Public ideas
Who believes conspiracy theories?
Most conspiracy theories violate rules of logic and ignore evidence. That’s why they’re credible.
A headline in The Conversation – Why do educated people fall for conspiracy theories? – was attention-grabbing because it was so counter-intuitive. Surely education is the means to develop our scepticism and to hone our skills in bullshit detection.
In fact the article by Tylor Cosgrove of Adelaide University (nee The University of Adelaide) is about the behavioural traits that are associated with belief in conspiracy. He finds a positive correlation between people’s scores on measures of narcissism and their tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. So strong is this correlation that among narcissists it overrides the usual negative correlation between education and belief in conspiracy theories.
He suggests that the reason so many people believe conspiracy theories lies in the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning”. We are good at “using reasoning skills to comes to pleasing conclusions because we want to believe something”. He explains further that “when people feel superior to experts, want to feel special, or need a concrete answer during uncertain times, they might use their reasoning to hold certain beliefs despite a lack of evidence”.
A conspiracy theory that assigns responsibility to specific actors can be particularly satisfying, “providing a sense of control by identifying a powerful group to take action against, and for social reasons, such as showing others which political groups you belong to and signalling loyalty to those groups”.
He doesn’t go on to give examples, but there seem to be plenty of imagined “powerful groups” in our current political life. One is a supposed woke left that has infiltrated our cultural institutions and the media, particularly the ABC.
The Bondi murders provided an opportunity for such specific identification. Consider the following three statements:
- The killers were motivated by hatred of Jews.
- The killers were motivated by hatred of Jews, spread by extremist religious preachers.
- The killers were motivated by hatred of Jews, spread by extremist Muslim religious preachers.
The third statement has most punch, because it names the supposed villains.
It is also the most credible of the three statements, even though, logically, the more general statement (2) offers a wider range of possibilities than statement (2), while statement (1) offers the widest range of possibilities. For example it is possible that they picked up their hatred of Jews from neo-Nazi white supremacists.
The higher credibility of the third statement is an example of what behavioural economists and Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the “Linda problem”, described in a short post on Puzzlewocky. It’s a case of “the conjunction fallacy” – a mistake in our reasoning, where adding extra details in an explanation makes it appear to be more likely, although in logic the less detail there is in a statement the more likely it is that the statement is true.
We fall for this fallacy, perhaps, because we like stories. The first statement in passive voice is vague. But as each element is added it starts to read like an engaging whodunnit story.
If you want to mount a good conspiracy theory, forget about logic, forget about evidence. Use your imagination. Make your story rich. Verge on the edge of incredulity.
If you belong to a political movement that wants to return to a “White Australia”, name the groups who make your supporters feel like “strangers in our own home”. Blame the Chinese who spread Covid-19, blame the Indians who bid up real-state prices, blame the Muslims who preach antisemitism. It’s the story that counts, not the evidence.
A time of monsters – the 2025 Reith Lectures
Exposure of the right’s hypocrisy, and a wake-up call to the left, in Rutger Bregman’s first Reith Lecture.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” wrote Antonio Gramsci 100 years ago, in the turbulent years of interbellum Europe.
The Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman uses that quote from Gramsci in introducing the first of the 2025 Reith lectures – A time of monsters – re-broadcast through the ABC’s Big Ideas program.
He goes on to compare the present times with the collapse of the Roman Empire:
Reading the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is like watching a civilization rot in slow motion. Sadistic emperors on gilded thrones, generals who sold out their own armies, and senators who cared more for spectacle than statecraft.
And yet what shocks you most when you read Gibbon today isn't the depravity, it's the familiarity. Gibbon wrote about politicians who lacked seriousness. Elites who lacked virtue, and societies that mistook decadence for progress. Two thousand years later, we live in an age where billionaires dodge their taxes, politicians perform instead of govern, and media barons profit from lies and hatred. The Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned. Our elites live-streamed the fire and monetized the smoke. Immorality and unseriousness.
Those are the two defining traits of our leaders today. And they're not accidental flaws, but the logical outcome of what I call the survival of the shameless. Today, it's not the most capable who rise, but the least scrupulous. Not the most virtuous, but the most brazen.
From that introduction we might expect Bregman, who describes himself as an “old-fashioned European social democrat”, to launch an all-out attack on the crony capitalist culture of the USA, and he doesn’t disappoint as he uses soft sarcasm to expose the hypocrisy of the mob hanging around Trump.
His main criticism, however, is directed to the supine “left” of the USA and Europe, which has largely withdrawn into a world of irrelevance. Their language is about inclusion, but their behaviour is to disengage. But “when the left steps back others are ready to rush in” – and they have rushed in.
He doesn’t mention Australia, but his observations of the rise of far-right populist movements are about the West generally. The right seeks to destroy democracy’s institutions because they get in the way of the personal ambitions of the rich and powerful: he doesn’t refrain from calling out “fascists” when he sees them. And the left lets them do it.
As Gramsci warned, it can get far worse. The populists succeed in recognizing the problems driving grievances, but the oligarchs who fund those populist parties have no intention of dealing with those problems. Even when social-democratic governments win office, they find that state capacity has been so weakened that they cannot succeed.
You will need to tune into the rest of the Reith series, under the general title “Moral Revolution”, to hear his ideas about how people can achieve change. You get some clues in the extensive Q&A session that starts after his 28-minute lecture. There is a transcript of this first lecture on the website of Britain’s public broadcaster, the BBC.
Bregman’s most recent book is Moral ambition: stop wasting your talent and start making a difference.