The following is a condensed excerpt from my recent book The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence.
Conspiracy stories surround us. The tales have gotten stranger and stranger over time: alien lizard people kidnapping children and drinking their blood; cannibal “Deep State” cabals secretly running the government; Covid-19 vaccines that contain tracking devices and cause sterility. Though conspiracy theories have always been part of the human experience, we’ve seen a burgeoning in recent years as flat-Earth proponents blend in with anti-vaxxers and those who maintain the moon landing was a hoax. As with other facets of extremism, conspiracy theories have been amplified and spread on social media.
Conspiracies and violence
Like other traits, conspiracism can also be viewed on a spectrum, ranging from mild suspiciousness about things that could be plausible to firmly held, bizarre beliefs that cannot possibly be true. While it’s theoretically possible that a group rather than a solo assassin killed JFK, it is odd to believe that JFK is still alive and secretly running The Illuminati.
There are reasons for this tendency that originate in our neurobiological system; it serves as a protective factor. Evolution has wired us to scan the environment for potential danger.
At the mild level, conspiracy theories have little consequence in an individual’s life. It’s not paranoid to occasionally wonder if people at work like us or if some are talking behind our backs. Sometimes a boss really is out to get us.
Moving toward the higher end of the conspiratorial spectrum into the pathological territory, we see people building cohesive groups around paranoid themes, which typically involve an evil “other” seeking to cause harm to “the good people.” In this way, conspiracy theories build a sense of camaraderie among like-minded people who oppose a common enemy while building false narratives and feeding perceptual distortions.
Conspiracy theories amplify hostility against other groups and seed “us versus them” thinking. When individuals with paranoid, psychopathic, and narcissistic traits become involved with conspiracies, it can lead to dehumanizing others and may become one ingredient in a recipe for violence.
Dangerous conspiracism stems from the amplification of a paranoid thinking style that has become maladaptive; we find this conspiracy mindset woven into the fabric of all extremist movements.
Put most simply, the common underlying tenets of conspiracist thinking are:
Nothing is as it seems.
Everything happens for a reason.
Everything is connected.
Conspiracy detection system
Conspiracy theories are not new and are certainly not limited to the United States. Indeed, the tendency to be suspicious is part of human nature and, in past times, may have served to help protect humankind from genuine threats. Many hypothesize that humans evolved through natural selection with a “conspiracy detection system” integrated into our mental structure. This system is activated by environmental cues, which could indicate an increased risk of danger. This threat system served to help keep our hunter-gatherer ancestors safe in an environment characterized by constant threats from the natural world and competition for resources from nearby groups. As with other aspects of our information processing system, what originally started out as adaptive can become maladaptive when amplified in modern times.
No matter how logically we believe ourselves to be, emotions and certain cognitive biases play a substantial role in perception and decision-making. Since our brains are pre-wired, these influences operate beneath conscious awareness.
Conspiratorial beliefs are not grounded in analytic thinking processes. They are motivated by emotional reasoning, which is when our emotions define reality apart from fact. Despite this, conspiracists typically expend a great deal of energy attempting to find rationale to support their belief, often citing “research,” which is nothing more than watching dozens of YouTube videos or reading articles online that contain false information. They are drawn to such material — which often contains scientific-sounding terms — as they desperately search for validation for their misperceptions.
Automatic cognitive processes that underlie the conspiracy mindset:
Illusory pattern perception and errors of causality:
Humans automatically search for meaningful and causal patterns between stimuli they experience. This has been an essential factor in our survival as a species. Our ancestors learned to chart the days and seasons by perceiving patterns, the duration of pregnancy, and the cycles of crops. Understanding causal patterns allowed us to know which foods are safe to eat and which are poisonous.
But this doesn’t mean our perceptual system is infallible.
Illusory pattern perception is when we erroneously connect the dots where there is actually no meaningful pattern. Errors of causality result when we perceive a cause-and-effect relationship between two events that are, in fact, not related.
For example, if I’ve worn a red shirt the day I buy a winning lottery ticket, I may interpret the “lucky red shirt” as causative. If I throw a penny in a wishing well the day I apply for a new job, I may cite the penny in the wishing well as a causative factor when I get the job. We avoid stepping on cracks or walking under ladders because “you just never know.” We refer to this thinking as superstition, and at low levels, it’s harmless. It comes naturally and makes us feel better.
The illusion of control
The randomness of life can be anxiety-provoking. There is no end to things that can go wrong in our daily lives, from car accidents to cancer to war. We worry about our loved ones, family members, pets, and climate change.
Anxiety is uncomfortable; we all seek ways to cope with it. Sometimes these coping methods are healthy, but often they are not.
Conspiracy theories are a common maladaptive way of coping with anxiety by implying that we can influence events over which we have no power. They give us a false sense that we can organize and order our world.
If a mysterious malevolent cabal has overtaken our government, we believe we can fight them in various ways, including taking up arms or joining militias. This is particularly dangerous when we mistake political enemies for alien lizard people or believe that an entire race or gender of people is trying to harm us or that women are conspiring against men to deny them sex.
Confirmation Bias
Our brains constantly curate what information we pay attention to. Confirmation bias is the tendency to only pay attention to information that supports our preconceptions and existing beliefs while ignoring or automatically rejecting conflicting information.
For example, a person who believes in ESP will keep track of instances when they were “Thinking about Dad, and then the phone rang, and it was him.” Yet they ignore the far more numerous times when they were thinking about Dad, and he didn’t call, and when they were not thinking about Dad, and he did call.
Confirmation bias is more robust for emotionally charged issues; it ensures that a person emotionally invested in a conspiracy theory only notices information that validates the conspiracy while ignoring and discounting any conflicting information.
