Paper On Conspiratorial Thinking Invokes Conspiratorial Thinking

Layzej writes "Last summer a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled 'Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation (PDF).' The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspiratorial thinking, including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. It is not clear whether the response to this paper will itself provide data for further research, or how far down this recursion could progress. I fear the answer may be 'all the way.'"

Comments

turtles

[stoolpigeon]

all the way down.

The turtles are behind it all in the end.

Yo dawg

[dabadab]

I herd you like conspiration theories

Re:Yo dawg

[Kell Bengal]

Wait a minute! Who told you?!!

Re:first

[webmistressrachel]

"from the elvis-lives-on-the-moon-with-hitler dept." - from the strapline of the title...

I was convinced beyond all doubt that Elvis was living with Diana in a guest house in Blackpool, but then again, I am a Brit, so I would think that...

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't take people's freely written statements as being evidence of what they think?

Evidence does not have to be perfect to make an objective study. The brain may be an inaccessable black box as far as psychology is concerned, but if there are identifiable patterns in its output, you can still work from that.

Random Randomization

[some old guy]

Are we to presume, then, from the analytical model in TFA that the LIBOR affair, Watergate, and the 1919 Black Sox scandal are all just paranoid hysteria?

Re:Random Randomization

[Vintermann]

There were not a lot of people shouting in the desert that "LIBOR are fixing interest rates for their own gain!", nor a lot of people saying "Nixon is using illegal means to keep track of his political opponents. Guaranteed!". Conspiracy theorists tend to miss the real conspiracies, it seems.

Re:Random Randomization

[some old guy]

While true that the unbalanced ones will always be off the mark, I worry that too broad a brush will make people unwilling to acknowledge real collusion for fear of being lumped in with the loony lot. Just the sort of thing political and business spinmasters try to foster.

Re:Random Randomization

[dabadab]

This paper is about the thought processes, not about the actual truth. Actually there are no guarantees that you can not arrive to a right conclusion using flawed reasoning (however, I don't recall conspiracy theory nutjobs speculating about the LIBOR fixing).

Re:Random Randomization

[swillden]

That does happen. Anytime I point out what looks like price fixing, or market divying, there's always someone that says "stop being a conspiracy theorist".

I don't know about what you've pointed out, but it's very common that people point to something and call it price fixing when there's a clear and simple non-collusive market explanation for what's going on. Further, it's often likely that there is some more subtle dynamic that explains the apparent synchronicity of price changes or market division even when there is no clear and simple explanation. So while price fixing and market divvying do happen, there's a good chance that you often are being a conspiracy theorist, because they appear to happen more often than they really occur.

Is this a joke?

[elucido]

People believe in conspiracies because they don't have anyone in authority they can trust. It doesn't help when authority lies to them about virtually everything.

Re:Is this a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

People believe in conspiracies because conspiracies actaully exist. The US really did get lied into two wars, for instance, and those who did the lying knew exactly what they were doing. The motives were profit and power. Period. That's about as evil as it gets.

Also, I think there is sufficient proof that government does NOT represent the interests of the people these days, that they do protect the interests of the rich, and that government gets seriously paranoid whenever there is an active movement opposing either it or the wealthy--see law enforcement's reaction to Occupy Wall Street for an example. The Bradley Manning case as another. The Aaron Swartz case as another. The list, unfortunately, goes on and on.

Does that mean every conspiracy theory is true? Of course not. However, I'm sick and tired of "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist" being some kind of get out of jail free card for people who don't want to truly address what's going on in our society these days.

Re:Is this a joke?

[dabadab]

People believe in conspiracy theories because it is way much easier than to actually learn the truth. The great thing about conspiracy theories that you don't have to know the actual facts (in the case of many theories it is actually a hindrance), you don't have to be very rigorous with your logic and if there's any hole in the theory you are welcome to make up any explanation. Compare that to the hard work required to be competent in a real area of knowledge.

Also, your reasoning does not make much sense: you cannot trust the authorities so you believe everything the first nut job tells you? Really?

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[KeensMustard]

You do realise that a political allegiance doesn't actually allow to escape the bonds of reality? that the scientific method has nothing at all to do with negotiating a mutually acceptable solution for everybody?

"Cheese Makes you Fat!"

