How do People Come to Believe in Conspiracy Theories | Nature, Formation, & Personality

Welcome to my scientifically informed, insider look at mental health topics. If you find this video to be interesting or helpful, please like it and subscribe to my channel. Hello, this is Dr Gande.

Today's question is: How do people come to believe in conspiracy theories? I'm gonna use the acronym “CT” for “conspiracy theories” here in this video. Also, I have questions around the personality profile of people who believe in CTs.

The self-perception of conspiracy theorists – so, how do they look at themselves? How would they describe their approach to philosophy and science? And also, how and why the conspiracy theorists resist the authority of scientific institutions, scientists, and the production of knowledge through the scientific method.

So, kind of a lot of different questions here related to conspiracy theories, but I’m mostly looking at the nature and the formation of the beliefs. I’ve mentioned before when I’ve talked about conspiracy theories how there is a relationship, sometimes, to delusional thinking, which, of course, is pathological. But I’m not really talking about that level of believing in conspiracy theory.

I’m not talking about somebody who has a mental disorder that has delusions, and therefore, they believe in conspiracy theories, but rather non-pathological presentations. So, people that simply look at the evidence in whatever way they look at the evidence, and determine that a conspiracy theory must be true. Again, I’m not talking about mental disorders, just talking about people that are within normal range for mental health symptoms.

At the end of this video, I'm going to be talking about the alien lizard humanoids, which is one of my favorite conspiracy theories; I’d have to say it is my favorite conspiracy theory. Toward the end of the video, I'm gonna be talking about television show that I saw one time, and how maybe that led to this particular CT being my favorite. I don't know, but there's really no science involved in that part, so I'm going to save that to the end of the video so you can see what the research literature has to say, and then, if you're interested, stay for that story about what may have influenced my thinking on the alien lizard humanoid conspiracy theory.

So, what happens with CTs? We see that when people believe in conspiracy theories, official explanations for events are challenged, reconstructed, and contested. We see kind of this theory of a vast, insidious, international conspiratorial networked designed to perpetuate nefarious acts.

They're usually not benign; the beliefs are about something kind of scary, not something really neutral. They typically involve interpreting errant data. What that means is, whenever something happens, there are certain things we can look at in that situation that can help explain what happened.

Then there’re other elements that are unaccounted for in the official narrative. People that believe in CTs tend to really focus on those unaccounted-for pieces as evidence of a conspiracy, rather than just of evidence of an anomaly. Anomalies happen with every event.

If we look at any event, we're not gonna be able to fully explain why it happened. There's going to be elements of the event that we don't know about or that we don't have the capability to measure. The CT mindset really looks at specific events as being too complex or too convenient to have arisen by chance alone.

This is really well illustrated by the expression that we see commonly with people that believe in CTS: “Nothing happens by accident. ” Because they believe that “nothing happens by accident”, this leads them to all these really sophisticated and complex plots. We see that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a tendency to distrust authorities.

They typically have feelings of powerlessness and a feeling of dissatisfaction about their own lives. We also see another characteristic that's fairly common, and this is anxiety. If you think about the nature of conspiracy theories, this really actually makes a lot of sense.

I don't know if I've ever heard anybody talk about a conspiracy theory in kind of a neutral way, or anybody that was, like, “okay” with it. If we use, for example, these shape-shifting alien lizard humanoids, nobody ever assumes they're just here on vacation or they're here maybe to help us, or maybe they kind of pulled up to our planet on a spaceship and looked at us and said, “We feel kind of nervous about fitting in, so we’re gonna try to look like humans. ” No one ever assumes the best of the lizard people.

It's always something that's rooted in anxiety: “The lizard people are dangerous”, “the lizard people are trying to overthrow the government”. We look at these characteristics, particularly anxiety, and again, it really makes sense when you hear people describe conspiracy theories. They don't have a happy component to them.

They're usually, again, about something nefarious. We also see that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to lack a sense of control, whereas people who do not believe in them tend to have more of a sense of control. Perhaps believing a CT just leaves somebody feeling that they have more influence on the situation around them.

