Why truthers are idiots

Intentionality bias makes us assume that events are planned by somebody or something. Confirmation bias means we seek out evidence that supports our beliefs.

And the illusion-of-understanding bias makes us overestimate our knowledge of how things work. Conspiracy theories can also paradoxically be emotionally reassuring. They provide truthful-sounding explanations for events that otherwise seem inexplicable, random or capricious, and often make your political opponents look bad.

Personality type also plays a part. People who are naturally suspicious of received wisdom and authority are more likely to believe. Conspiracy theories are often utterly preposterous and totally lacking in credible evidence, but they are almost impossible to disprove, at least in the minds of believers. No amount of counter-evidence can refute them, and in fact this evidence often reinforces them because it can be dismissed as part of the conspiracy. In this respect conspiracy theories have much in common with pseudoscience , which superficially resembles science but lacks its crucial epistemological feature, falsifiability — meaning that hypotheses must be structured such that they can be disproved by new evidence.

The conspiratorial mindset may have been an asset in the past, but is now a liability. Another study found this trait is also associated with people who ascribe profundity to randomly generated nonsense statements. Once again, these findings jibe with what you may presuppose about conspiracy theorists: Making connections between unrelated events or symbols is a key marker of many conspiracy theories. In practice, that might look something like the post below, which was shared in a QAnon Telegram group.

It makes many logical leaps to try to indicate that the Ever Given, the ship that was caught in the Suez Canal and which many Q followers believe was transporting trafficked children, is somehow connected to a March Madness tweet from Mike Pompeo, the transit of a Navy warship and a Q post from We see rabbits in the clouds and faces in household appliances.

Illusory pattern perception is just a heightened version of this universal phenomenon. What place are you in? There are two likely answers to this question, an intuitive one first place , and an analytical one second place.

Only the latter is correct, though. Questions like this are often used to measure whether someone naturally tends to think analytically, to take time to reflect on the information at hand before responding, or if they tend to go with their gut instinct. Each of these tasks captures just a drop of the cognitive stew that can make someone more vulnerable to believing in conspiracy theories. We all have a little conspiracy theorist in us. Setting up the chessboard. Cognitive quirks only go so far in explaining why people believe conspiracy theories.

In the context of modern conspiracy theories, social media plays a significant role in getting these theories in front of the people who might be susceptible to them. Conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine are a clear example.

And as so many of us have spent more time at home — and online — during the pandemic, our environment has become awash with all kinds of conspiracy theories. Anyone with even the slightest tendency to this kind of thinking would have trouble dodging the rabbit holes. The jumping-to-conclusions bias, for example, exists on a spectrum, and its manifestation can depend on the situation. None of us forms every single one of our beliefs and opinions with perfect reasoning and extensive research.

This might help explain why belief in conspiracy theories is surprisingly common. This is not a civility argument. For one thing, civility arguments are mostly bullshit rhetorical sleights-of-hand designed to shift focus from the substance of a critique to its tone.

Nor is it a claim that false information is cool and fun and we should just shrug and say nothing, since who needs truth, Mike Bloomberg makes the best memes , and everything is terrible. One problem is that making fun of something spreads that thing just as quickly as sharing it sincerely would.

See: Covid conspiracies. The theory in question might be a bizarro-world fever dream. The person who shares that fever dream to mock it could have the best intentions; they might assume that showing the absurdity of the theory will help prevent others from taking it seriously.

Sharing is sharing is sharing. In the case of the Nigerian Pete supporter, every time folks made snarky comments or retweeted jokes about the theory—whether they were Pete supporters or Pete anti-stans—those messages pinged to new audiences, spreading polluted information in unpredictable directions. The more responses there were, the more reason journalists had to cover the story.

Another problem with mocking conspiracy theories is that it plays right into the conspiratorial mindset. Instead, as historian Kathryn Olmsted emphasizes , conspiracy theories have long existed on the right and the left , within white and black communities; , and among those with little power and those with extraordinary power.

Some are off-the-wall bonkers , and some are grounded in historical precedent.