested that fear of evil coalitions may be a product of evolution. They claimed people have a “functionally integrated mental system to detect conspiracies that in all likelihood has been shaped in an ancestral human environment in which hostile coalitions—that is, conspiracies that truly existed—were a frequent cause of misery, death, and reproductive loss.” If this is true, humans have a natural fear of conspiracies, making it far easier to convince people they exist, as their brains are already hard-wired to do so.
The above helps explain why so many QAnon followers, for example, were willing to threaten democracy on January 6th, 2021. Although almost none of QAnon’s prophecies had come true, followers still passionately “trusted the plan” because they were terrified that a secret group of evil-doers was stealing the election. If you ask a conspiracy theorist to demonstrate how 5G towers caused the coronavirus pandemic, the answer likely won’t include a detailed discussion about the science of radio waves and human biology. Rather, they’re more likely to ramble on about powerful elites trying to control the globe.
So, in the mind of a conspiracy theorist, logic and evidence can’t compete with fear, rendering any attempt to dissuade them from their beliefs useless.
2. Conspiracy Theories Help Them Understand the World
Conspiracy theories help fill gaps in knowledge, provide simpler explanations in place of complex ones, and help defend more fundamental belief systems. In other words, conspiracy theories form an essential part of some people’s worldview.
The authors of this study supported these conclusions when they said “conspiracy theories appear to provide broad, internally consistent explanations that allow people to preserve beliefs in the face of uncertainty and contradiction.” Likewise, the authors of this study found that “conspiracy theories originate particularly in crisis situations and may form the basis for how people subsequently remember and mentally represent a historical event.”
For example, flat Earthers don’t understand basic science like gravity, electromagnetism, and refraction, so they fill their gaps in elementary school science with conspiracy theories. They also can’t understand or are turned off by the complexities of modern science, so they outright reject it in favor of their much simpler ad hoc explanations. Lastly, for most flat Earthers, their beliefs are really just thinly veiled Christian extremism. That is, the flat Earth movement advocates the creation myth found in Genesis. Therefore, flat Earthers stick to their beliefs so passionately because without them the world would be confusing and uncertain.
Similarly, conspiracy theorists that think the Rothschilds control the world don’t understand international finance, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, etc. so they’ve filled this gap in knowledge with nonsense. They’ll throw around buzzwords and catchy phrases like “petrodollar,” “Jeykll Island,” “fractional reserve banking,” etc. to give the illusion of knowledge, but their understanding of these is not based in reality. Also, they can’t handle the complexity of major events like world wars, so they’ve invented simpler ones involving secret societies. And any conversation with any of these conspiracy theorists inevitably detours into a conversation about religion because in their minds the two are intertwined. For these types of conspiracy theorists, the Rothschilds are Satanists that have been trying to control the world since the late 1700s.
So, if an idea helps people understand the world, especially in times of turmoil, it’s almost impossible to change their mind, regardless of how ridiculous it is.
3. They Have Personality Disorders
Normal people that have interacted with or watched conspiracy theorists probably already suspect that something about them is off. When Mike Lindell ranted about voter fraud in the 2020 election in his 3 hour broadcast “Absolute Proof” it was obvious that he suffers from one or more personality disorders. Get into a conversation with an anti-vaxxer, and you’ll see something similar. But what is it exactly that is different?
The authors of a 2020 study from the Asian Journal of Psychiatry found that conspiracy theorists are likely to suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder, Schizotypal Personality Disorder, and Narcissist Personality Disorder. People that suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder have a “generalized mistrust of others, they may be hypersensitive, feel easily insulted, and are constantly on the watch for what others may do to them.” These people are also more likely to search for patterns and to find patterns when they don’t exist. Schizotypal Personality Disorder is characterized by an unease towards other people, a struggle to maintain close relationships, frequent bizarre behavior, and a tendency towards magical thinking. Those that suffer from Narcissist Personality Disorder have “exaggerated feelings of self-importance, and require an excessive need for admiration, usually to the point of lacking empathy towards other people.
The authors of another study found that conspiracy theorists are more likely to suffer from Machiavellianism, in which they believe “other people to be foolish and easily manipulated; whereas they themselves are not so easily manipulated and know the truth.” Therefore, to counteract the secret group of malevolent conspirators, they see it as their job to manipulate the public towards what they see as the truth. They’re also hypersensitive to being manipulated. This same study also found that conspiracy theorists are more likely to suffer from primary psychopathy, which is “characterised by traits such as social dominance, self-confidence, selfishness, manipulation of others, and a callous nature.” This study also found that magical thinking was a common trait.
Well, these studies go a long way in explaining why Eric Munchel, better known as the “zip-tie guy,” was ready to use those zip-ties on members of Congress on January 6th, 2021; why Dr. Fauci and his family need to have armed security guards because he told people to wear masks; why officer Brian Sicknick was beaten death for defending the Capitol building; and why so many conspiracy theorists exhibit such violent rhetoric.
