A talk with psychology researcher Mikey Biddlestone (Twitter: @biddlepsych), who specializes in studying conspiracy theory beliefs, about some psychological factors that can make beliefs in conspiracy theories more likely. We talk about “just world” beliefs (beliefs that the world is largely just and fair) and how those might relate to conspiracy-minded thinking. Other topics discussed: how narcissistic and antisocial personality traits can relate to such beliefs; how we might define what is an unreasonable level of conspiracy-minded thinking; how conspiracy-minded thinking relates to anti-establishment views; how conspiracy-minded thinking ties into political polarization.
A transcript is below.
Episode links:
Related resources:
TRANSCRIPT
[Note: transcript will contain errors.]
Zach: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. On that site I’ve got some compilations of episodes on different topics: I’ve got a compilation of sports and games-related episodes; i’ve got a compilation of mental health-related episodes; I’ve got a compilation of episodes related to policing and investigation work. If you like this podcast, go check out those compilations, and please share these episodes with others; that’s the biggest way you can show your appreciate is sharing these episodes with other people.
On today’s episode I talk to psychology researcher Mikey Biddlestone about conspiracy theories.
I’ll tell you a little background about how I got interested in talking to Mikey. I’ve been thinking about conspiracy theories lately because I have a section on them in my book Defusing American Anger. I devote a good amount of space to them in there because I see conspiracy minded thinking as being a factor in extreme polarization; it’s possible to see a bit of a feedback loop there, in that extreme polarization results in more conspiracy-minded, paranoid thinking, and also, a belief in big conspiracies can result in more us-vs-them animosity. One of the things I try to do in my book is make the case for why big conspiracies are so rare and unlikely to succeed, because I think one of our problems is people believing big plots are way more likely to be attempted and to succeed than they are.
As I was thinking about that stuff, I got on a tangent of thinking about the more existential fears that might be behind some conspiracy theory beliefs. One thing that stood out in that regard was watching a Sandy Hook shooting conspiracy theory believer talk about their beliefs; this was someone who thought the Sandy Hook school mass shooting was staged and not real; watching her talk about that, I got the sense that she couldn’t face the idea of such horror, that her mind rebelled against the idea that such a thing could happen, and it seemed like maybe she’d rather believe that it was a staged event; that no children were actually killed. So that got me thinking about so-called Just World beliefs, which we’ll talk about in this talk. The just-world concept is basically an assumption that many of us have, even an unconscious assumption, that the world is largely just and fair, and that horrible things don’t happen to undeserving people. Basically a sort of underlying belief in karma and justice. This can be seen as a way of dealing with existential terror and a desire to avoid facing the more chaotic and random and terrifying aspects of existence.
And so that led me to finding Mikey Biddlestone’s work, and wanting to ask him about these ideas. As you’ll hear he’s researched some of the more nuanced aspects of conspiracy-minded thinking. Some of the things we talk about in this episode include:
How narcissistic personality traits relate to conspiracy-minded thinking
The difficulty of defining what is unreasonable conspiracy-minded thinking and how we might differentiate unreasonable versus reasonable ways of thinking
The survey result that claimed to show 12 million Americans believe in lizard people
The difficulties of determining people’s real beliefs via surveys
How conspiracy minded thinking relates to anti-establishment beliefs on the left and the right.
A little more about Mikey: he’s currently a Research Fellow in Social Cognition & Digital Media at the University College London. His primary research focus includes the social factors associated with conspiracy beliefs, developing misinformation interventions, and investigating psychological reactions to everyday politics. You can follow him on Twitter at BiddlePsych; that’s BiddlePsych. And you can check out his research papers by searching online for ‘mike biddlestone’.
Okay here’s the interview with Mikey Biddlestone.
Zach: [00:00:00] Welcome to the People Who Read People Podcast with me, Zachary Ellwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about [email protected] on that site. I’ve got some compilations of episodes on different topics. I’ve got a compilation of sports and games related episodes.
I’ve got a compilation of mental health related episodes. I’ve got a compilation of episodes related to policing and investigation work. If you like this podcast, go check out those compilations and p
Zach: Hi Mikey, welcome to the show.
Mikey: Hi, Zach. Thanks so much for having me on.
Zach: So maybe we could start with, um, could you give a kind of a high level summary of your work on conspiracy theory areas and what kind of, what drives your interest in that area?
Mikey: Yeah, for sure.
Well, um, I think if I start off with the interest side, uh, I think that maybe explains a bit why I am kind of interested in this topic area. Um, I’ve, I’ve known people who have kind of, I guess you could say fallen down the rabbit hole. Uh, I’ve sort of seen how it’s affected their lives, you know, I’ve also had friends who have kind of found conspiracy theories entertaining, but not necessarily fully.
Gone into kind of the conspiracy mindset. So all that sort of stuff I’ve been interested in working out, you know, what the conditions are under which, you know, people fall into fully the rabbit hole, or are they just sort of teetering on the edge, or are they just sort of humoring themselves with conspiracy theories.
So that was kind of what motivated me to, uh, at least do a PhD on, um, the psychology of conspiracy beliefs. So my background is basically a, um, you know, social psy psychology [00:05:00] that I was interested in, but, um. I started my PhD at the University of Kent in 2018, which was of course just after the kind of Trump presidency, Brexit in the uk.
So there was a lot of stuff about populism that was kind of inspiring in terms of, you know, what we wanted to understand. So at that time, my focus of, of my thesis was essentially about the kind of intergroup, uh, elements of conspiracy theories. So the sort of perspective that we took there was, um, there’s this quite helpful, I guess, framework that, um, is used in the literature.
Which is about the motivations that drive conspiracy beliefs, right? So the idea here is that we have frustrated needs that are kind of universal psychological needs. If those needs are frustrated, we tend to kind of try and compensate for that negative experience by adopting these beliefs that maybe make us feel, at least in a superficial way, they make us feel safer, they make us feel more certain.
They kind of identify maybe the groups that are supposedly responsible for our, our. Negative experiences or shortcomings. Uh, and that’s sort of the general perspective that we take. So we call those the sort of epistemic. So that’s about like the kind of way we understand the world that’s about certainty, those motivations, [00:06:00] existential motivations, which is about threat or security, wanting to feel safe and in control of your environment.
And then there’s the kind of social or kind of intergroup or self-image elements, which is kind of to bolster your self image. As I said, my, my PhD was about the intergroup processes and in some of the work, what we found was, uh, there’s this, uh, notion, uh, of a variable that’s commonly used now called collective narcissism.
So this is the idea that we have like a kind of conventional identification with our ingroup who feel solidarity. We feel satisfaction, we feel like there’s a kind of overlap with our fellow in-group members in a community, right? There’s also this approach to identification, which we can kind of see as sort of defensive and insecure.
Uh, it’s basically based on the idea that you feel like your group is undervalued and underappreciated, uh, and therefore you feel like your group is kind of under threat by everyone else, and you wanna reestablish the kind of dominance or the status of your group by believing in certain things or, or engaging in certain behaviors, right?
So. What, what the literature shows is that collective narcissism in different contexts, like the national context, maybe even [00:07:00] sports context, is linked to belief in conspiracy theories, especially about outgroups, because this allows you to kind of put your group in a sort of morally superior victim role, even if you’re not a victim, but also if you are a victim, you know, regardless of that.
If you feel defensive about your identity, you’re gonna reach out and explain your, your circumstances. By believing in conspiracy theories, it allows you to kind of dodge any sort of, uh, responsibility for the negative shortcomings of your group. This is also related to a kind of, uh, using your in-group for personal gains instead of for the benefits of the group as a whole.