It just gives them, again, a sense of control. When we talk about the formation of the conspiracy theorist, we see that it may actually begin as an individual process in which a person tries to make sense of some event perceived as threatening or disastrous. So, really, it may start with anxiety, as well.

We know that anxiety is a part of it, but it might start that way, and it may also start with fear. We also believe that certain people are more vulnerable to go through this individual process; to look at a situation as disastrous or frightening and kind of develop a conspiracy theory ideation. What we found is, this type of ideation is more prevalent among people who are politically cynical, who have low self-esteem, who are more disagreeable, and I’ll talk about that a little more when I get to personality, and possibly people that have lower crystalized intelligence.

Again, this is just an association. This doesn't mean that everybody that believes in a conspiracy theory has lower crystallized intelligence. Just some research shows that it's more likely in that population as opposed to other populations.

We see that discrepancies or ambiguities in mainstream explanations for an event may also have a role in shaping CT ideation. Once this process has been initiated, we see that confirmation bias at work; people look at information and only pick out what confirms what they already believe. Also, they want to avoid cognitive dissonance.

They see the world or a situation as scary, and the conspiracy theory is scary, so they want to keep those two things in a balance. This just ends up starting this cycle where they drive further and further into this belief system toward a conspiracy theory. Furthermore, if somebody already has a tendency to distrust science, that only magnifies this process.

Distrusting science, this can be fueled by personal encounters with PhDs, mental health and medical professionals, lawyers, and other people who are in positions of authority. If somebody has a bad experience with somebody from one of those groups, that may tend to move them a little bit closer to believing in CT ideation. Now, the strongest predictor of whether or not an individual will ultimately accept a conspiracy theory is actually the presence of an earlier conspiracy theory.

That’s still out best predictor. If somebody believes in one, they're quite likely to believe in others. This really goes against a lot of the thinking you see that's promoted around conspiracy theories, this idea that somebody says, “no, this one conspiracy theory, I believe this is true, but I don't believe that any others are true”, which, in a way, kind of adds credibility, because they're saying, “No, it’s just this one; I have evidence to support this one.

I don't believe in the rest of them”. But what happens, in reality, is someone who believes in one is much more likely to believe in many. Now, eventually.

. . social dynamics do play a role.

As I mentioned, it's an individual process, but then group and social dynamics kind of take over and reinforce embedding the CT. I don't think it's so much that conspiracy theorists really market and reach out to other people and try to recruit them, I think this individual process starts and then somebody’s looking for a group to merge with. And of course, they're very easy to find with the internet.

All these different conspiracy theory groups are quite accessible, so if you have this belief or this tendency to believe in CTs, you can find reinforcement for that and a social group very easily. This is a good time to point out that I put the references for the articles I use in the description of my videos. I have a reference in there from an article that actually shows that people that believe in real world conspiracy theories - so, the ones where there are groups of people that believe in them - are actually more likely to believe in fictitious CTs, as well.

In this experiment, they created a conspiracy theory that had no basis in anything. No one believed it. It was completely made-up, and people who believed in real-world CTs were more likely to believe in one that was completely made-up.

There's a real tendency to add more and more CTs once you already believe in one, like I indicated before. What about the logic? What's the logical processing as somebody kind of moves towards CT ideation?

Well, the consensus among those who aren't CTs is that the conspiracy theorists are bad scientists; that these individuals are not interested in falsification, but instead selectively seek evidence to confirm their beliefs. This is the confirmation bias. They indiscriminately accept any argument that points to the conspiracy.

This really forms a self-sealing quality. They're resistant, if not invulnerable, to contrary evidence, and actually, the contrary evidence can make the belief in the CT stronger. The evidence against the conspiracy theory is often ultimately seen by its adherents as evidence in favor of the conspiracy.

Ultimately, they defeat really any attempt at testing, and this is referred to as a "paradox of evidence" that renders conspiracy theories as unfalsifiable. Nothing can change their minds. Of course, this is highly inconsistent with the scientific method, which promotes flexible thinking.

