Merged Psychology of Conspiracy Theoriests

[Ape of Good Hope]

 

[Foster Zygote]

I've found that many of the conspiracy theorists I've encountered (mostly Apollo hoax believers) display rather pronounced characteristics of narcissism. I frequently encounter an odd mix of haughty arrogance and insecurity, as well as the seemingly pathological inability to cope with being mistaken about anything.

When psychologically well developed people are presented with empirical evidence that they are wrong about something, they generally feel no shame about admitting that they were mistaken and readily accept the new evidence. I've seen this happen many times, and I've had no problem admitting my errors in such cases.

But when you present empirical evidence of error, or point out a logical fallacy to a narcissist, no matter how politely you do it, their response is very often something along the lines of, "no, you're stupid!". I think that the conspiracy theory is something that provides comfort by allowing the theorist to feel intellectually superior to the vast majority of people, whom they perceive as too stupid to see something that they can easily discern. To them, being wrong about something is a sign of stupidity and inferiority. So when you show them evidence of their errors, they react emotionally because in their minds you are now attempting to reverse the game and and make them look stupid. Anyone who disputes their claims is the enemy.

 

[blutoski]

I've found that many of the conspiracy theorists I've encountered (mostly Apollo hoax believers) display rather pronounced characteristics of narcissism. I frequently encounter an odd mix of haughty arrogance and insecurity, as well as the seemingly pathological inability to cope with being mistaken about anything.

When psychologically well developed people are presented with empirical evidence that they are wrong about something, they generally feel no shame about admitting that they were mistaken and readily accept the new evidence. I've seen this happen many times, and I've had no problem admitting my errors in such cases.

But when you present empirical evidence of error, or point out a logical fallacy to a narcissist, no matter how politely you do it, their response is very often something along the lines of, "no, you're stupid!". I think that the conspiracy theory is something that provides comfort by allowing the theorist to feel intellectually superior to the vast majority of people, whom they perceive as too stupid to see something that they can easily discern. To them, being wrong about something is a sign of stupidity and inferiority. So when you show them evidence of their errors, they react emotionally because in their minds you are now attempting to reverse the game and and make them look stupid. Anyone who disputes their claims is the enemy.

I think that sounds less like Narcissism, and more just some sort of cognitive dissonance. At some point, the claimant has bound his self-image to the truth of the claim. If the claim goes down, somehow it means he's not a good person, so he needs to defend it at all costs.

The most dominant PDs I've seen associated with CTs are [ASPD] in the Cluster B and [OCPD] in the Cluster C.

I've treated these as part of the 'intrinsic/personality' group in my taxonomy.

 

[Oystein]

The thread title and in the link grossly misinterprets the results.

From the comment in the extract.

As the first author of this study, I'd like to address a misleading headline that's been making the rounds lately: the idea that this study says that people who believe 9/11 conspiracy theories are better-adjusted than those who do not. This grossly misinterprets our results: this study says nothing about mental health, and its results do not justify any conclusions about one group of people being more or less "sane" than another.

Let me add to this:
First - the link to the above quote is the abstract of the Wood&Douglas paper - scroll down to find Wood's comment:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23847577
Here the full comment:

Michael Wood2014 Nov 30 07:45 a.m.edited 2 of 2 people found this helpful

As the first author of this study, I'd like to address a misleading headline that's been making the rounds lately: the idea that this study says that people who believe 9/11 conspiracy theories are better-adjusted than those who do not. This grossly misinterprets our results: this study says nothing about mental health, and its results do not justify any conclusions about one group of people being more or less "sane" than another.

The main basis for this misinterpretation appears to be the observed difference in hostility between conspiracist (pro-conspiracy-theory) and conventionalist (anti-conspiracy-theory) comments. On average, conventionalist comments tended to be somewhat more hostile. In the paper, we interpret this difference as the product of a fairly specific social situation in which the two rival opinion-based groups use different strategies of social influence according to their relative popularity, rather than as an inherent psychological difference. In fact, previous research by Marina Abalakina-Paap and colleagues has shown that dispositional hostility is positively, not negatively, correlated with beliefs in conspiracy theories - in other words, people who believe more conspiracy theories tend to be more hostile. However, that finding doesn't necessarily justify the conclusion that conventionalists are better-adjusted than conspiracists. Either of these conclusions relies on the unstated premise that hostility is never good or justified, and that less hostility is always better. This is at least an arguable assumption, and there's certainly no evidence for it here.

In general, I would urge anyone who found this paper via the "sanity" article to please think critically about headlines in the future. It is tempting to believe without question self-serving headlines that validate your prejudices and beliefs, but that's precisely when critical thinking is most important.