And that’s a recent finding where people in the workplace environment, when they have kind of like team-based collective narcissism, they’re willing to instrumentally use their coworkers for their own personal ends instead of kind of benefit the workplace. So this convoluted thing, the conclusion of this is what we found in our research was this also kind of goes into the sort of conspiracy realm.
So what I mean by that is not only our collective narcissists. Willing to instrumentally treat their coworkers as, uh, objects in their kind of chess game. They’re also willing to conspire against their fellow in-group members. So we found in [00:08:00] across four studies that collective narcissism in different contexts was related to intentions to conspire against your fellow in-group members.
And in our final study as well, we found that that was particularly only the case when they saw these in-group members as typical members of their in-group. Meaning it’s not about using people. In general, it’s about their in-group members that they feel like they have control over, they have dominance over, and they’re using them for their own selfish ends in a sort of conspiratorial way.
There was other work I did in my PhD, but I think that was the most interesting in terms of how I perceive these sort of populous movements, right wing extremism, this kind of thing. But, um, sorry, I’m aware that I gave a sort of convoluted explanation there, but that was the sort of Yeah, I think the, the background to that intergroup mm-hmm.
Perspective that I had. Yeah.
Zach: I think a lot about the relationship between the extreme polarization, extreme group animosity and, and the relationship between that and kind of the perceptions of big conspiracy and plots. And one thing I see in that area is via the outgroup homogeneity effect, you know, where you see the other group as kind of all the [00:09:00] same, you know, and kind of like all as bad as the worst members in that group.
It’s like. That, that’s kind of an understandable outcome because you start seeing like, you know, the more you’re filtering for the other group’s fences and their. They’re insults and their bad behaviors. It’s like you and, and, and the more you see them as all the same, you, you kind of see these linkages between, oh, the, the thing that the political leader did here is related to the thing that this person on the street did, this violent thing the person on the street did.
So you kind of see this, you know, you start seeing more and more connections between this, like all the actions of the, of the hated outgroup, right. And so it kind of like naturally leads to, you know, more paranoid, basically, uh, mm-hmm. Mindset. And I’m curious, do you see, you know, does does that make sense?
Mikey: Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, you kind of touched on a few things there where I feel like the way maybe we would describe it in a sort of psychological sense is, um, I think they call it the perception of like group entity. So this is the, the idea that. A group is seen as this sort of, um, blob, right? Like a, a group is a sort of biological, physical thing.
And it tends to be, you know, we’ll, we’ll stereotype or perceive outgroups as, uh, [00:10:00] yeah, this sort of blob and this, this concrete thing. And then on that as well, you know, is, is the, the way that, uh, in an ingroup sense, the way we’re sort of trying to see outgroups as responsible for negative circumstances, it really does bolster the image of our own ingroup, right?
It’s like we’re being attacked. And, you know, especially when you see it from a political perspective of like partisan parties, you know, uh, Republican versus Democrat, for example. If you lose an election, if your party loses an election, you’re much more likely to perceive a conspiracy having happened, right?
Mm-hmm. And the idea there is that, you know, you have to explain your, your negative circumstances in your existential worries of the fact that for the next four or five years, you know, there’s this party that I don’t think are gonna run things very well. What do I do now? Oh, it must, there can’t have been that people actually do support them.
I can’t believe that it’s that, yeah, they conspired in order to achieve that.
Zach: Being attacked by this large blob that’s like this monolithic blob and as opposed to a bunch of individuals, a complex system. Right,
Mikey: exactly. It allows you to project that kind of conspiratorial element onto them, which is a simplistic narrative of the world, right?
Like, um, I think Manican, [00:11:00] is that the word? Or Manish Mannequin, I think is, yeah, Manan. Yeah. Like good versus evil, simplistic terms, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you talked about this for a second where it was like you, you said you knew people that kind of like played around or were kind of entertained by conspiracy theories versus people that.
Actually fully believed in them. I think that that’s an important nuance sometimes because I Yeah, for sure. I feel like sometimes, you know, and I, and I read about this in my, um, my book Diffusing American Anger, which is about, you know, our divides in America. It’s like sometimes we too quickly call people’s, uh, beliefs or, or even their, like, ideas of what could be true.
We’re, we’re, we’re often too quick to label them. As conspiracy theories. And one example is that is, you know, the, the Jeffrey Epstein Epstein story, which I think is resulting in, it resulted in a lot of copi, conspiracy minded thinking, you know, not just on the, on the right, but on the left too. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Uh, a lot of these, you know, big plots are happening and they’re, they’re hurting kids, kidnapping them, that the, the, the political elites or whoever. Uh, but I think in, in that realm, it’s like. There can be, you know, more rational like ideas of like, hey, maybe something [00:12:00] bad is happening, like the less certain kinds of ideas or like mm-hmm.
Just a suspicion, because that story was so creepy. Uh, so I think there’s this range, you know, this, you know, the, the getting into the nuance and the, that, the kind of, uh, spectrum of beliefs. And anyway, that, the practical thing there for me was, you know, be being careful about like too quickly labeling.
People’s ideas of what could be as conspiracy theories, because that in itself can be kind of like, make them more likely to believe in the conspiracy theories because they’re like, you know, oh, they’re pushing back against our ideas that something bad could be happening. So maybe, maybe our conspiracy theories are correct that they’re trying to cover it up, you know?
Uh, but I’m curious. Yeah. Do, do you have any thoughts on like, that, the nuance in those areas and maybe how difficult that can be to determine from like simplistic surveys and stuff?
Mikey: No, for sure. I mean, yeah, you’ve touched on a few things there that I think are really interesting elements of, of the sort of research approach, you know, to conspiracy beliefs.
And I think I wanna preface this with like, uh, we do deal as researchers with this sort of perspective of us that, you know, we’re trying [00:13:00] to maybe debunk. Uh, these ideas, right? These things that tend to be called conspiracy theories. On the one hand, we’re still tackling with how to really agree on and define what a conspiracy theory is, uh, and what should be, you know, what should fall under that category.
Uh, one big part of that is whether they are true or not, right? And, and from my personal perspective, I think a lot of the, the scholars that I, I speak to sometimes, like we mostly tend to agree that these are not. We’re not trying to make claims about whether conspiracy theories or conspiratorial claims, uh, conspiracist claims, I should say, are true or not.
It’s more about, uh, if we can find a collection of these ideas that sort of are related to each other, what does that predict? What, what does that mean, you know, in, in terms of your psychology in a, in a. Psychological profile sense. So I think that’s maybe helpful in understanding of like what our perspective is because we don’t really wanna deal with whether, you know, like, ’cause it’s basically impossible, you know?
There’s, there’s, mm-hmm. Conspiracy theories often are unfalsifiable, but they’re, yeah. That’s
Zach: what makes ’em so spreadable. Yeah,
Mikey: exactly. Yeah. So engaging with them, I’m not really sure. Is that helpful? That being said, you know, like, uh, I have my [00:14:00] own suspicions about certain ones. You mentioned the Epstein one, you know, JFK.
I can completely understand why people have suspicions about that and that kind of takes me into the next point you were sort of raising there, which is the kind of degree of your conviction in belief in these ideas. As you sort of touched on there, is like, it’s kind of unfair to say that if. On a scale, you know, we find that belief in a collection of conspiracy theories is related to something that that means that people who are completely convinced that the world is all a conspiracy, you know, lizard people around the world or that kind of thing, those are not the same thing, you know?
