The first time I visited Mexico I was 16 years old. I was rather surprised to discover that many Mexicans believed in conspiracy theories, ideas that I’d never heard before. Some involved the CIA as a puppeteer behind much of what went on in the world.
My wife just visited China and found that many people there also believe in conspiracy theories, such as the claim that Covid-19 was created in a US lab. Based on what I’ve read in various news sources, it seems that conspiracy theories are pretty common in most developing countries.
Over the last few decades of the 20th century, I paid little attention to conspiracy theories. One would occasionally hear a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination or UFO cover-ups, but they never seemed to be a major part of our culture.
In the 21st century, conspiracy theories have become a much bigger part of America life. There are major conspiracy theories that suggest all four presidents elected during this century are illegitimate, with one election basically being stolen by the Supreme Court, another won by a candidate born overseas, another influenced by a Russian disinformation campaign, and another tainted by vote fraud. The idea of an illegitimate president has gone mainstream. And it’s not just elections, something as innocuous as a vaccine trial announcement is now entangled in various conspiracy theories.
So why have conspiracy theories exploded in 21st century America? First we must ask why people believe conspiracy theories. Penn Jillette argues that there’s a sort of preference for conspiracy theories. Imagine if people want to believe X, but the officials at the top of society (government, media, science, etc.) say that X is false. Also assume that those officials are in a position where they would know the truth. If you want to continue believing X, then you are forced to develop a conspiracy theory as to why the officials would deny that X is true.
A relatively small share of the world’s population does not engage in “motivated reasoning”, rather they form beliefs based on evidence, apart from what they wish to believe. Of course these are just tendencies, I suspect that everyone engages in motivated reasoning to at least some extent (including myself), but some do it more than others. Polls show that the views of Democrats and Republicans on the state of the economy immediately flipped after the 2016 election, before there was even time for the actual economy to change very much.
Psychologist describe a certain type of relatively unbiased person as “WEIRD”, which doesn’t mean strange, it means people from areas that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.” But even in those countries, only a modest share of people are actually WEIRD. This category more often applies to moral values, for instance those people who think nepotism is wrong, that it’s wrong to be biased in favor of those you know and like. But WEIRD also overlaps with a non-biased epistemic style that is often called “rational”.
There are certain ideas that are highly seductive, so much so that even “WEIRDOS” occasionally dabble in conspiracy theories. So why weren’t conspiracy theories a bigger part of life in the late 20th century? I believe this is because the media was almost completely controlled by WEIRD people. The news desks at ABC/NBC/CBS stuck to the mainstream version of events, unless they had clear evidence that the official were lying (say after the Ellsberg Papers came out.) So there was no major institution to form and disseminate conspiracy theories. These theories did exist back then, but never gained enough traction to have a big impact on society.
The internet changed everything. More specifically, it democratized information sharing all over the world. There are no more “gatekeepers”. Because less that 10% of the world’s population is truly WEIRD, the internet has made conspiracy theories the dominant epistemic style of the 21st century. Just as the 21st century will be a low interest rate/high asset price century (as I predicted years ago), it will also be a century of widespread conspiracy theories. I doubt whether I’ll live along enough to see another president who is generally accepted as legitimate.
PS. Think about the bizarre coincidence that there’s almost a 100% correlation between people who believe an election was stolen and those who support the losing candidate. If you think that correlation is weird, then you are probably WEIRD. If you think that correlation is not in the least surprising, then you are probably not WEIRD.
PPS. There’s another (much less interesting) question to consider. Are these conspiracy theories actually true? Some of them? All of them? None of them? I suspect that a unit within the federal government has looked into this question—perhaps the NSA. And I imagine that by now they’ve been able to ascertain the answer to this question.
But they aren’t telling us.
PPPS. There’s some speculation that President Trump will release information on UFOs as he leaves office. If so, will he be exposing a government conspiracy? Or would it be a Trump conspiracy to make our intelligence services look devious?
PPPPS. People who don’t like my ideas want to believe that I don’t actually believe what I write. These are almost always people who disagree with me. Scratch that; they are always people who disagree with me. Hence my comment sections (especially at MoneyIllusion) are full of claims that I am part of a conspiracy to disseminate ideas favored by powerful people.
PPPPPS. It’s likely that some people will view this post as part of a conspiracy. Whose interests are served in trying to analyze the psychology of conspiracy theories at this exact moment in history?
Think about it.
READER COMMENTS
Airman Spry Shark
Nov 12 2020 at 2:56pm
Maybe I’m just really missing the point, but the ‘then’ clauses seem flipped to me.