Specialness
Conspiracy theories are particularly seductive to those needing to feel special since they promise “inside knowledge” outside the mainstream’s beliefs. Only those in the inner circle, the enlightened truth-seekers, know what’s really going on — even though their beliefs and perceptions are utterly wrong. This sense of specialness increases solidarity among group members who view themselves as insiders, more intelligent, and more aware than everyone else outside the group. They become self-aggrandizing heroes in a life-or-death battle against evil-doers. They want to believe their group is on the side of righteousness, and through reciprocal reinforcement, they can convince each other of almost anything.
Human motivations common to all of us are what drive conspiratorial thinking. People are drawn to conspiracy theories because they meet psychological needs, including the drive to understand the world, feel safe and in control of our environment, and maintain a positive sense of self and our social group.
Social factors and crises
Conspiracy theories are heavily influenced by social factors and can be activated by social situations. They become more appealing during times of crisis and social unrest when people are anxious and more apt to feel a loss of control. The sense of powerlessness becomes a driving force as people begin to perceive patterns in random noise. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories serve to amplify fear, and frightened people are more apt to become aggressive.
Simple narratives that help us “connect the dots” appeal more to an anxious mind than the uncomfortable reality of coincidence and randomness. The unpredictable nature of the world is scary. It is less threatening to believe that a natural disaster is an evil cabal’s work than to accept randomness. We can arm ourselves and fight an evil cabal, but we can’t control Mother Nature.
Conspiracy beliefs are empirically associated with political extremism on both the far-left and far-right ends of the political spectrum and contribute to the radicalization of the vulnerable in both directions. As the United States has experienced increased political polarization and social unrest, conspiracy theories have increased accordingly.
Predispositions and the Conspiracy Mindset
On the extreme high end of the spectrum, belief in conspiracies correlates with various personality traits such as paranoia, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. While people with such predispositions will be more attracted to conspiracy theories than others, it’s also possible for consistent exposure to the conspiracy narratives to build these tendencies in some who would not usually go down the extremist rabbit hole.
It’s important to note that though conspiracy theories differ in content, the underlying belief processes are the same.
Many people simultaneously believe in mutually incompatible conspiracy theories, such as “Princess Diana was murdered” and “Princess Diana staged her own death.” The conspiracy mindset allows people to disregard facts and logic and believe almost anything. Once a conspiracy mindset is established, one conspiracy belief results in a person believing in countless other conspiracies. The single best predictor of belief in one conspiracy is a belief in a different conspiracy. This is known as “fringe fluidity.” Once a person has accepted one fringe belief, they readily embrace others.
In modern times, this common human tendency has been exploited by self-serving bad actors, from snake oil salesmen and unethical politicians to violent racists. It’s been amplified by social media, which efficiently spreads the conspiracy effects through their algorithms with bots. These algorithms tend to feed people shocking content designed to maximize their engagement on the platform. One conspiracy video on YouTube leads to dozens more appearing on the sidebar; this rapidly builds a massive online ecosystem of the like-minded, which continues to amplify.
From QAnon, Pizzagate, and Trump’s Great Lie to anti-Covid-19 vaccine hysteria, social media serves as the accelerant, as conspiracists seek out information that supports their emotional reasoning.
Beliefs drive behavior, and conspiracies have consequences, even when entirely untrue. Conspiracies influence whether people vote, get vaccinated, take up arms to overthrow the government, or murder members of a racial or religious minority. Anti-vaccine conspiracists are now responsible for filling our hospitals and causing tragic and unnecessary deaths.
We know that the more a message is repeated, the more people come to believe it’s true. The consequences of allowing this process to go unchecked are deadly.
I appreciate getting the summarized version to the point where feel informed. I am finding it increasingly difficult to get through books that harp for long times about the details after the highlights have been delivered. I sat down to re-read Ulysses recently and gave up after ten pages. The language is superb but I know the story so well I couldn't maintain my flagging intterest.
This is a lesson for me as I struggle with my own manuscript and with a writing style that ranges from prolix to pedantic. I keep trying to summarize but that's apparently a skill I don't own.
A friend of mine has a friend from childhood who is a hardcore flat earther. As a child this friend was, of course, not an adherent of this, and my friend only recently came to a conclusion he shared with me. He believes his friend's primary reason for holding this belief and for always putting it out there is a matter of control.
The illusion of control is part of it, but my friend insists there is, in fact, a sense that his friend is controlling any interaction. He can hijack a conversation and control predictably what the outcome will be. You can either argue with him or agree. Thus, any gathering, any time spent among others, he can keep within a set of possibilities in which he feels comfortable and in charge.
Thanks for this wonderful summary and the cross-disciplinary connections. The prehistoric roots are one aspect that may be overemphasized, not in here by you, but in people's imaginations. I wonder if for my own thinking it makes a stronger point to connect healthy habits, inclinations, desires, aspirations, etc., with the unhealthy, analogous to obsessive washing and healthy grooming habits.
In particular, I love the way you highlight, in addition to the illusion of control, the camaraderie and sense of belonging to a like-minded community. With its own shared tropes and references, the in-group of conspiracy adherents can also reflect the negative potential of even ordinary communities for intentionally snubbing and isolating others.
On the one hand, it may seem "natural" that we feel a stronger loyalty to our families. Such "common sense" arguments can be used to rationalize genocide. Of course, we know it is not true; often family members, with their personal histories and common origins gall us over time. Increasing genetic and archeological evidence shows this has actually been a more accurate picture of human relations in hunter-gatherer societies both today and prehistorically.
Apparently individuals often traveled very far to find a group they preferred. Present-day small bands show only about 10% common ancestry, which makes perfect sense. We can all feel somewhat validated in our responses and also more hopeful for our species. It is likely no more "natural" to prefer those closest to us by accident of birth than to others. There's more going on, for better and worse.