And, and what we’re saying there is that there’s this sort of relationship between a tendency to maybe perceive the world in this way. And when people have a collection of these ideas altogether, maybe we’re capturing this sort of idea of a conspiracy mindset. But at the same time, you know, I just wanna say that we’re not certain on this.
You know, we’re still. Grappling with these ideas of what, what do these measures mean? So as a, as a maybe helpful example, we have these three sort of distinct approaches at the moment that seem to be coming out the literature, which is belief in a collection of popular specific conspiracy theories or, or well known, I should say.
So, you know, these are the [00:15:00] ideas like the Epstein conspiracy theory, JFK, the moon landing nine 11. We, we put those in a scale when we ask people how certain they are that those things are true, or how likely they believe those things to be true, right? But then we also have something that we label a sort of conspiracy mindset or a conspiracy mentality.
And this tends to be, uh, seen as a sort of way of perceiving the world without any specific content, which is that, you know, conspiracies happen. Um, and that seems to be acting in a different way when we, when we measure that in the literature, right? So belief in specific conspiracy theories tends to have a very low mean when we measure that, meaning that people.
Overall tend to just not believe many conspiracy theories when you ask them whether they have suspicions that, uh, things are happening behind closed doors. Some things are connected when we don’t realize it. These sort of general definitions of conspiracies. There’s a lot more agreement with those in a, in a mean scale.
Mm-hmm. Uh, terms. Right. Then finally, we have this sort of in the middle bit, which is belief in like general notions of conspiracy narratives. So we don’t necessarily specify what the event is, but we do say things like the government use, [00:16:00] uh, people as patsies in order to hide their crimes. Uh, they commit acts of terrorism on their own.
Soil information is hidden from the public, that kind of thing, right? Mm-hmm. So they’re kind of alluding to real conspiracy theories without actually saying what that conspiracy is without. Saying the context of what happens. So that seems to be in the middle in terms of like, whether it’s specific or, or mentality.
And again, the reason why I’m saying all of this is because, you know, there are different ways to, to conceptualize this and we all sort of disagree on what we think is the most helpful approach here because in my personal opinion, I think it’s actually most helpful to measure. I. At least belief in specific conspiracy theories because that’s what people think about when they think about conspiracies.
Mm-hmm. But then you have the distinction of like, are those conspiracies challenging power structures or are they labeling minority groups with low material access to power as being conspirator conspirators as well. You know, so there’s even a distinction within there. Uh, and I think I’m risking going into way too much of the, of the distinction, but that’s kind of, I think that helps to, you know, separate out these things.
Right. And, and again, we’re grappling with that. So. We don’t have an answer yet, but there do do seem to be these different approaches that predict different things, essentially. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Yeah. It’s like, like [00:17:00] all these things, it’s like once you start digging into them, there’s so many areas of inquiry and so much complexity.
Yeah,
Mikey: exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Zach: So one random thing I’ve been curious about and wanted to ask somebody about was mm-hmm. The, um. You know, something got a lot of press a few years ago where it, it said a, in a survey that like, you know, extrapolating from the survey that like 12 million Americans believed in lizard people, something like that.
Mm-hmm. And I’m curious, what, what were your thoughts on that? Is there some hidden nuance there that may be missing that makes it maybe less, less absurd seeming? It than it does on the service.
Mikey: Yeah. Well, so I did look up the survey and I couldn’t find the sort of original data, but I dunno if I just wasn’t looking hard enough.
But from, from an intuitive standpoint, from these kind of survey responses and that kind of thing, uh, I guess my intuition from the, that finding is sort of on a, on an idea we both touched on already, is this thing of what does believe mean? You know? Mm-hmm. Like, what was the scale? Because what we tend to use is like a five point scale where.
One is, is definitely not true. Five is definitely true, but within that there’s also probably not true. Probably true. And there’s [00:18:00] also undecided, right? Mm. It depends on how they conceptualize belief. Because if it’s like. Possibly true or, you know, may be true. That’s completely different to saying that they’re certain about it.
That doesn’t, that’s not really fair to say, you know, that that person believes the same as, you know, the person who’s convinced. That being said, you know, maybe they did use a, a conservative criteria of what belief was, in which case I believe there could be an element of, you know, not. Necessarily serious answers to the survey, but that might be a bit of a cop out to say that, you know, that means I don’t have to engage in why that might be.
It just seems like a very large number compared to what we see with regards to certain conspiracies. Right. So conspiracy theories, so, you know, the Epstein one, the JFK one, we tend to say about, uh, 20% to 30% maybe of a population might have suspicions that that might be true. Meaning it, they could mean it’s probably true or possibly true.
As opposed to, uh, much less frequent ones like, you know, lizard people. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, a, a few ones like that, which kind of have a magical element to them. People are much less likely to, to be convinced of those. So, [00:19:00] uh, yeah. So that’s to say basically that, um, it’s this kind of degree of belief, right. And I think that maybe I would say they probably weren’t convinced of this and at least maybe not answering the survey.
So seriously.
Zach: Yeah. And, and that’s a good, uh, maybe good segue because mm-hmm. I do see sometimes criticisms of these surveys where it’s like, there’s various criticisms you can make of some of these surveys, like especially the online ones where, you know, there’s the criticism, uh, or the observation that sometimes, you know, uh, so-called, you know, more normal, average people are less likely.
To answer the online surveys, like they have things to do or whatever, you know? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, so that there’s kind of a skew. There can be a skew there. And then as you say, like there’s also the kind of like troll effect, you know, which I think is more, you know, as polarization gets worse, I think there’s more and more trolls Sure.
Who are like, I wanna mess with your survey. Right, definitely. And I’ve actually seen people say that, like, I’m never gonna answer a a, a news organization survey. You know, seriously, or honestly, and people say, say stuff like that. Mm-hmm.
Mikey: Of course. No. Yeah. Are
Zach: there, you know, and do you have thoughts on that?
Do you, do you feel like it, it can be a little bit difficult with some of these [00:20:00] surveys to see what’s going on? No, for
Mikey: sure. Yeah. So I think this is honestly probably the biggest, uh, well, I was gonna say threat, but I don’t mean that, I mean, I. Uh, issue, you know, with, uh, with our conclusions that we can draw in, in the literature.
So, um, there’s this, this great colleague, uh, good friend Ken Ra that’s doing a lot of research and basically the perspective that he tends to have when I speak to him seems to be, without realizing it, maybe we stigmatize these, these conspiracy beliefs, right? So his approach tends to be very much, you know, allowing people who may have these suspicions to kind of like air their grievances and, and to have a very sort of like o open platform.
Whereas, you know what. Well, on my side, we tend to do just because it’s not so much the interest of like destigmatizing, it’s more about, you know, the intergroup elements is we just sort of top down say, you know, do you believe this is true? This is not true. And then we make assumptions about, you know, oh, okay, so this may be a conspiracy mindset, therefore that person probably is, you know, low in analytical thinking or that kind of stuff.
Right. What he’s interested in is sort of, yeah, like I said, de-stigmatizing these ideas. So what he’s done is he’s run surveys instead of on, you know, we tend to use this platform called Prolific, which is, you know, a paid, [00:21:00] uh, database of, of participants where, like you said, they don’t seem to be representative generally of the, of the general population.