Note the link to another paper:
Abalakina-Paap, M., Stephan, W. G., Craig, T. and Gregory, W. L. (1999), Beliefs in Conspiracies. Political Psychology, 20: 637–647. doi: 10.1111/0162-895X.00160

Abstract

This study used canonical correlation to examine the relationship of 11 individual difference variables to two measures of beliefs in conspiracies. Undergraduates were administered a questionnaire that included these two measures (beliefs in specific conspiracies and attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies) and scales assessing the 11 variables. High levels of anomie, authoritarianism, and powerlessness, along with a low level of self-esteem, were related to beliefs in specific conspiracies, whereas high levels of external locus of control and hostility, along with a low level of trust, were related to attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies in general. These findings support the idea that beliefs in conspiracies are related to feelings of alienation, powerlessness, hostility, and being disadvantaged. There was no support for the idea that people believe in conspiracies because they provide simplified explanations of complex events.

Full paper available here:
www.researchgate.net/publication/227692209_Beliefs_in_Conspiracies/file/3deec524b89e40340c.pdf

 

[JayUtah]

I'm going to cast my vote on the side of narcissism, prefacing that I'm using a layman's understanding of the term and not the DSM's canonical definition.

I believe a significant component of conspiracism is ego reinforcement. I believe the conspiracist constructs a worldview in which he is the hero for having identified to the world things that he believes powerful interests want to keep secret. This compensates in some cases for failed aspirations.

In terms of reasoning in specialized fields, the conspiracist usually believes his common sense provides sufficient expertise, supplemented with web searches that produce snippets of marginally relevant erudition. When his incompetence in the field is demonstrated, there is dissonance between his desire to maintain the construct in which he is an expert and the growing realization that he is beyond his ken. But as far as the construct holds for him, I think it would appear from the outside to be narcissism.

 

[Oystein]

Another, British (this constitutes a flaw, as the authors point out themselves! ), study is

Swami, V., Chamorro-Premuzic, T. and Furnham, A. (2010), Unanswered questions: A preliminary investigation of personality and individual difference predictors of 9/11 conspiracist beliefs. Appl. Cognit. Psychol., 24: 749–761. doi: 10.1002/acp.1583

Full text here: http://www.drtomascp.com/uploads/Unanswered911_ACP_2010.pdf

Swami et al. conclude thusly:

Concurrently, the focus on personality and individual differences in this study contributes to this aim by identifying the 9/11 conspiratorial individual as a believer of other conspiracy theories, exposed to 9/11 conspiracist ideas, politically cynical, agreeable, defiant of authority, supportive of democratic practice and inquisitive.

(Please note that the traits enumerated in that sentence need not have the layman's everyday-meaning. They are also not meant to be interpreted along "good-bad" axis).

Scott Sommers had offered a bit of criticism in 2012 already - here.

 

[dudalb]

I'm going to cast my vote on the side of narcissism, prefacing that I'm using a layman's understanding of the term and not the DSM's canonical definition.

I believe a significant component of conspiracism is ego reinforcement. I believe the conspiracist constructs a worldview in which he is the hero for having identified to the world things that he believes powerful interests want to keep secret. This compensates in some cases for failed aspirations.

In terms of reasoning in specialized fields, the conspiracist usually believes his common sense provides sufficient expertise, supplemented with web searches that produce snippets of marginally relevant erudition. When his incompetence in the field is demonstrated, there is dissonance between his desire to maintain the construct in which he is an expert and the growing realization that he is beyond his ken. But as far as the construct holds for him, I think it would appear from the outside to be narcissism.

As someone once said, a lot of Conspiracy Theorists see themselves as Neo in "The Matrix" fighting against a vast evil conspiracy only a few people know about while the sheep remain unaware. A huge ego trip.
Of course this narcissim can be combined with other motives..like extreme left or right political opinions. An individual can have a number of motives for what he believes and what he does.

 

[blutoski]

As someone once said, a lot of Conspiracy Theorists see themselves as Neo in "The Matrix" fighting against a vast evil conspiracy only a few people know about while the sheep remain unaware. A huge ego trip.

I'd warn against overdoing it, though. That's not necessarily narcissism. I would describe most skeptics as motivated by a self image of crusading for justice as well. The number one word I hear in skeptics in the pub to describe non-skeptics, it's "Sheeple".

Narcissim's considered pathological when the person thinks they personally are more deserving a human being than everybody else - ie: that they deserve to gain wealth and power from the suffering of others. I only see that among the CTers who are insincere and deliberately fabricating CTs to get rubes to join their cult, join their newsletter, buy books, movies, &c. Kevin Trudeau is a good example of a malignant narcissist.