Scott Sumner
Nov 12 2020 at 3:12pm
I meant that a “WEIRD” person would see no reason why one’s view on which politician is best should be correlated with the view they hold on a seemingly unrelated issue, the subject of whether fraud occurred in a particular election.
Airman Spry Shark
Nov 12 2020 at 3:21pm
Sure, but a WEIRDO can recognize the nature of the hoi polloi and therefore be unsurprised by the correlation that emerges from their collective irrationality.
I guess it depends on whether you’re considering the correlation on the object or meta level.
Steve
Nov 12 2020 at 4:08pm
I got hung up on this as well. I do not find that correlation surprising, but not because it’s what I would expect from random chance, but because it is what I would expect from humans who are sore losers and have to rationalize why they lost.
delurking
Nov 19 2020 at 1:56pm
k-level thinking! Excellent! You must be WEIRD.
AMT
Nov 12 2020 at 5:35pm
Scott, you are incorrect because WEIRD people are aware of motivated reasoning. I would also be completely unsurprised that football fans are far more likely to say a close call for a penalty was incorrect if it went against their team than vice versa.
Thomas Leahey
Nov 13 2020 at 10:49am
Here’s the study you want– one football game, many accounts. Old study, but holds up well.
Hastorf, A. H., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game; a case study. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49(1), 129–134. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0057880
Abstract
When the Dartmouth football team played Princeton in 1951, much controversy was generated over what actually took place during the game. Basically, there was disagreement between the two schools as to what had happened during the game. A questionnaire designed to get reactions to the game and to learn something of the climate of opinion was administered at each school and the same motion picture of the game was shown to a sample of undergraduate at each school, followed by another questionnnaire. Results indicate that the “game” was actually many different games and that each version of the events that transpired was just as “real” to a particular person as other versions were to other people. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Market Fiscalist
Nov 12 2020 at 3:47pm
I’m not sure whether to view the CIA in the 1970s as ‘a puppeteer behind much of what went on in the world’ was to believe a conspiracy theory or to hold a correct view of (then) current events.
Scott Sumner
Nov 12 2020 at 6:12pm
Why not both?
Market Fiscalist
Nov 12 2020 at 6:44pm
I think that a conspiracy theory (in order to count as a conspiracy theory) has to be opposed to a more likely and widely accepted explanation of events and US involvement in regime change (and other meddlings) in the 1970’s is so well documented and was so well known even at the time that I find it hard to classify that one as a conspiracy theory.
Scott Sumner
Nov 12 2020 at 7:00pm
A conspiracy theory is simply a theory that a conspiracy took place, which is denied by the authorities. It could be true or false. But if you want to focus on accuracy, I can assure you that many of the theories I heard were crazy. The CIA did some underhanded stuff, but they were nowhere near as powerful as believed by people in places like Mexico during the early 1970s.
Market Fiscalist
Nov 12 2020 at 8:00pm
I guess its one of those terms that has no very clear meaning. For what its worth Wikipedia has it as:
‘A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation when other explanations are more probable.’ which combines both our definitions.
Market Fiscalist
Nov 12 2020 at 8:51pm
Here is a list of US inspired regime-changes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
I’m sure that the US government would have conspired to deny and.or cover up these events but even at the time (and especially by the 1970’s) the narrative that the CIA was overturning governments on a regular basis was widely seen by many people (especially outside the US) as very likely to be true.
Scott Sumner
Nov 13 2020 at 5:05pm
Yes, I lived through that period, and recall many of those events. But the CIA was nowhere near as powerful as its opponents assumed.
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 12 2020 at 4:43pm
Excellent post! Conspiracy theories have been a part of American history since the Nation’s founding and wax and wane over time. As the late Gonzo journalist, Hunter Thompson put it, “…when the going gets weird, the weird turn professional..” It’s also useful to turn to Thomas Pynchon in times like these. As his ‘proverbs for paranoids #3’ so aptly notes, ” If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
I’m still waiting for the latest drop from ‘Q’ to tell me that all will be well.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 14 2020 at 11:37pm
Everybody is waiting for Q!
robc
Nov 12 2020 at 4:46pm
Five in a row, not four. Don’t forget the conspiracy theory that the Clinton team threatened Perot (or his daughter’s wedding or something, its been too long) to get him to drop out. He reentered, but only got 19%. The theory is he would have gotten ~30% and denied Bill C the election.
There is probably about 6 things wrong with that, but that is true of most conspiracy theories.
Also, where do you put people who voted LP but think an election was fraudulent?
Scott Sumner
Nov 12 2020 at 6:13pm
robc, OK, but only in the 21st century have these theories become a really big deal.
robc
Nov 13 2020 at 7:07am
It was a big enough deal that I remember it 28 years later.