But, you know, it’s a very helpful database of, of participants, and it doesn’t mean that it’s all incorrect, it’s just those uncertainties. What he’s done is, for example, is run Facebook ads. Where he said, have you ever been called a conspiracy theorist by someone? Uh, in a way that’s sort of, you know, trying to say, you know, this may have been unfair.
And, um, and, and he, and he sees how this may be unfair, you know, or another question he asked in the advert was like, if you ever shared your ideas, do you worry that you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist? That meant that he collected this sample, which again, in his survey. Then after that, he also asked similar questions in order to capture their sort of what he was calling, like this kind of self labeled.
Conspiracy identity, you know? Mm-hmm. And he really got a sample that seemed to represent what we really wanna look for. So we call this the access problem. You know, the people who, uh, don’t want to take our surveys are the exact people that see us as conspirators, you know, and stuff like that. So they don’t trust us.
Those are the people that we wanna research. Whereas what he’s doing is he’s trying to be [00:22:00] open about this, you know, and, and, uh, say, you know, if, if you, if you don’t trust me, why don’t you trust me? Tell me, you know, tell me what I’m doing wrong. And he’s, and I just really, you know, I, I really respect his approach to that.
You know, I think he’s really making a good effort there. Um, so that’s sort of the, the way I would, I would conceptualize that at the moment is using these ways to, uh, uh, identify these communities, you know, and, and be open and, and honest about what you’re doing. Mm-hmm. That being said, like you said, you know, there’s the troll effect, you know, and I’ve run surveys on Reddit where people have said, uh, oh, you’re trying to say that, you know, COVID conspiracy theories are are crazy or something.
I’m gonna run your survey. 50 times and give the wrong answers. Uh, but you know, there’s ways that we can identify that. So it wasn’t so much of an issue. It was just, I felt bad because that person had this grievance with me, you know, because, uh, maybe on the survey title it said Cambridge, and people were saying, oh, this must be Cambridge Analytica.
Oh. Or this kind of stuff. You know, it’s just, it’s very hard to remove any sort of suspicious element from it. But the point being that I need to make more of an effort as a researcher, and we all do, you know, to do what? Essentially. I think Kenzo Nera does really well.
Zach: Well, it’s kinda like the, yeah. The, the more us versus [00:23:00] them, uh, you know, political animosity there is, the more things are potentially triggering to whatever group.
It’s like they’re, they’re gonna, there’s always gonna be something that like, catches their eye and is kind of a trigger point. And they’re like, I don’t trust you for X, y, Z reason, you know? Yeah,
Mikey: exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And like I said, you can never really remove that, but, you know, we can do our best, I
Zach: think.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. At least, at least think about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, maybe we can get into the, uh, you know, one of the reasons I I reached out to you was. The potential link between the so-called just world types of ideas. Mm-hmm. And beliefs and conspiracy theories. And maybe you could explain first, you know, what the, when people talk about this just world concept, uh, what is that?
Mikey: Yeah. So from my understanding, I’ve, I’ve not researched it in depth, but, uh, just world beliefs. But there’s this measure of of, of, yeah, what. Like you said, you know, this measure of just world beliefs where people seem to kind of see the world as the conclusions or outcomes is that people, you know, will, bad people will get what they deserve.
Good people will get what they deserve in the sense that they’ll be rewarded and bad people, you know, will be punished, this kind of thing. So, kind [00:24:00] of karma, I guess it’s like a psychological perspective of karma. I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve seen a different, um, conceptualization of this check.
Zach: Yeah.
That’s, that’s pretty, yeah, that’s pretty much my understanding. Like kind of like a, a, a, they don’t want to see the world as chaotic and, and having no reason. They want see, you know, a belief that. Bad people get what they deserve. Yeah. Basically. Yeah.
Mikey: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think it’s not necessarily about like a cognitive need or epistemic need for like order or certainty necessarily, even though that’s part of it.
I think it’s about the moral outcomes, right. Of good and bad, I think is, is what that taps into. So, so yeah, that there’s basically, uh, I’m really happy that you brought this up because this is a really understudied variable in the conspiracy beliefs literature, so it’s something that we need to tap into more.
However, there is stuff that we’ve looked into that I do think is quite relevant, so. For example, uh, we’ve run a meta-analysis recently, which, uh, hopefully will be published soon, where basically we’ve looked at the different motives that are associated with conspiracy beliefs. And as I mentioned earlier, we distinguished it between epistemic, existential and social motives, right in the existential motives.
What we seem to have found is that these, [00:25:00] uh, worries and anxieties and perceptions of threat. That are particularly related to the world around us as opposed to these kind of ongoing experiences of internal threat. So we called it internal external threat. What we found was external threats are the ones that are the strongest motive predictors of conspiracy beliefs, and in those in external threats, it was.
Perceptions of a dangerous world, dangerous worldview. It tends to be called, or dangerous world beliefs, uh, alienation, and then also feelings of enemy or an nomia, which is this kind of feeling that you, you don’t understand how societal breakdown is happening. Uh, everything’s moved on and you are being left behind.
Is this kind of existential dread about how quick society is moving and that you’re left out of it, essentially, right? Mm. Dangerous worldview is one of the biggest predictors, and I think that’s really important because. Really is the perception that the world is, um, dangerous and that people are trying to, uh, I don’t know, screw each other over and, um, and, uh, hurt each other.
Is that really different from what conspiracy beliefs are in, in the first place? You know, I think that the point is that [00:26:00] those are really closely related, even as a conceptual description. Mm-hmm. Which I think is an important point. So, on that, I think that. The relationship between beliefs in a just world and conspiracy beliefs would be negative, meaning that I think seeing the world as chaotic and unjust and that there is no karma actually is probably more likely related to conspiracy beliefs than belief in a kind of just world and a karmic thing.
That being said, I think that the mane and distinction between good versus evil is why there may be this sort of perception of like. Bad people will get their comeuppance. There’s a benevolent antidote to a dangerous world or unjust world. Right. So I guess what I’m trying to say here is I don’t think that the worldview is a good one.
Mm. When you’re a conspiracy believer, I do think that, that it’s perceived as chaotic and it’s perceived as dangerous and competitive. But there’s this personal thing, which is that you are the hero on the good side trying to fight the evil. Right. And overcome this, this dangerous world. Okay. So that’s what I’d say.
I think that it’s, it’s belief in an unjust [00:27:00] world that you personally have an antidote to. That’s maybe the way I can describe that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. I, and I, and, and I don’t have any firm beliefs that, that’s one of the reasons I reached out to you, but I, the thing I was thinking about, and to give you a specific example, is like, let’s take the Sandy Hook shooting, you know, in America where the person shot many skilled school children, young children, and it’s just such a horrifying, you know, idea that this could happen.
I think there, there can be kind of like a, a mental inability to deal with that. And, and so it’s like. By, by not wanting to face this kind of like chaotic terror, terrifying vision of, of the way the world can be, it can almost be like more comforting to have an idea that, hey, this didn’t happen randomly.
There was a plot behind it by evil people and evil people that still exist, right? Like maybe we can still punish those evil people. So. You know, and, and not to say that this could, you know, ’cause I, I kind, I kind of would see this as like, you would first need to have some of the things you, you [00:28:00] mentioned kind of like narcissistic, you know, dark views of the world in the first place.
But underneath that, it almost seems like that’s a more comforting vision than being like, oh, somebody, you know, somebody can randomly just out of the blue, you know, have these kind of. You know, this kind of mental disturbance. A small note here, I realized I didn’t make it clear what my point was. I was trying to point to a prominent conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook that alleged that the mass shooting didn’t happen at all, that it was a fake event.
