Tag: Conspiracy theories

‘An American Tradition’: Lessons from a year covering conspiracy theories

December 31, 2021

“Our brains are not built for the truth,” David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told me earlier this year. “Our brains weren’t even built to read. Our brains weren’t. Evolution is a very slow process. It takes many, many, many, many, many generations. And the change in technology and particularly in information is so rapid that there’s no way for evolution to keep up.”…

We choose who to believe, we choose who to trust, often before we realize we are doing it. It is no wonder our disinformation battles can feel so personal, especially within families.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/12/29/american-conspiracy-theories-essay/

QAnon: The alternative religion that’s coming to your church

October 5, 2020

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon…

QAnon: The alternative religion that’s coming to your church

“Immune to Evidence”: How Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracies Spread

May 17, 2020

Good Q and A that breaks down conspiratorial thinking. At the bottom is a link for the really well done “Conspiracy Theory Handbook.”

Conspiratorial videos and websites about COVID-19 are going viral. Here’s how one of the authors of “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook” says you can fight back. One big takeaway: Focus your efforts on people who can hear evidence and think rationally.

How do we prevent the spread of conspiracy theories?
By trying to inoculate the public against them. Telling the public ahead of time: Look, there are people who believe these conspiracy theories. They invent this stuff. When they invent it they exhibit these characteristics of misguided cognition. You can go through the traits we mention in our handbook, like incoherence, immunity to evidence, overriding suspicion and connecting random dots into a pattern. The best thing to do is tell the public how they can spot conspiracy theories and how they can protect themselves.

https://www.propublica.org/article/immune-to-evidence-how-dangerous-coronavirus-conspiracies-spread?utm_source=pardot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature

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The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

Download Conspiracy Theory Handbook

5 Theories About Conspiracy Theories

March 1, 2020

For people living through a ruinous financial crisis or devastating climate change — or even through rapid social change that has no material effect on their lives — it can be hard to make sense of a cascade of events that seem to have no plainly evident causal chain, or even identifiable human authors. How do you account for a world we’re meant to master, but is so complex its workings seem essentially opaque?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories.html

Five myths about conspiracy theories

January 28, 2019

Much has been written about the concept of “fake news” and conspiracy theories but this brief list helps bring together some interesting information.

Presenting fringe theories as the essence of conspiracism gives the impression that conspiracy theorists are a handful of kooks who will believe even the most ludicrous ideas. But conspiracy thinking — the inclination to entertain conspiracy theories in general — is much more widespread than belief in any particular theory.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-conspiracy-theories/2019/01/17/0ef1b840-1818-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html?utm_term=.53804eeeb1db