Of course this narcissim can be combined with other motives..like extreme left or right political opinions. An individual can have a number of motives for what he believes and what he does.

I expect there's a lot of factors combining, with the exception of the genuinely psychotic, where that pathology dominates all psychology.

 

[blutoski]

Another, British (this constitutes a flaw, as the authors point out themselves! ), study is

Swami, V., Chamorro-Premuzic, T. and Furnham, A. (2010), Unanswered questions: A preliminary investigation of personality and individual difference predictors of 9/11 conspiracist beliefs. Appl. Cognit. Psychol., 24: 749–761. doi: 10.1002/acp.1583

Full text here: http://www.drtomascp.com/uploads/Unanswered911_ACP_2010.pdf

Swami et al. conclude thusly:

(Please note that the traits enumerated in that sentence need not have the layman's everyday-meaning. They are also not meant to be interpreted along "good-bad" axis).

Scott Sommers had offered a bit of criticism in 2012 already - here.

I actually liked the study despite its obvious shortcomings. I do want to emphasize that it may not be generalizeable to other topics, and there may be fertile ground for research on other CTs and perhaps categorization. For example, there may be higher correlation between certain clusters of CTs, and some CTs may exclude each other very effectively (despite the proven ability for CTers to maintain contradictory CTs).

 

[Oystein]

Since I have linked to a few CT-psychology papers already, let me continue with one of the most-cited - from 1994:

Goertzel, Ted: Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Political Psychology Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 731-742

Goertzel's full manuscript (pre-publication; without journal additions) can be downloaded here.

This has been brought up and commented several times on this forum in various threads. I liked Scott Sommer's and ElMondoHummus's takes. I suggest you search for "Goertzel" - which will also bring up some more comments he made elsewhere more recently.

Just a couple of teaser quote:

Most respondents are inclined to believe that several of a list of conspiracies are probably or definitely true. The tendency to believe in conspiracies is correlated with anomia, with a lack of trust in other people, and with feelings of insecurity about unemployment. ... The strong correlation with the scale of Anomia indicates that Belief in Conspiracies is associated with the feelings of alienation and disaffection from the system.
...
Conspiratorial beliefs are useful in monological belief systems since they provide an easy, automatic explanation for any new phenomenon which might threaten the belief system. In a monological belief system, each of the beliefs serves as evidence for each of the other beliefs.

 

[Jango]

As someone once said, a lot of Conspiracy Theorists see themselves as Neo in "The Matrix" fighting against a vast evil conspiracy only a few people know about while the sheep remain unaware. A huge ego trip.
Of course this narcissim can be combined with other motives..like extreme left or right political opinions. An individual can have a number of motives for what he believes and what he does.

Or Alice or Dorothy. The analogy is fitting for the reason that it is an awakening of sorts. Statistics and demographics in the U.S. illustrate this concept nicely. Look at the population right now, over 310,000,000.

About 80,000,000 of them are almost entirely eliminated from knowing much of anything about politics or the way their government operates on a day-to-day basis. Their grasp of history, especially contemporary U.S. History, leaves much to be desired. This is a result of a bad combination of events, namely, public educators only have so much time to cover such a large topic, the way children are taught & what the children are taught. It is a conditioning of sorts.

Where the sense of an awakening occurs is when a person who had been taught nothing but the Rah-Rah stuff, was not involved in the political process, had no interest in history and was a true believer of the U.S. and that we're truly exceptional stumbles upon or is directed to information that is entirely contrary to everything that had made their world view stand up.

Using a particular fiction character's name to describe the sensation of newfound awareness gets chuckles out of people or the roll of their eyes, but a more down to Earth approach would be like opening a door. Sometimes the doors we open lead us to vastly different experiences than we're used to.

How many Americans do you think that are alive right now that are walking around completely ignorant to much of everything around them in a political sense or a historical sense? The media had said that about 30,000,000 Americans were going to watch the State of the Union and less than 60% of eligible voters voted in the 2012 Presidential election and even less than that vote in elections for local, state and Congressional officials.

There's not a whole bunch of people like say, a Noam Chomsky walking around the United States. Imagine the ratio between Chomsky-like Americans and Americans that are completely sucked up into some entertainment medium like MMA, Boxing, football, T.V. shows, reality shows, music, etc. It is far more appealing and far more widespread to see Americans consumed by mindless entertainment. Deflated footballs in the NFL has dominated mainstream media attention. So the media isn't helping the inane culture in this country that has been orchestrated for almost a hundred years now. The rabbit hole is deep, and it leaves a person feeling as though 12 years of their life were forcibly taken away from them and it was all for nothing because what they were taught was malarkey.

So it isn't so much ego as it is just a reality of the way it is. For every one aware person there are hundreds if not thousands of politically dumb and ignorant people. The media talks about this from time-to-time.

 

[Sceptic-PK]

No, it's ego.

 

[Jango]

You're right, it is organized and realistic.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Except that (a) there are erudite, intelligent, well-educated and sceptical people who know that governments behave amorally and yet still don't buy the crazy half-baked nonsense peddled by conspiracy theorists, and (b) not all the world is the USA.

Dave

ETA: In fact, Jango, the fact that you discuss acceptance or rejection of conspiracism in such USA-centric terms suggests that you are part of the problem you're trying to describe.

 

[Jango]

America comes first, naturally.

 

[Dave Rogers]

As usual, something that looks like a response but actually isn't. But your argument, that failure to believe the conspiracy theory is a result of unsophisticated thinking, simply doesn't hold water. Conspiracy theories tend to be (a) USA-centric, and (b) based on oversimplified understanding of events. Kennedy's head jerks back and to the left, so conspiracists say the bullet came from in front and to the right because it's a simple answer; they can't be bothered to understand that bullet impacts are more complicated than in the movies. America gets attacked by people from a less developed country; conspiracy theorists can't believe that foreigners can be cunning, well-educated and determined, so they claim that nineteen cavemen couldn't have overcome the world's most sophisticated air defence system, conveniently forgetting that the "cavemen" probably had better educations than they did. Anything conspiracists can't understand is simply put down to "That's how the conspiracy planned it," because understanding anything more complicated might be hard. And every action, good or bad, is attributed to dark forces within the US Government, because there isn't anybody else in the world capable of action.

Bottom line is, it's the conspiracy theorists whose world view is the crude one.

Dave

 

[RoboTimbo]

You're right, it is organized and realistic.

America comes first, naturally.

Thus proving many points in this thread. I don't think you could have played your part any better.

 

[JayUtah]

Sometimes the doors we open lead us to vastly different experiences than we're used to.

Or sometimes they lead nowhere. The process of determining the difference is critical thinking, and it's how intelligent people go about determining the value of what's behind each door. Conspiracism is the art of calling what's behind every door the Royal Honeymoon Suite no matter what's actually there.

How many Americans do you think that are alive right now that are walking around completely ignorant to much of everything around them in a political sense or a historical sense?

The question is how many people are alive making stuff up out of pure imagination and believing on that basis that they are deep thinkers? How many people are being led around by the nose by pied pipers, and being told how intelligent they are because of it? How many people literally don't know how to test an idea to see whether it has any factual support?

So it isn't so much ego as it is just a reality of the way it is. For every one aware person there are hundreds if not thousands of politically dumb and ignorant people. The media talks about this from time-to-time.

No, it's pure ego. It's people making stuff up to make themselves feel important, and then calling others ignorant for not believing them.

 

[JayUtah]

Except that (a) there are erudite, intelligent, well-educated and sceptical people who know that governments behave amorally and yet still don't buy the crazy half-baked nonsense peddled by conspiracy theorists, and (b) not all the world is the USA.

The notion that in order to "question the conventional narrative" one necessarily must believe in some conspiracy is daft. The central fallacy of conspiracism is still that eroding faith in one narrative establishes another narraive by default. Intelligent, skeptical people don't believe that. People can question the conventional narrative, question the individual alternative narratives, and come away believing that the conventional narrative still holds the most water of all of them. There's nothing unintelligent about that, and it certainly doesn't make one "politically ignorant" for having done so.

 

[JayUtah]

Bottom line is, it's the conspiracy theorists whose world view is the crude one.

Very much so. Another central tenet of conspiracism is that it's most often based only on what the conspiracy theorist knows at the time. Often times, legitimate expertise is specifically eschewed as being tainted by mainstream thought. But conspiracy theories definitely depend very heavily on the reader's ignorance, if not the author's as well.

Paradoxically the conspiracy theorist will sometimes purport to educate the reader, and thus the reader comes away believing he has been given additional information the rest of the public supposedly doesn't have. But at best the reader has been spoon-fed a carefully chosen smattering of relevant facts (or more typically, rumor masquerading as fact) which he then doesn't question.

But one of the big reasons conspiracy theories don't go very far is not because the public is somehow ideologically predisposed against them, but because they simply can't stand up to any real-world scrutiny of their facts and reasoning.