There’s no debate with people like this.
4. Conspiracy Theories Give Them a Self-Esteem Boost
Most conspiracy theorists see themselves as heroes in a war that doesn’t exist. They pride themselves on being one of the enlightened few, fighting a secret cabal, and trying to save as many “sheeple” as possible. A good example of this is infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ latest stunt, in which his crew filmed him trying to physically stop a car that he believed was full of children being trafficked. Of course, this was not the case, as the children and their mothers were being offered help by the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. Their spokesperson said “The video clip is a staged confrontation interrupting the goodwill of someone providing assistance in the form of transportation for three mothers and their children to the Humanitarian Respite Center.” However, for Jones, he was a warrior fighting the good fight.
One possible explanation for this mentality is that they seek such a powerful self-esteem boost because they have been ostracized by society, which is certainly the case for Jones. This study said “Experimental results suggest that experiences of ostracism cause people to believe in superstitions and conspiracy theories.” The same study found that group members with low status due to factors like income or ethnicity and those on the losing side of politics are more likely to embrace conspiratorial thinking.
Another study looked at 202 participants and found similar results. Each participant was given a questionnaire about conspiracy theories, a self-esteem assessment, and a narcissism assessment. They determined that “general conspiracist beliefs were predicted by high individual narcissism but low self-esteem.”
While these conclusions may not apply to all conspiracy theorists, they help explain someone like Jake Angeli Chansley, the guy wearing the horns during the Capitol riots. Chansley was unemployed, a failed actor, and was living with his mother before making the worst decision of his life. Likewise QAnon Congresswoman Lauren Boebert was a high school drop out and didn’t get her GED until shortly before running for Congress.
So, when someone uses conspiracy theories to prop up their self-esteem, it’s not possible to convince them otherwise.
5. They’re Susceptible to Cognitive Biases
Conspiracy theorists are experts at twisting information and the world to fit their needs because they suffer from an array of cognitive biases. “A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments that they make.”
One of the most common cognitive bias is confirmation bias. This is when new information is interpreted as a confirmation of one’s beliefs. For example, when Andrew Wakefield published his bogus 1998 study linking vaccines to increased rates of autism, people that already distrusted modern medicine readily accepted and spread the results, spawning the anti-vaccination movement. Because of their confirmation bias, anti-vaxxers were blind to literally every other study on the subject and the many problems with Wakefield’s study, such as a very small sample size (only 12 people were studied), unorthodox research design, and speculative conclusions.
Likewise, selection bias warps conspiracy theorists understanding of the world. This occurs when a person selects the sample to be studied, instead of using a truly random one. For example, if someone’s child develops autism and he or she attributes it to getting a recent vaccine, this does not prove that vaccines cause autism, as the sample being tested (only this one child) was arbitrarily selected. This is akin to saying “Joe Biden couldn’t have legitimately won the election because everyone I know didn’t vote for him.” But what about everyone else?
The Dunning-Kruger effect is also prevalent with conspiracy theorists. This is the tendency for uneducated people to overestimate—and educated people to underestimate—their knowledge. When Trump called Covid-19 a hoax, he was not speaking from decades as an epidemiologist, immunologist, or virologist. He just assumed he was an expert because he had learned a tiny bit on the subject. Flat Earthers are notorious for falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Most of their arguments rely on the misguided idea that they know more than actual scientists.
So, it’s impossible to argue with people that can’t even process reality correctly.
This article below offers a much more detailed explanation of the destructive effect of cognitive biases, such as hostile attribution bias, anchoring bias, reactive devaluation, availability cascade, among many others.
6. They’re Just Uneducated
Despite all the fanciful rhetoric, the more educated a person is, the less likely he or she is to believe in conspiracy theories. Many conspiracy theorists have learned to sound educated by repeating terms, phrases, and ideas they heard from their friends, online, or from people like Tucker Carlson. However, few have been formally educated on the subject or even in general.
A survey from Pew Research Center supports this assertion. In a survey conducted in June of 2020, they looked for a correlation between highest education level attained and believing the coronavirus outbreak was intentionally planned by powerful people. 48% of people that had attained a high school diploma thought it was true. For those that had attended some college, it was only 38%. The percentage falls further with 24% for those that held a university degree and 15% for a graduate degree.
These results are echoed in a 2017 study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. The researchers found that the higher a person’s education, the more they rejected conspiracy theories. The study “revealed three independent mediators of this relationship, namely, belief in simple solutions for complex problems, feelings of powerlessness, and subjective social class.”
So arguing with uneducated conspiracy theorists is pointless, as they often miss the point of the discussion. Scott D. Weitzenhoffer described arguing with creationists “like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.”
7. They Don’t Understand the Difference Between Science and Pseudoscience
Conversations with conspiracy theorists inevitably devolve into who has the real evidence. They’ll claim they’ve done the research and that their opponents need to “wake up,” “take the veil off,” “take the red pill,” etc. However, they lack the ability to see that their evidence and research are pseudoscientific garbage.