"Shows what you know! I'm in the CHEESEMAKING PARTY! Cheese will just give me a healthy glow!"

"I'm sorry Mr Ridebacher, you have lung cancer"

"No, that's unacceptable. You're interfering with my rights! Tell you what, why don't we compromise and say that I have a bad cold?"

Sneaky scientists

[adamjv]

Isn't it obvious? The researchers paid dozens of bloggers to come up with these conspiracy theories. The blogs were used as evidence to support the hypotheses in the follow-up paper, which will earn the researchers enough cash to pay more bloggers. And so on.

It's kinda like the way McAfee and Symantec have secret programmers who strategically release new viruses when business is slow.

My own conspiracy theory.

[frivolous_taco]

MEMBER OF THE ROYAL FAMILY, KING RICHARD III, FOUND MURDERED IN PARKING LOT, POLICE DECLINE TO INVESTIGATE!! CONSPIRACY??!! - Leave out one key piece of information and it takes on a life of it's own, but there is nothing untrue about the above. Conspiracies seem to live on the interpretation that those who believe them have a better understanding of the issue at hand than those in charge, or that they have all the relevant information, when they don't.

Re:My own conspiracy theory.

[VortexCortex]

Leave out one key piece of information and it takes on a life of it's own, but there is nothing untrue about the above.

Conspiracies seem to live on the interpretation that those who believe them have a better understanding of the issue at hand than those in charge, or that they have all the relevant information, when they don't.

Nonsense. Even if you have all the evidence in plain view there can still be vast networks of shady dealings and huge cover-ups at work. Just look at the Kennedy Assassination!

Those bones matched royal DNA because they weren't from King Richard III, they were really from a current member of the royal family who has now been replaced with an evil doppleganger clone (made possible by recently discovered Nazi stem cell research and advanced eugenics). They just needed a convenient way to dismiss the evidence -- Oh, that body with royal DNA? Uh, oh, It's just the remains of King Richard! Which one? Why, the 3rd one! Now they've got an inside agent in the royal family... Hot on the heels of Kim Jong Un's replacement of Kim Jong Il, all while for the 1st time ever the USA presidency is held by a black man!?

Coincidence?! I Think Not!

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[Vintermann]

The sixties would be a late time to come with that prediction/accusation. Keep America Beautiful, arguably the first corporate environmental front group, was founded in order to preempt and oppose laws restricting disposable products - in 1953.

Re:Yada Yada Yada

[Anonymous Coward]

You're interpreting this the exact wrong way. They found a link. There's nothing wrong with that. And they didn't cry "foul" (fixed that for you). They made another research paper that actually *SUPPORTED* their original paper. They didn't say all climate skeptics are conspiratorial nuts. They just said conspiratorial nuts are climate skeptics as well. That shouldn't be taken as offense by climate skeptics, unless you are indeed a conspiratorial nut.

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[MrL0G1C]

of course you're right, environmentalists aren't really interested in keeping the land, water, sea and air free of poisonous substances, its all just a big power play. (nice trolling)

make a habit of reading pools to get big picture

[WOOFYGOOFY]

If you make a habit of reading polls on a a variety of political and social issues, you'll learn a lot about Americans and specifically you might come to the conclusion that about 25-35% of Americans are basically so disconnected from scientific and social reality they're functionally insane and their opinion should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY be classified as "non-truth related".

For instance, and famously, about 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html

But also 10% think that prosecutors who send innocent people to jail should not be prosecuted:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-exoneree-testifies-20130204,0,3950542.story?page=2

25% think Obama is not an American citizen:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056061-503544.html

30%^ think God decides the outcome of sporting events: http://rt.com/usa/news/super-bowl-result-god-337/

And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism :

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.

right.

About 25-30% believe that events on Earth are assiduously overseen by an all knowing God who "sees them when they're sleeping / and knows if they're awake / and knows if they've been bad of good..." and what happens in everything from their personal life to world events is really of no consequence except to the extent that it is a reflection of an eternal, ongoing battle between good and evil being fought on an unseen cosmic plane. This is something they have this is common with every Muslim extremist who ever strapped a suicide bomb onto himself.

Americans have a deficit of rationality, a deep and persistent belief that something other than outcome based, welfare of humans is the proper measure of human morality, are scientifically illiterate and constitutionally incapable of perceiving in their thinking just the kinds of bugs that the referenced article details.

There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming. The fact is, democracy stops where science begins. This isn't going to lead to anything good.

The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.

You can come to this conclusion now when there's still time to do something about global warming or you can come to this conclusion later, when there's no possibility of doing anything about it and the starvation, the concomitant societal breakdown and mass, uncontrolled immigration, the tidal wave of anti-Western (Big Oil / Big Coal ) terrorism and collapsing centralized governments take not just the denier's civil liberties and Con

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[drinkypoo]

It seems all sides are conspirators, and conspiracy crackpots, depending on how you interpret them. So it goes nowhere fast.

Any time two people get together to bone a third person it is a conspiracy. The only overarching conspiracy of which I am aware is the conspiracy to deprecate the word conspiracy, and you're assisting with it.

An environmentalist told me, it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't a problem, because by forcing people to reduce emissions, you force them to reduce production and consumption â"â"and then with a thoughtful pause she added, "It is about reducing greed." And I see that kind of view a lot, just like the free enterprise competitive types like Burt Rutan says the data doesn't add up and it is verging on fraud.

It is about reducing greed. Where do the emissions come from? Making stuff. How much of that stuff do we need? HTH, HAND.

Political denial

[grunter]

One thing that many who believe that climate change is a "scam" or a "conspiracy" have in common is a political outlook that says that lefties, socialists, hippies, greenies etc. are just plain WRONG about everything, that their entire world view is basically incorrect.

So it really is hard for them to accept that the lefties and the greenies might be RIGHT about something - which seems to lead to ever more bizarre denials.

The corollary of this is that people with this kind of viewpoint tend to believe that climate change is a stalking horse of the left, to de-industrialise the economy, to promote their "business-hating" ideals, etc.

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[PopeRatzo]

Any time two people get together to bone a third person it is a conspiracy.

Every time somebody tells me that, I have to give myself a time out in the bunker until I calm down.

Dunning Kruger effect

[Martin S.]

Conspiratorial Thinking is clear example of the Dunning Kruger effect at work.

They overestimate their own intelligence or skill, and ignore contrary feedback. They disavow the intelligence or skill of others. These people are simply too stupid to invalidate their own hypothesis and recognise the validity of the alternative.

What is "Conspiratorial Thinking"????

[popo]

I'm utterly confused by the premise here.

Conspiracies are very often extremely real and extremely provable. HSBC was just found guilty at the highest levels of management of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. LIBOR manipulation involved dozens of banks and hundreds of people and was the largest financial market manipulation in history. During the mortgage crisis we had robosigning and MERS which intentionally broke the chain of ownership (and the law) in the interest of securitization. We also had dozens of investment banks bundling worthless mortgages and assigning positive valuations to them. Bernie Madoff and his partners conspired to rip off countless pension funds and communities. Etc. Etc. Etc. These are all conspiracies involving billions of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of people. That's just the last 4 years. And those are the provable conspiracies.

And then there are the conspiracies we know to be true, but cannot prove: Julian Assange for example, who announced he had an upcoming Wikileak regarding the banking system, and the next thing you know he's wanted on rape charges for consensual sex but supposedly with an aconsensual lack of a condom. A crime supposedly so serious that apparently world governments are willing to abandon 500 years of international law and invade sovereign embassies. Is disbelieving the premise "Conspiratorial thinking" or just "not being an idiot"?

Or let's take an easier one: Jon Corzine and his firm looted private accounts and absconded with over $1 billion dollars. The money was transferred somewhere. But no one knows where. It's a magical mystery of the disappearing $1 Billion. If you believe that are you resisting "conspiratorial thinking", or are you the biggest idiot on Earth? Let's see -- JP Morgan underwrote MF Global's trades. Everyone knows where the money went. But no one can talk about it. Because if you claim that the money went anywhere but to "money heaven", you're engaging in "conspiratorial thinking".

We are surrounded by corruption, plotting, scheming and insane rapes of the public coffers every day of every year.

These schemes are nothing other than "conspiracies".

But somehow this study begins with the entirely "fringe" premise that conspiracies aren't real. That in itself appears to be a conspiracy.

Re:What is "Conspiratorial Thinking"????

[popo]

I am not conflating *all* conspiracy theories with those which have been proven to be true.

You misunderstand my point. And by the way, I agree conceptually with most of what you wrote.

My issue is with the semantic definition of the term "Conspiratorial Thinking" to mean "Seeing little green men".

To be clear: In science we theorize and then we prove. Postulates do not carry the same weight as empirical fact, and should therefore be treated as such.

BUT theories are not "falsities" either until proven as such. And this is the problem with the tone of the OP. That "conspiratorial thinking" represents a "wrong" is as scientifically invalid as assuming the facts to be true. My point is that there is nothing remotely wrong with theorizing. In fact, we *must* theorize as it forms the basis of research.

The notion that "conspiratorial thinking" is "wrong" is a dangerous notion as it sets forth the premise that we should all agree with the prevailing facts as they have been presented. My point is that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the facts as presented are often false, and intentionally misrepresented as truth.

Given that we know conspiracies happen, it is in no way wrong-footed to theorize about who is engaging in secretive efforts, and how they might be benefiting.

Additionally: You asked "How can you know them to be true if you can't prove it".

Because we already have the proof of the crime. We simply do not have the proof of the criminal. This is the tree that has fallen in the forest. We discover the tree on the ground. It is not in question that the tree fell, only whether or not it made a sound (or what pushed it).

In the case of MF Global, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that $1 billion went missing from rehypothecated accounts. That this took some doing is clear. That this took some doing by multiple parties is also clear. (The transferral of $1 billion does not happen casually, without being noticed by the way). Ergo, we know that there was a conspiracy. What we cannot prove is who participated, or where the money went. But that there was a conspiracy goes without saying.

Does "Skeptic" == the new "Hacker"

[DigitalSorceress]

So, in the course of reading the article on ElReg, I noticed that the folks denying climate change are being referred to as "Skeptical".

I get it - being "skeptical" of something means that you are not taking it at face value - that you dispute it.

However, there's also the self-identified "Skeptical Movement" nowadays which consists of a lot of great folks who are trying to introduce science-based thought and skepticism / critical thinking.

I'm talking about folks like Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame), Phil Plait (of "Bad Astronomy"), Brian Duning's Skeptoid, The Skeptic's guide to the Universe, Skepchick.org, the James Randi Educational Foundation, QackCast, and many many more...

Real science-based medicine and thinking... and to see "Skeptical" with a capitol S, I think of these folks and having the word used to refer to conspiracy nuts and climate deniers... well, it just feels like the same kind of co-opting that happened to the "hacker" monicker.

I guess I just wanted to get the word out that while the climate deniers and conspiracy nuts may be "skeptical" of climate change and such, they're not representative of "the Skeptical Movement" which is all about critical thinking and science-based approach to life, the universe, and everything.

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[0xdeadbeef]

It fails their own stated goals of making a just world â"â" "climate justice" â"â"when a shack in Kenya that's supposed to store medicines and have a bed for the sick, has to choose between either keeping the fridge on, or the fan and lights, because the solar panel they have can't do both. And that's "climate justice" ????

No, that's a slippery slope leading to an imaginary dilemma, in service of your balance fallacy.

That's actually a rather strange scenario for you to create, since solar power is bringing energy to areas of Kenya traditional power doesn't or won't go.

Is it a reference to this? Are they having problems with their equipment? If so, it is rather obnoxious of you to call their hospital a "shack".

Or, is the scenario made-up, but still plausible? So where in Kenya are diesel generators illegal?

Basically, what I'm asking is, is there some reason for us to not believe you are completely full of shit?

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[BasilBrush]

You're making the point that true free markets are poor at dealing with the environment. That's true. They are also poor at dealing with all sorts of other concerns, which is why markets are regulated in all sorts of ways. And taxed at varying rates. All decided on by politicians. This is just one more way.

I'm quite open to non-market ways of dealing with the AGW problem. If you have any suggestions.

Doing nothing, just because the idealised, imaginary, true free market has no way to deal with the issue, is certainly not the answer.

Re:It is Psychology, Science! Fact!

[sycodon]

While you're ad hominem stereotyping is no doubt amusing to you and your fellow neo Nazis

Talk about recursive!