This can be seen as a much more comforting scenario than that the event did happen. Okay, back to the talk. But it’s, yeah, as you say, it’s like, it’s still a very dark vision of the world, but it’s almost like a more orderly vision in some way, you know?
Mikey: No, for sure. And, and of course, yeah. These things are complex and I, I totally agree with you, and I think that maybe the way to, um, conceptualize that as well is like the, the, the compensatory mechanism I, I mentioned earlier, which is I feel like the world is threatening and, and I, I can’t make sense of it.
And conspiracy theories are a way to at least superficially feel like you [00:29:00] can control the narrative or understand the narrative. Mm-hmm. And also identify what you’re supposed to be doing about this. Right. So what do you do? Well, I mean. We do have, you know, uh, debates about this in the political sphere, but like, you know, pe maybe someone feels like, what do I do about the fact that someone randomly buys a gun and goes and kills loads of schoolchildren?
You know? Mm-hmm. Um, there are people who have, uh, uh, can offer some advice on maybe how, uh, societally we can reduce the chances of that happening. But that’s quite a complex answer, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, oftentimes so I think what’s a bit easier is that to say, no, no, no, this, this, this blob of evil.
Orchestrated this or, or, uh, pretended that this happened, that means now I know exactly what I can do in order to fight this. Right. I join a community that makes me feel empowered, at least in the short term, where we’re gonna rally around this idea that we are the ones who are gonna stop this evil.
Mm-hmm. Fight against evil agency.
Zach: Yeah,
Mikey: exactly. Agency. Exactly that. Yeah. Empowering. That being said though, I do want to reiterate that that. Often, probably leads to this loop effect of, even though you are identifying what you [00:30:00] can control and do about the, the problem, you are actually saying there’s a small group of people who have malevolent powers that and nefarious intentions that control everything you do and the world.
And that makes you feel like you’ve lost control again. So that loops you back around to feeling a lack of control. And then what this idea is in, in the kind of motivational framework of conspiracy beliefs is that. You, you, um, but you are motivated to believe in the conspiracy theories. Those make you feel worried and existential dread again, which turns you to conspiracy theories again, and that may be what leads this to this sort of rabbit hole concept that we talk about, you know, is that it’s very hard to break out of that.
Once the answer is always the thing that. Makes you feel like you’re searching for the answer again. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I dunno if that’s, that’s, I said that clearly, but yeah, it, that makes sense. This is a perfect, essentially
Zach: it’s, it’s kind of getting back to the, the narcissism, the narcissistic element of these things.
You know, when we think of narcissists, it’s like the view the world outside as like, you know, coming to get them, you know, a, a real threat. And they’re like, they must always be pushing back against these. Forces that are, that are gonna tear them apart or something, you know? And [00:31:00] then that, that’s what leads them to clinging to the certainty and the, and the very certain views of the world and feel like they’re fighting a good versus evil, you know, kind of, uh, story going on.
Uh, no, I think
Mikey: you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah. I think the narcissism is a strong one. Yeah. Uh, otherwise why would they feel like they have the power to themselves, you know, be the hero and, and change the world or that stuff. No, I totally agree with that. Definitely.
Zach: Yeah. These things are so, um.
Complex. Yeah. But I, I was thinking, I was thinking about the, um, what got me thinking about that was reading, uh, I think it was watching some documentary about, not specifically about Sandy Hook, but it included people, uh, conspiracy minded people and their, and their conspiracy minded beliefs about the Sandy Hook shooting.
And, you know, one of the people was basically saying like. The idea of that whole thing happening was just so horrifying to me. I knew it couldn’t be a, you know, it couldn’t be a coincidence or it, or couldn’t happen randomly. Right. And it’s like, that was got me mm-hmm. Got me what, what got me thinking about it was just kind of like the pushback to the horrors of the, of the world kind of thing.
Yeah,
Mikey: for sure. No, definitely. And [00:32:00] that, that sort of thing about chaos and randomness and, and order does seem to come up a lot. And I don’t think it’s, you know, the, the. Biggest element of conspiracist reasoning, but I do think it’s a, a central component, which is like you’re getting at, is that yeah, there’s unwillingness to accept about, you know, randomness, these things have to be connected, you know, that kind of thing.
But I do think there has to be another variable involved there in order to trigger that towards conspiracy beliefs. Because, you know, for example, I could say without, you know, judging, but from. A perspective of when you look at it from a psychological perspective, maybe spiritual views sometimes have that element right?
But they don’t necessarily identify like a, a bad guy or an anan antagonistic outgroup. What they’re saying is, you know, that that was a work of, of God or, you know, a spiritual, uh, connection or something. Mm-hmm. Uh, that maybe someone who’s not spiritual wouldn’t perceive in that way, you know? Mm-hmm. So I think that there’s, there’s a, a comparison there to be made, which is there’s a lot of different psychological, uh, outcomes to a low perception of randomness.
But yeah, it’s, it’s that like, yeah. Uh, identifying an outgroup, which seems to make conspiracy theories really unique, you know, as a, as a psychological effect. And I do just wanna say as well, that, um, you [00:33:00] know, my, when I was younger, I watched a lot of Cohen Brothers films, um, and they’re kind of my favorite directors, you know, and I, I do feel like they were sort of a primer on.
Perceiving the world as a thing where you kind of need to accept ambiguity and you need to accept the fact that sometimes we don’t have answers and things. And I’ve wondered whether that’s like a long-term intervention for me. Not necessarily, you know, accepting conspiracy narratives so readily, you know, because, uh, I enjoy the fact that that, uh, answers bring more questions, you know, that kind of thing.
That it’s more interesting to me when there isn’t an answer or a clear answer. Uh, and I’m okay with the fact that maybe we’ll never find the answer. You know, that’s actually more interesting to me. So I wonder, I wonder whether that’s, you know, an effect there of the randomness part, you know, or the order part,
Zach: right?
It’s kinda like you’re, yeah, you, by thinking about those early, you can, the, the randomness of the universe ideas early, you kind of become immunized to, you know, that, that way of thinking a little bit more because Yeah, more acceptance of uncertainty basically. Exactly. Yeah, yeah,
Mikey: yeah. The uncertainty’s.
Okay. Right. You don’t have to avoid it or something. Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, I think it’s, I know you’re not like a just world concept expert, but Yeah, I was thinking about like, uh, [00:34:00] you know, it’s just, it, it is such a, um. As you say, it’s like clearly not the, you know, the only, uh, factor in these things because, you know, I can be horrified by the, the, the terror of the universe and not have conspiracy mind.
Yeah. Dinging, as you say. But yeah, it’s like the just world thing is, is interesting because it’s, I think it’s like we all have, we all have some level of that. I feel like it’s like, even though intellectually I can. I can say like, yeah, I think the world can be unjust and, and terrifying and, and people can suffer for no reason.
They’re still at the back of my mind, I think in a lot of people’s minds, it’s like, well, it won’t happen to me. You know, these, these, the worst things won’t happen to me. You know? So I think there, there can be this, this, this kind of like existential, uh, you know, we, we don’t really wanna face these things.
We wanna put off facing them as, as long as we’re able to basically.
Mikey: Yeah, absolutely. No, definitely. Yeah. The just world thing is weird, you know, like when I think about it as a comic thing. Uh, I guess, I guess it’s similar to justice, right? It’s like, you know, people get their comeuppance. Uh, I mean, when you’re not talking about it as like this sort of abstract, metaphysical thing, what it is is basically justice.
[00:35:00] Uh mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I, there is this like, need for justice among conspiracy narratives. I find, you know, for example, with COVID especially, there’s this idea that I. There’s gonna be the Nuremberg Trials 2.0. You know, and they, they genuinely think that these, uh, this comparison to like Nazi doctors is, is relevant, you know, to the people.
Mm-hmm. The doctors who push the vaccine is the, the way they see it, you know? Uh, so they, they want the justice. It’s just that I don’t necessarily think that they, they think there is justice in the world. Maybe I. I dunno if that makes sense, but Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. Well that, it’s very interesting you brought that up.
’cause I was, I was just at this depolarization, uh, braver Angels event, which is a depolarization group. And, uh, people were, you know, some people on the, on the right were talking about these ideas that, uh, people have to be punished for their role in the COVID things. And, you know, and what strikes me there is I think polarization, extreme polarization results in people in both sides kind of becoming more and more.
Intolerant about things that are kind of like expected and normal, like mm-hmm. You know, like government’s gonna make decisions, right? And like, not everyone is gonna agree with those [00:36:00] decisions. And both, both sides and, and, and a conflict will have these narratives about how the other group is doing harm and they’ll mm-hmm.
Become increasingly. Intolerant of things that, you know, a less polarized population would be okay with. Like the fact that, you know, a government has to make some decisions and you might very much disagree with them, but that’s always gonna be true of some segment of the population. Right, of course. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. And kind of just being intolerant of like, yeah, you might even think that bad things were done or incompetent things were done. But that’s like standard for any large human endeavor, right? It’s like, of course. Yeah. All the, so we, we become increasingly intolerant. These of these things that, you know, if we were less angry, we would be a little bit more tolerant of, and we start filtering for these, like, these people must pay for X, Y, z kind of, you know, uh, stories that, that, that we start forming.
Yeah.
Mikey: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think on that, maybe it was just making me think about maybe the. Uh, slightly understudied area in our literature as well, which is, uh, this kind of top down element of the way society is structured and how that influences the way in which conspiracy narratives [00:37:00] form. Right. So what I’m thinking right now is, you know, two party systems, for example, like, uh, well many countries have it, right?
But, you know, I’m from the UK and in the US and, um, and Canada and, and lots of countries that have this two party system, which I think contributes to this. That mannequin sort of distinction of like the good guys and the bad guys. I’m on this team, you’re on that team, which I think is really conducive to a conspiracy, uh, suspicion.
Um, and there’s a win-lose scenario, you know, that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Whereas in lots of other countries, they have like, you know, proportional representative systems where they actually have to resolve their conflicts and there’s kind of a degree of influence that certain parties have based on the amount of votes they get as opposed to win or lose, you know, and mm-hmm.
I think that really influences the ways in which, at least political conspiracy theories form and how maybe people deal with those, you know, like what you do about the fact that. Your party hasn’t won or what you do about the fact that you need to have more influence, you know, and, um mm-hmm. Anyway, that’s a bit of a, uh, I, I, you know, I, I think a lot about how we don’t discuss in society the difference between, for example, representative or direct democracy, you know, and those are fundamentally different things, you know, [00:38:00] and I think they have a big effect on, on society.
Zach: Well, yeah, to that point. I mean, there’s, you know, the, there’s, I dunno if you’ve heard the, the Juan Linz, LINZ is his last name. He, he, he had criticisms, he was a political, uh, theorist and he made some really. Great criticisms of, of the way that the American system of government, you know, specifically the fact that the, the presidential, uh, you know, the presidential power and the, the congressional power and how you even had like those, uh, votes, those elections were kind of staggered.
So the basically, long story short, there, the system itself was not conducive to collaboration. It was conducive mm-hmm. To polarization. Mm-hmm. And, uh, you know, so, so just, yeah, there’s the various systemic things that you can observe as being, you know, the reason, creating more polarization basically.
Exactly. Yeah. I feel like we don’t examine those things enough. We, we, you know, we just focus on our specific grievances and narratives and not the systemic things.
Mikey: No, definitely. But then on that as well, you know, it’s like, is in, in a democratic sense, are conspiracy theories part of a democratic. [00:39:00] Debate, you know, like, um, uh, this, this need to identify corruption is actually really important in a democracy where I guess the assumption is that there’s, there’s less corruption than if it’s like an authoritarian state or something.
Right? But is that necessarily true? Like, we don’t know. So we should be questioning things. We should be identifying stuff. But how do you grapple with the fact that there’s also this side of conspiracy beliefs, which are just so unhelpful, and in one way, they deflect from changing the system and actually make you focus on this made up group of small, like a small group of people.
That actually means that you are distracted while the systemic issues remain, you know, and they carry on. And I think that’s a huge issue, you know, is we think sometimes conspiracy theorists think they’re challenging the system, that actually what they’re doing is they’re deflecting systemic issues towards this.
Made up small group of people, you know, and it’s really not helpful for what their intention is, which is to change the bad things in society, you know?
Zach: Well, yeah. Getting to, you know, even getting to like, how do we even classify a belief as, you know, outlandish or unreasonable? I mean, to me it’s, you know, it’s basically when I, when [00:40:00] I see people.
Saying something, uh, a very, something very certainly about something you couldn’t possibly be certain about. Right? It’s like I think that that really is what delineated delineates it for me. You know, I see people on Twitter say something confidently like, this is the way it is, and it’s like, uh, you, you know, even if you think that’s likely, you have no way of being sure.
And so I think it, I think it’s just the over certainty, which is kind of like the indicator of bad thinking. Like no matter what it is, you know, say it, say, it’s like you, you really believe global warming, anthropomorphic, uh, global warming or anthropogenic uh, global warming is happening. It’s like, you might really believe that, but like still, like you might to be like a hundred percent certain Yeah.
Is different than being like, you know, 98% certain or whatever. Exactly. So I, I think it’s like you can, you can very much. Believe things might be happening or might likely be happening, but I, I think that’s what gets over the line for me is like, no matter what topic it is, it’s like I am a hundred percent certain of this.
And that kind of gives away a little bit of, of, uh, unreasonableness.
Mikey: Yeah, absolutely. [00:41:00] Definitely. I mean, that ties into what we were saying earlier right? About making assumptions on the scales that we use and things like that. But, um. You know, I think on that as well, uh, some colleagues, uh, um, Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton have a paper where they’ve grappled again with like trying to define conspiracy theories.
And one of the helpful terms they use is, it’s not necessarily about whether something’s true or not, it’s about whether the claim is epistemically risky, meaning that it kind of goes against the official narrative and it’s also doesn’t hold a lot of maybe airtight evidence towards it, but it’s a claim that you’re making that’s kind of interesting and entertaining sometimes, uh, and holds a lot of weight to it.
But in terms of its actual veracity, it’s quite risky to make. Right. Um. And also identify certain groups as being malevolent or nefarious, which is quite, um, an accusation, right? So they, calling them epistemically risky, I think is quite helpful. Um, heuristic to use. Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. And to be clear, I, I believe in manmade global warming.
I was kind of trying to think. No, no. Yeah. I underst an example of like, how do we, how do we delineate even for things that we agree with, right,
Mikey: of course. Yeah. I understand what you mean. No, definitely. And I think on that as well is, you know, the way that you can communicate to people that. Climate the [00:42:00] climate crisis is anthropogenic is, uh, by saying that you know the truth, which is, uh, what is it, like 92%, I wanna say scientists agree.