Benoit Essiambre
Nov 12 2020 at 5:18pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk
Scott Sumner
Nov 12 2020 at 6:16pm
Good song.
Daniel Carroll
Nov 12 2020 at 5:32pm
Conspiracy theories are a form of superstition – evil elites have near god-like magical powers.
Floccina
Nov 12 2020 at 5:41pm
Maybe it was only the people that I knew but conspiracy theories seemed much more common in the 1960’s and 70’s. People then though seemed to be more accepting of them though.
I was told all of these and more:
The Trilateral Commission picks the President.
Kennedy and LBJ paid the mafia to deliver Illinois and they did.
Did you know that there was a carburetor that made a Cadillac get 100/gallon, the oil companies bought up all the patents though.
The Mafia runs the New York city police department.
You know the oil shortage is just the oil companies trying to drive up the price.
You know we are in Vietnam because there is oil there, wait till the war is over you’ll see.
Scott Sumner
Nov 12 2020 at 6:14pm
I heard some of that as well, but it was very fringe stuff. Now it’s much more mainstream.
john hare
Nov 13 2020 at 4:23am
Brian
Nov 12 2020 at 6:21pm
Stackoverflow, the programmers question forum, is quite good in finding highly rational answers. You might think that this is an easy standard to meet because of the nature of programming and of programmers, but no, there can still be a diversity of views on very specific questions. The stackoverflow system of norms and votes and reputation helps to distinguish quality. It’s not perfect but still very useful. The stackoverflow community pushes people toward very specific questions. In this way we can try to avoid eliciting essays of persuasion. There are also related forums for software engineering and code review and operating systems that allow for more of what I might call informed guidance supported by references. I have to be careful not to characterize these as forums for informed opinion because that is formally forbidden even though the imprecise nature of language and composition makes proscription impossible. These forums are on a slippery slope.
Stackoverflow has diversified in many directions. For example there is politics.stackexchange.com and economics.stackexchange.com. For the time being these continue to produce answers that seem to be mostly rational even though politics may be the most slippery slope.
Woe are we for having to share this planet with flat-earthers but for the moment there are places on the internet where rational answers rise to the top. How much longer can these websites avoid being overwhelmed by misinformation?
Ted Durant
Nov 12 2020 at 6:40pm
I like to apply Ockham’s Razor to all theories, especially Conspiracy Theories. For those, I like to ask, “What additional conditions would have to be true for the Conspiracy Theory to be true?” Almost always, the complexity required makes me assign a low probability to the Conspiracy Theory.
Russell Hogg
Nov 19 2020 at 7:35am
Perfectly stated.
Weir
Nov 12 2020 at 9:24pm
Sheldon Whitehouse uses an ordinary pen when he draws a bunch of arrows connecting this name with that name in his spaghetti bowl of nefarious actors.
In his presentation to Amy Coney Barrett he put quote marks around so-called “groups.” He put green dollar signs up the top. It was very entertaining but it wasn’t a huge technological advance on Joe McCarthy.
Likewise the McCarthyism of Adam Schiff isn’t some advanced upgrade on 1953. Jerry Nadler doesn’t need the internet.
Go back to 1963. “One week after Kennedy’s murder a major US poll showed that less than a third (29 per cent) of those asked believed that Oswald had acted alone.” That’s from a book called Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch.
Just one day after Kennedy’s murder James Reston wrote in the New York Times that “from the beginning to the end of his Administration he was trying to tamp down the violence of the extremists from the right.”
Readers of the New York Times would have felt like Jackie, wouldn’t they? “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist.”
Oswald’s politics were an embarrassment and the conspiracy theories were more comforting.
Mactoul
Nov 13 2020 at 12:32am
All the WEIRD people I know, scientists at research labs and professors of physical sciences believe in the Russian interference story of 2016 elections. Perhaps they are not so WEIRD after all?
And didn’t the professional media also incessantly hype the Russian interference story? Merely to pander to their audience or did they really believe in this conspiracy theory?
Brian
Nov 13 2020 at 2:13am
Why wouldn’t they believe in Russian interference? I recall that plausible findings were reported. A political troll farm was identified in St. Petersburg by U.S. intelligence. How about motive? It would seem all authoritarians have a motive to discredit elections in the U.S.. If you were Putin you would do it too. Obama bought up the subject with Putin. Payments to Facebook for showing misinformation were attributed to the troll farm.