What’s the difference between science and pseudoscience? This is an old, complex question that dates back to before Aristotle, and it’s still not completely answered. While scientists and philosophers still quibble over the nuances, a big part of the answer was offered by Karl Popper. In 1934, he devised the idea of falsifiability, which explains that science is the process of trying to disprove a scientific hypothesis, not proving it true. Proving a hypothesis true is not possible due to the limitations of human ability and understanding. Rather, if a hypothesis is tested and survives, then the likelihood of it being true increases. The more failed attempts to disprove it there are, the more confidence we can have that it’s true. For example, if someone says “all swans are white,” it would only take the existence of one black swan to disprove this statement. The more attempts to find black swans that fail, the more certain scientists can be that the statement is true. Einstein’s Relativity, for example, has survived literally every attempt to disprove it, making it one of the most corroborated scientific principles, yet it would only take one successful falsification attempt to dismantle it.
Conspiracy theorists, though, don’t understand this idea. They believe their hypotheses carry the same weight as entire fields of science. For example, they claim “vaccines cause autism,” yet this hypothesis has not been rigorously tested and survived. In fact, it failed numerous tests right off the bat. In other words, it has been successfully falsified. Likewise, other hypotheses like “Democrats cheated in the election,” “NASA is lying about the shape of the Earth,” “5G networks caused the coronavirus,” etc. have not survived any falsification attempts. Despite this, they continue to spout these ideas because they can’t understand the concept of falsification.
So arguing with people that believe every idea they hear has scientific validity is a waste of time.
8. They’re Victims of Manipulation
Conspiracy theorists may be the easiest people to trick into buying your product, reading your article, or watching your video. They’re a gold mine and easy to take advantage of.
First of all, most antivaxxer information is spread by 12 people, most of which have an ulterior motive. For example, one of these people is Joseph Mercola, a doctor that not only opposes vaccines and standard Covid-19 precautions but also sells herbal supplements as an alternative. Instead of listening to the CDC, he wants people to go to his website and purchase his products, for which he might soon face legal action: “Dr. Mercola’s self-serving and unsupported theory is extremely dangerous to consumers, as well as an illegal disease treatment claim.”
Furthermore, QAnon was heavily pushed by Russian bots from the very beginning. An analysis by Reuters found that “From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed.” Why would the Kremlin do this? Because it sows discord, divides a nation, and opens strategic global advantages for Russian interests. QAnon bolstered support for Trump, who did little to oppose Russian influence, such as the ongoing Ukraine invasion, the silencing and murdering of Putin’s opponents, intervention in Syria, etc. Spreading QAnon greatly benefitted Russia, in much the same way that spreading Brexit misinformation did, as it helped fracture the European Union, easily one of the greatest opponents for Putin.
Also, is it a coincidence that Pizzagate started in October of 2016, right before the election, and it’s main target was Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton? Probably not. It’s more likely it was a last ditch attempt to sway voters. How much money does Alex Jones make from selling supplements like Alpha Power? NPR found that in 2014 he made $20 million, two thirds of which came from sales, though he has bragged of making upwards of $60 million in a single year. How much has Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson made spreading conspiracy theories like election fraud, that Biden is controlled by China, that the coronavirus is a hoax, etc.? Millions of dollars. In fact, Sean Hannity is worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
So, it’s impossible to counter someone who is the victim of well-coordinated and well-funded efforts to scam them.
How Do We Fix a Conspiracy-Laden Society?
There are no easy answers, but a good first step is better education, particularly in the sciences. This would help people better recognize pseudoscience, boost their critical thinking skills, and make them more resistant to conspiracy theories. Another possible solution is controlling the spread of misinformation. This is already being done to some extent, such as Twitter flagging certain comments and Amazon removing the social media app Parler from their hosting services.
The authors of this study believe mental health is the key, as they said “even if belief in conspiracy theories about COVID-19 is not necessarily pathological, one effective way of (at least partially) eradicating such beliefs is by contributing to a more robust public mental health.” The authors of another study believe the solution is predicting the types of people who are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and counteracting them before the false information spreads: “Given the possibility for these beliefs to shape real world behaviour, and the possibility for this behaviour to have damaging social and civic consequences, it is imperative research continues to establish predictors of these beliefs so reliable methods to challenge and negate these erroneous beliefs can be established.”
Of course, putting a lid on conspiracy theories will take all of the above solutions and others we haven’t yet thought of. However, society seems to be going in the right direction, as conspiracy theorists are no longer holding important offices, billion dollar lawsuits against conspiracy theorists are on the way, conspiracy theorists are headed to jail for storming the Capitol, and, because of the last few years, most people see just how dangerous and crazy they are. Hopefully, the trend will continue.
Support The Happy Neuron by clicking the links below:
