aggle-rithm
Ardent Formulist
I while back I watched a TEDTalks presentation with VS Ramachandran, talking about the Bouba/kika effect. Ramachandran made the point that we can bring the information supplied by our senses together by using metaphor. If we hear "quack", we picture a duck, but if we hear something unfamiliar, we picture something that looks like something that sounds like what we've heard. We try to understand new information by comparing it to what we already know, using metaphorical thinking.
It's been noted many times on these forums how much difficulty conspiracy theorists have with the concepts of metaphor, analogy, and simile. If someone says something sounds "like a bomb", they believe that person means there was an actual bomb. If a debunker tries to explain a concept in a difficult subject like physics by using an analogy, the CTist fails to grasp the point.
I've long wondered whether this was an actual inability to think metaphorically, or just willful ignorance. Then I thought about Ramachandran's talk, and how it suggested that metaphorical thinking is critical to our ability to make sense of the world.
That's the CTists whole problem...they can't make sense of the world. They attempt to interpret the events around them, but that interpretation is badly distorted in a way that is obvious to most people.
I don't think everyone who leans toward conspiracy-type thinking has this problem; some just jump on the bandwagon because it helps promote their own agenda. But I'd be willing to bet that this is the root cause of the cognitive distortions demonstrated by most of them.
How would we test this? It would be cool to do the bouba/kika test on a group of people that includes conspiracy theorists and compare the results to the baseline. In that test, 95% of the people correctly associate the symbol with the sound. If CTists score significantly less than that, we have a winner!
(Of course, that wouldn't prove that they are conspiracy theorists BECAUSE of their difficulty with metaphorical thinking, but it might give us a clearer picture of their psychology.)
It's been noted many times on these forums how much difficulty conspiracy theorists have with the concepts of metaphor, analogy, and simile. If someone says something sounds "like a bomb", they believe that person means there was an actual bomb. If a debunker tries to explain a concept in a difficult subject like physics by using an analogy, the CTist fails to grasp the point.
I've long wondered whether this was an actual inability to think metaphorically, or just willful ignorance. Then I thought about Ramachandran's talk, and how it suggested that metaphorical thinking is critical to our ability to make sense of the world.
That's the CTists whole problem...they can't make sense of the world. They attempt to interpret the events around them, but that interpretation is badly distorted in a way that is obvious to most people.
I don't think everyone who leans toward conspiracy-type thinking has this problem; some just jump on the bandwagon because it helps promote their own agenda. But I'd be willing to bet that this is the root cause of the cognitive distortions demonstrated by most of them.
How would we test this? It would be cool to do the bouba/kika test on a group of people that includes conspiracy theorists and compare the results to the baseline. In that test, 95% of the people correctly associate the symbol with the sound. If CTists score significantly less than that, we have a winner!
(Of course, that wouldn't prove that they are conspiracy theorists BECAUSE of their difficulty with metaphorical thinking, but it might give us a clearer picture of their psychology.)