Scott Sumner
Nov 13 2020 at 5:08pm
Yes, I think there was Russian interference. But that’s the standard view of the authorities (except perhaps Trump.) WEIRD people are more skeptical of conspiracy theories that are rejected by authorities.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 14 2020 at 11:52pm
On the supply side, you have to look at the incentives of the conspirators or potential conspirators. I have a draft post on this.
tpeach
Nov 13 2020 at 4:54am
I think you’re part of a big conspiracy.
For ages you’ve been talking about your new book coming out, but it’s nowhere to be seen….
I’ll be watching closely next spring.
#Where’sScottSumner’sNewBook?
Scott Sumner
Nov 13 2020 at 5:09pm
It’s not my fault; I wrote the book long ago. Publishers are extremely slow for reasons that I don’t understand. The book is scheduled for the spring of 2021.
Phil H
Nov 13 2020 at 9:06am
Aaargh, no, that’s not right! I think you’re missing the institutional nature of weirdness. It’s *not* about changes in individuals.
“A relatively small share of the world’s population does not engage in “motivated reasoning”, rather they form beliefs based on evidence, apart from what they wish to believe.” – I’d guess it’s almost none, and their influence is non-existent. It’s not about *people*.
“Psychologist describe a certain type of relatively unbiased person as “WEIRD”” – No, this is a description of societies.
“I believe this is because the media was almost completely controlled by WEIRD people.” – Absolutely not. Those people weren’t any more or less rational than the people controlling the media today. The difference is in the processes they instituted.
Scientists aren’t better today; it’s the institution of open science that makes them better. Politicians in democracies aren’t better than autocrats, they just get chucked out before they can do too much damage. The media weren’t better, they were just working in a constrained environment. And judges aren’t better at judging stuff than other people, they’re just forced to follow the law.
For me, this is absolutely fundamental. It’s systems, not people. I mean, how could the opposite be true. Do you really think that the character of the American people has changed massively in the last 20 years? It seems massively implausible to me. Whereas the other explanation is not only plausible, it’s true: the number of people believing and talking about conspiracy theories has remained roughly the same, but there is a massive new media channel that transmits these theories, which did not exist before.
Michael Sandifer
Nov 13 2020 at 12:12pm
It is very difficult to predict the interest rate environment for the next 80 years. It may even be impossible. That would be true, even if we shouldn’t expect an AI-based productivity boom sometime this century.
Michael Sandifer
Nov 13 2020 at 12:18pm
In fact, I think the AI revolution will be a bigger discontinuity in productivity growth than the industrial revolution, and it won’t be close.
robc
Nov 13 2020 at 3:40pm
This seems appropriate for this topic:
https://babylonbee.com/news/local-man-wouldnt-believe-there-was-election-fraud-except-media-big-tech-corporations-keep-screaming-at-him-that-there-wasnt
Scott Sumner
Nov 13 2020 at 5:11pm
Cute!
Charles Richardson
Nov 14 2020 at 10:46pm
I’m sure there are some conspiracy theories out there about the 2000 election, but I don’t see how the main narratives about it fit that description. We know what happened: the Florida supreme court ordered a full recount, there was some reason to think that might flip the state to Gore, at the request of the Bush campaign the US supreme court shut down the recount in a 5-4 decision, and that made Bush president. People disagree in their evaluation of those facts, as to whether or not that amounts to a stolen election (disclosure: I think it does), but I don’t think either side is embracing a conspiracy theory.
Scott Sumner
Nov 19 2020 at 12:58pm
I would say that many people believe that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush for reasons other than their publicly stated reasons. (I agree with that cynical view, although I don’t regard the election as being stolen, because it was such a close call that it’s not clear what the proper decision would have been.)
It’s debatable whether this should be viewed as a conspiracy, but it has much the same effect as a conspiracy.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 14 2020 at 11:56pm
I don’t think there is any evidence of large, and even less, pivotal fraud. But I agree with the last part of your comment.
Robert A Gressis
Nov 19 2020 at 11:43am
There’s a debate among epistemologists about how to characterize conspiracy theories. On the one side, there’s the minimal view (defended by, e.g., Charles Pigden and Michael Dentith) that a conspiracy theory is merely a theory that a conspiracy happened. As such, some conspiracy theories (e.g., that 9/11 was committed by a group of Al Queda members) are correct, whereas others (e.g., that 9/11 was an inside job) are incorrect.
