Conspiracy Thinking

Conspiracy Thinking

• An enduring disillusionment or dissatisfaction with the status quo.
• Feelings of inadequacy, lack of agency, and a poverty of personal importance.
• A general rejection of expertise, established knowledge, scientific data, and common sense — in favor of elaborate fictional propositions.
• A strong propensity to be reflexively contrarian and maintain a superiority of self-concept over others, while at the same time being attracted to alternative, outlier paradigms.
• Mental reactions of confusion and bewilderment — and emotional reactions of fear, anxiety, and suspicion — when confronted with unknowns of immense complexity, rapid change, and pervasively veiled or indiscernible causality in modern society. These reactions work in concert to induce a compulsive craving for subjective certainty and control.
• The tendency to adopt or generate narrative causality for explanations of complex events, rather than accepting normative assumptions or applying Occam’s Razor.
• An intuition or paranoia that the world is unstable, unpredictable, or falling apart — that society is ending, etc.
• Feelings of loneliness, isolation, and generalized anxiety that inspire a strong desire for belonging, a need to feel special and unique, and then to have that specialness reenforced through association with other conspiracists.
• A tribal level of moral development that emphasizes in-group vs. out-group polarization and mistrust — a circling of a given community’s wagons.
• A titillating interest in possessing secret or special knowledge, enhanced and reenforced through sharing with an initiated community of like-minded folks who are also “in the know.”
• Increased levels of dopamine in the brain, which excite looser, less logical associations and more superstitious, unicorn assumptions.
• Boredom or dissatisfaction with “life as it is;” a yearning for more excitement.
• Cultural and commercialized conditioning to rely on external authorities, sources of information, or calls to action, rather than learning to depend on more self-sufficient critical/skeptical thinking. In the U.S., for example, it can be argued that American culture encourages an infantilized dependency on commercially driven consumption in order to feel happy, gain status, keep up with peers, bolster our self-esteem, etc. — and this pattern also applies to the consumption of information that maintains our sense of community, well-being, and status.
• Mental illness (and schizotypal personality disorder in particular) that induces conspiracy thinking. In particular there appears to be a steadily increasing phenomenon of epigenetic mental illness in developed countries — and in particular the U.S.A. — which may be the result of environmental and cultural stresses, poor diets, and toxic pollutants.
• A heightened mental reflex of apophenia that imposes order and meaning on an otherwise chaotic universe.
• The natural tendencies of fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and belief perseverance, all of which reenforce conspiracy thinking.
• An inability to take personal or collective responsibility or culpability for negative conditions or consequences (for example: climate change, the autism epidemic, an economic crises, oppression of women and minorities, etc.)
• Excessive vulnerability to both the illusory truth effect and the Dunning-Kruger effect as consequence of some or all of the above.
• A high resistance to factual counterarguments, logical reasoning, or other efforts to undermine conspiracy claims. Sometimes this resistance is undergirded with delusions of persecution, and often the conspiracy thinker will immediately accuse anyone opposing their fallacies as “part of the conspiracy.”