Climate scientists agree that is anthropogenic. And that doesn’t mean, again, you know, that you have to be exactly certain that it’s a hundred percent happening because that’s 92% of them. But the point is that that norm and that consensus, uh, from experts is. Pretty convincing, you know? Um, and you have to have a lot of evidence against that in order to, you know, change someone’s mind on, on that subject, unless you just think that they’re all part of a conspiracy, which is a, a nice way to devalue any kind of evidence, you know, is just say you’re part of the conspiracy and then it’s done.
Right. You can, you can believe whatever
Zach: you want if you start thinking that
Mikey: way. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That’s the real, the real. Difficulty of the unf falsifiability of conspiracy beliefs and narratives. Yeah. It’s impossible.
Zach: Yeah. That is the, I think that is a big part of why they are, you know, it’s kinda like they say the, you know, a a a lie can travel around the world quicker than Yeah.
The truth can, it’s kinda like, well, yeah, something that’s un by definition Unfalsifiable mm-hmm. Is, can be appealing. And spreadable for, for that reason. Yeah,
Mikey: for sure. It’s very hard to, I mean, you just win all the debates, [00:43:00] right? With all of your
Zach: tactics and stuff. Yeah. Any evidence that that’s presented about, uh, against, against your idea is like, well, somebody’s covering it up, you know, somebody’s do working against us or something, you know?
Yeah,
Mikey: yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s real quick as well. It’s, I see on Twitter a lot is these, uh, anti-vaxxers sort of saying, I challenge all of these, uh, provax scientists to a debate online, and they never get a response because a lot of these scientists know that it’s just gi Well, the one thing is that it’s giving them attention, you know, and, and giving the.
These are very dangerous and problematic perspectives. You know, a lot of breathing, uh, a lot of oxygen I should say. Uh, but then on top of that as well, it’s like, you know, I dunno if you could really win a debate against an anti-vaxxer, not because you are wrong, but because they use these manipulation, argumentative, manipulative tactics, you know, to essentially dodge all of your points, you know, and, and you can never really pin them down.
And that’s why they’re actually really clever on, on that stuff. You know, this, uh, this detection of manipulation, I think is a really good way to make people psychologically resistant against someone who’s trying to. Trick you into believing conspiracy narratives, which is what we call like pre bunking or, or [00:44:00] inoculation, where you, uh, warn people about the manipulation tactics people might use to trick you into believing certain things, right?
Mm-hmm. Uh, and if you know what tactics they’re gonna use, you can identify it in the first place, even if it’s real information. Sometimes someone might be using emotive language, in which case you should be suspicious of it, that, you know, you should fact check it, and that kind of thing. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I think there are, and probably somebody’s done some work on this, like the kinds of, you know, uh. Grammatical or, or language use that are probably indicative of not good thinking and, and conspirator conspiratorial thinking, because I’ve seen some of that, like linguistic analysis for other purposes.
There’s probably, um, I’m sure somebody’s probably, yeah,
Mikey: there was a paper actually. I think they found that it was anger and negative, uh, language basically was the general sort of Yeah. Right. That would be a good
Zach: indicator. Yeah. It’s like. You can see the emotion underneath what’s driving exactly. The, the beliefs kind of thing.
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. Mm-hmm. Definitely. One person I interviewed for the podcast was, uh, Kevin Arsen, who worked on the need for chaos research, and I don’t know if you know much about that, but,
Mikey: uh, [00:45:00] I know of the work. Yeah. I, I don’t recognize the name, but I do know of the work, so it must be, the paper that I read was like the first one.
I remember finding it really interesting. That need for chaos thing. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Yeah. Do, do you have any thought? I mean, basically it was about like people having, you know, more and more kind of like. Uh, hostile or, or kind of more antisocial views of society, which, uh, you know, kind of like, uh, well if we’re, we can’t fix these problems, maybe we should burn society down kind of views.
Yeah. And which, which seemed, uh, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think there was a study about the increase in it, but I, I can see it. Maybe as on the increase because of the US versus them polarization and such. But, but I’m curious, do you see, you know, do, do you have any thoughts on the relationship between those kinds of things?
It, it probably is in the, some same realm as, you know, what drives people to believe the more ani high animosity. Conspiracy theories, I would imagine.
Mikey: No, definitely. So yeah, I do have, uh, uh, thoughts on that. I think it’s interlinked with a few of these variables that we know about, uh, pre, you know, this work on need for chaos.
So I think what I would start with, I suppose, is like political extremism. So there does seem to [00:46:00] be a lot of work suggesting that it’s not necessarily only really. Often what we find is that it’s like conservative ideology, right? That predicts conspiracy beliefs. But that sort of, uh, gets lost in the sense of like, some conspiracy theories are actually more palatable to the left wing, right?
So actually what they find is that anti-establishment, conspiracy theories are, uh, more strongly found on the left and right in the extremes, uh, as opposed to like, um, just generally left and right politics, right? It’s about your simplistic, uh, views of the world being. You can, um, easily solve political issues.
Seems to be one of them, right? Belief that is easy to solve. These issues tends to be an extremist thing, which is also related to conspiracy beliefs. So on that, I think that this kind of need for chaos element is like anti-establishment, right? It’s, it’s um, uh, knock all of the chess pieces off the board, start again kind of approach.
And I think that is really related to extremist ideology because otherwise someone might be like, oh no, I’m gonna vote in a certain way to slowly change the things in the way that I want them to be changed, right? So I think that’s definitely related to that. And I’m actually pretty sure they may have found that in the paper.
Um, in, [00:47:00] in their analysis is this element of extremism. The other one that I think is actually really important is this idea of, um, well, the dark triad. So there are these measures of, uh, it’s, uh, the dark triad is narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy. So it’s these kind of, when taken together, they’re these sort of dangerous traits.
You know, they make someone. Someone that you don’t really wanna be around, there’s someone that you should be wary of. Particularly Machiavellianism seems to be linked to belief in conspiracy theories. So this, um, tendency to maybe see people as objects that you use in your, in your chess game. Right. And that’s interesting because.
What that suggests is that you maybe perceive the world in the way that you are yourself project. So if I’m, if I see other people as, as chess pieces on a chess board, I believe that there are evil groups that are using everyone as chess pieces on a chess board, right? There is some really interesting evidence that, um, similar to the work i, I discussed during my PhD, but the stuff that paved the way for this was these, these findings that, um, personal willingness to conspire against others.
Related to belief in conspiracy [00:48:00] theories, meaning that it’s possible that if I’m willing to conspire myself, I project what I see about the world onto other people and assume they’re gonna act in the same way. So really, people who believe in conspiracy theories may actually be conspirators themselves.
And I know that’s quite a sensationalist claim, and I’m not saying it’s so clear cut as that. But I think in terms of the psychological processes that need for chaos stuff, the extremism stuff, I think is, you know, the Machiavellian stuff I think is that, you know, that they’re seeing the world in the way that they feel themselves.
Mm-hmm. Which is maybe a red flag, you know, if someone’s really saying that, oh, everyone’s just out to get each other. Maybe they are out to get everyone, you know? Mm-hmm.
Zach: That kind of thing. Something I read about it or talk about in this podcast in mes and write about in my book, is like kind of the interplay between those things.
It’s like when the US versus them polarization reaches high levels. It’s like if you start to perceive. 50% of the population is like horrible and immoral or evil. It’s like that, that can’t help but make you antisocial in some way. And so that can even affect, like it can change your own personality and.
[00:49:00] Uh, in, in, in some ways where you’re like, well, you know, if they’re that way, I will be more that way. You know, it’s like mm-hmm. This kind of like snowball effect from, from both directions. So you can see all these things kind of like interplaying. Mm-hmm. And, and being complex. And that’s what strikes me about the extreme polarization.
It, it just makes people more antisocial in general.
Mikey: I think, I think it, it dehumanizes groups, right? But also in that circumstances kind of justifies your feelings of like a moral crusade against the evil. So that’s the kind of stuff that in psychology, at least in like the nineties, I think there was a lot of work on where they, they really uncovered this thing about like what maybe the psychology of like what makes people, I.
Able to commit genocide like you know, certain groups, right? And it’s this obviously dehumanization, but I think it’s also this, what they see as this benevolent antidote to an unjust world, which we do find among conspiracy theorists as well, is that they’re justified in their moral crusade of like fixing the world, you know?
And when you have such. A simplistic perspective of the world that’s very idealistic. That can often lead you to do really dangerous things, you know, because it’s justifiable in a moral sense now because they’re [00:50:00] all animals or they’re all evil, you know, that kind of thing.
Zach: Right? Yeah. When you perceive yourself as, you know, the victim of evil things, you can be capable of evil things yourself because you Yeah.
You, you start to justify, you know, whatever it is that you want to do, because you see the other side is so, so evil. Yeah,
Mikey: exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Definitely. Um,
Zach: well, is there anything else you’d like to mention about your work or anything that you know, we didn’t touch on that you think would be interesting to mention?
Mikey: Uh, actually, I, I would like to quickly just mention I did touch on like pre bunking and things and I just want to not be such, um, ’cause I feel like this conversation is definitely on the, you know, predictors and the things that are related to maybe the psychological profiles of conspiracy theorists. I just wanna say that there, there does seem to be an answer.
You know, there does seem to be a way out. It’s not so doom and gloom. Um, so the one thing is that there is not a lot of evidence that there’s an increase in. Conspiracy beliefs or conspiracy theories? Well, sorry, what I should say is there’s not necessarily been an increase in people’s susceptibility to believing in conspiracy narratives over time.
Over the past, maybe, let’s say 10 years, I think it was really what seems to be [00:51:00] happening is this kind of, it’s, it’s more open and easier to spread conspiracy theories, theories and misinformation. But that doesn’t mean that the people who believe in them weren’t already gonna be believing in, in this kind of.
We tend to call like epistemically questionable claims and stuff, right? So on that, I think that the one, one interesting approach is this pre bunking approach. And uh, it comes from quite an old theory of inoculation where it treats like persuasion as a vaccine, right? So if you give someone small doses of how disinformation may spread, it makes them psychologically resistant in terms of like, uh, psychological antibodies against those manipulation techniques in the future.
So there’s a lot of work recently and seems to be maybe some meta analysis about to come out on. Uh, what the effects of this are, and it does seem to be pretty effective in certain circumstances. And I just wanna mention that, you know, conspiracy is one type of misinformation, but there’s also many other manipulative techniques such as emotive language, use of polarization, uh, impersonation, you know, like spreading bots online, uh, or pretending to be someone like, and.
Maybe even fake experts, you know, in order to become [00:52:00] more trustworthy to people. There’s other argument techniques like ad hominem where you attack the person instead of their argument. Uh, what aboutm where you distract by mentioning something that’s basically unrelated. And also like moving the goalposts where you kind of change the circumstances under which your claim can be falsified.
There was one more, uh, uh, strawman, uh, attack where basically you. You make a false version of what the opponent is in your argument in order to easily win the argument and make it look like you’ve kind of dunked on them, basically. I know I’ve gone through a lot of those in a sort of crash course, but I just urge people if they’re listening to this, you know, to maybe look up those techniques because once you can identify those, it’s really helpful to use that as a, as a way to perceive the world because you can always be, uh, have this sort of detection mechanism or a radar for when someone’s trying to manipulate you with misinformation or even real information.
It’s just worth looking into to see if someone’s manipulating you. That’s the one thing I just
Zach: wanna say. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s the interesting thing there too, is like. It is, it isn’t even necessarily purposeful manipulation. Mm-hmm. It’s like when you believe some of these things, you will naturally take these approaches because Exactly.
Your [00:53:00] emotions are so high and you have such conspiracy, you know, such, such a kind of like, um, these kinds of views that lead you to naturally kind of take these more like emotion based as opposed to logic based arguments. Right. I think we sometimes be like, oh, they’re, this person’s trying to manipulate me.
Whereas sometimes I think it’s like. No. They actually really believe this, and that’s what’s leading them to act in these ways.
Mikey: Exactly. That’s literally how they think. You know, they’re, they’re thinking in a straw man way, or they’re thinking in an emotive way. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hmm. You can tell them, by the way, the argument you’ve just made is manipulative because A, B, and C, they might be like, oh wow, I’ve just misinformed myself by manipulating myself.
You know? That’s super interesting. Yeah,
Zach: and I think that’s important too, because it’s like getting, you know, it’s one of the conflict resolution ideas is like being, you know, criticizing ideas and not people, so that applied to this, it would be like. Hey, don’t, don’t call that person, you know, manipulative or lying.
Mm-hmm. It’s like draw attention to. That, that idea or that argument isn’t good, as opposed to like telling them that they’re a bad person or you know, exactly. These kinds of things. [00:54:00] Because I think that’s, that’s exactly what exacerbates their perception that mm-hmm. You know, there’s this, these people are, you know, are working against them, that, you know, it basically like amplifies their own conspiracy beliefs.
Yeah. You know, in a way. Exactly.
Mikey: Exactly. And it becomes personal, right? As opposed to this maybe a safer debate platform where you can just like. Uh, externally treat the ideas as something that’s not, you know, a personal thing. But yeah, no, exactly. I totally agree. Yeah,
Zach: definitely. Yeah. ’cause you can, you can more gently draw their attention like, Hey, maybe, did you know that that’s not a great piece of logic that you just said.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That was a talk with Mikey Biddle Stone, who you can follow on Twitter at Biddle Psych. That’s B-I-D-D-L-E. Psych as in psychology. One thing I didn’t get a chance to ask Mikey was about the potential role of entertainment media. In my book, diffusing American Anger, one thing I talk about is my belief that TV shows and movies have made us more conspiracy minded by surrounding us with many of those kinds of narratives.
To take a specific example, we’ve got movies like Michael Clayton, and that [00:55:00] was a movie that many people perceived as a serious and smart movie. You can find many people online who even thought it was based on a true story, probably because it did come across as such a serious and intelligent movie. But the plot of Michael Clayton is pretty ludicrous in terms of the un unlikelihood of that kind of plot.
There’s no corporation I know of, at least in America, that ever conspired to kill people like was shown, and Michael Clayton. And there are some very logical reasons for why those things are quite unlikely, mainly just due to how easy it is for plots to unravel. And most people realizing how hard it is to pull these things off.
And we could look at many other examples, many shows and movies that we enjoy that contain outlandish, unlikely conspiracy theories. And we can see these things as making us think such things are more plausible than they are. I talk about these things in my book, if anyone is interested in those things, especially as those ideas relate to polarization.
I. People interested in my work on polarization might like checking out the site from my book, which [email protected]. If you like this [00:56:00] episode, you might like to check out some of the other psychology related episodes of my podcast. This has been the People Who Read People Podcast, and you can learn more about [email protected].
I am Zach Elwood. Thanks for listening. Music by small skies.