On other side, there’s the expansive view, defended by folks such as Quassim Cassam, who argues that, in our day-to-day use of the term, our calling something a conspiracy theory includes a pejorative connotation. (Cassam lists six features that any such theory must have: (1) they are speculative; (2) they are contrarian (to an official story); (3) they are esoteric (usually involving hidden or secret evidence that the conspiracy theorist can somehow suss out) (4) they are amateurish (they usually involve people who don’t have expertise in a subject opining on areas within that subject, like ballistics); (5) they are premodern (they don’t invoke systemic explanations or random chance; instead, they make much greater use of agentic explanations); and (6) they are self-sealing (the only evidence they allow to assess the truth of their conspiracy theories is evidence that affirms the truth of their conspiracy theories). (See Quassim Cassam, Conspiracy Theories, Polity Press, 2019)
Scott Sumner
Nov 19 2020 at 1:01pm
I agree that the term “conspiracy theory” has a negative connotation for many, but what about for people who believe in many different conspiracy theories? How do they view the term?
Even people who are skeptical of most conspiracy theories (including myself) tend to believe that at least some conspiracy theories are true.
Robert A Gressis
Nov 19 2020 at 11:46am
It may also be of note to read Hugo Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday. There, he talks about how there are some natural theories of how the world works that people in a wide variety of cultures converge on.
E.g., did you know that Galen wasn’t the person who invented the practice of bloodletting? Instead, he just gave it a rationale based in the four humours. In about 75% of the world’s cultures, bloodletting was practiced, with or without a particular rationale. Mercier’s theory is that bloodletting just seems like an obvious solution to sickness to many people: if something inside you hurts, cut the person open to let it out.
He speculates that the same thing is true with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. Vaccination, when you think about it, is very strange: give someone a little of something terrible so that they don’t get a lot of something terrible. Mercier suspects that this goes against many people’s natural ways of thinking, and helps to explain why conspiracy theories arise about it.
Brian Donohue
Nov 19 2020 at 12:29pm
So do you think the whole notion of “manufacturing consent” is imaginary? Because as far as I can tell there is huge machinery involved, and mainstream media is right in the middle of it. The blatant middle finger that was the dénouement of the Jeffrey Epstein story provides a lot of food for thought for today’s skeptic.
It’s hard to navigate information these days. The mainstream narrative has been awful, but you go ahead and slurp it down.
Scott Sumner
Nov 19 2020 at 12:52pm
You said:
“The mainstream narrative has been awful, but you go ahead and slurp it down.”
You mean like my view of the Great Recession? Perhaps you are mixing up the issue of whether I agree with you on a particular issue with the separate issue of whether I’m easily brainwashed, and lack critical thinking skills.
Brian Donohue
Nov 19 2020 at 2:55pm
Fair enough. Your ability to stand apart from conventional wisdom is noted, applauded even.
So what do you think about that Epstein character? I think he suffered from depression but sadly nobody picked up on this. Oh well…
GU
Nov 19 2020 at 4:16pm
Third-world nations are more prone to conspiracy theories.
The US had become more like a third-world country in the 21st century (and that transformation shows no sign of stopping, and is, if anything, accelerating).
Ergo, I’m not surprised that conspiracy theories are more popular in 21st century America.
Brian Slesinsky
Nov 19 2020 at 8:45pm
I had guessed that the previous link would be this song, but it wasn’t:
https://youtu.be/urglg3WimHA
Cartesian Theatics
Nov 20 2020 at 1:44am
This is a very interesting post and topic. I think you’ve put you finger on a lot of the dynamics. But I’d point to a few additional things:
1. The dynamics of conspiracy theories serves existing power structures. Promulgating a a category of “conspiracy theories” allows elite influencers to broadly construe outsiders as the “land of the crazies”.
2. A vacuum of investigative journalism clearly fuels conspiracy theorizing
3. Perhaps also the game-theoretics of “psyop” politics is more complex and better understood today. There’s a more cynical, subversive air to a lot of the conspiracies nowadays. As the saying goes, never interrupt your enemy when they’re making their biggest mistake. In fact, why not induce them to make mistakes? Why not drive them crazy with false leads?
My opinion regarding conspiracies has shifted considerably in the last few years. I’m far less certain about any telling of events. I think this is overall a good shift, we just have to culturally learn to have high standards of evidence and theorizing.
Lex
Nov 20 2020 at 2:36am
Tangentially, I’ve noticed a that the likelihood that the murder (or untimely death) of a political leader will be seen—even by mainstream folks—as the work of a conspiracy, rather than (as the the official story goes) depends on whether said leader was perceived to be of the left, rather than the right.
JFK, RFK, MLK, and Pope John Paul I? Even seemingly sensible people believe some sinister government cabal was the real culprit. Archduke Ferdinand, Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, and Pope John Paul II? All shot by lone kooks (it’s merely coincidence that the Russians in fact had plans at the time to whack the Holy Father) or died of natural causes.
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