With the scientific method, you may believe in something, but if you see evidence to the contrary, especially if it's repeated, and you weigh that evidence and it seems to be substantial, then, in theory, you would change your mind to a new way of thinking. We adjust based on the evidence. With conspiracy theorists, we just don't see that adjustment.

We don't see people moving in a direction away from the conspiracy theory. they only move into a firmer belief of that theory, and again, add theories on top of it. It’s interesting, of course, as many people who believe in conspiracy theories will say that they appreciate logic.

Yet, when we look at the evidence, we see that a number of people that believe in these theories simultaneously hold contradictory conspiracy theories. So, it becomes kind of a tricky area to align CTs with logic. How about the personality of people who believe in CTS?

This is actually fairly straightforward. If we look at the Five Factor Model of Personality Theory - Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism; I remember this through the acronym OCEAN - We see that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to be low in Agreeableness and high in Openness to Experience, So, they do tend to have intellectual curiosity, which, of course, is actually weakly correlated with intelligence. I mentioned before that there's some other evidence that indicates an association with low crystallized intelligence, but here we have evidence that there's actually intellectual curiosity.

Again, we just can't look at somebody who believes in a conspiracy theory and automatically think that we know what their level intellectual functioning is. Everybody's different. Now, with this Openness to Experience piece, we also see High Imagination and an Appreciation for Novel Ideas, and really, all these characteristics make sense in light of what we know about conspiracy theories.

What about self-perception? How do people who believe in conspiracy theories view themselves? What do we see in the research literature?

Well, we see there are some shared assumptions among respondents in these types of studies that look at conspiracy theory beliefs. We see a lot of different descriptors that they use for themselves, like: “skeptical by nature”, “daring to think differently”, “thinking outside the box”, “motivated by skepticism”, and “critiquing every form of dogmatic thinking”, which I find particularly interesting because conspiracy theories align very closely with dogmatic thinking. But in general, they look at themselves as skeptical and having good critical thinking skills, and they tend to look at modern science and say that modern science is dogmatic.

So what we really see here is that conspiracy theorists, some of them, kind of paint this picture of a war between philosophy and science, even though, of course, science is a type of philosophy. And I've heard this argument a few times; this idea that all scientists are scientific materialist. Meaning, all scientists must believe that all truth can be found by studying the natural world, and therefore, they have an agenda; they're not neutral, not fair, and not unbiased.

But of course, we know that many scientists are very philosophical and theological, so this idea that all scientists are scientific materialist just isn't correct. People that believe in conspiracy theories also tend to believe the scientists are paid by big corporations and that's another reason they wouldn't be neutral. They tend to believe that scientific facts are not so much discovered as constructed, and this knowledge production is related to political power and economic interests.

So, there's a lot of distrust of scientists and other people that work to produce knowledge through the scientific method. Part of the self-perception too appears to come from maybe even a personal dislike of people in positions of authority. I kind of mentioned this before.

A lot of people who believe in CTs view experts as having an authoritative position in society that’s not deserved. They believe that, essentially, scientists disregard alternative sources and knowledge to keep, like, a monopoly on the truth. Conspiracy theorists often feel like, when they try to explain their point of view, scientists and other experts exclude them, mock them, and stigmatize them.

When they propose an alternative way of looking at the world, scientists kind of turn their back, or worse. I think that also plays into the way that conspiracy theorists tend to look at themselves, in terms of how they relate to the scientific community, at least. What I find interesting about this is that conspiracy theorists aren't really adding philosophical beliefs to science, which is kind of how some of them make it seem.

[They make it seem] like they're taking science, which they say is dogmatic and not really looking for all sources of knowledge, and they're adding philosophy onto it; they're weaving philosophy and science together. But that's not really what they're doing. Really, what they're doing is dismissing scientific findings.

They're looking at something scientific and simply saying “that's not true”, not synthesizing it with philosophy. Also, I find it interesting that they often insert results from their own experiment, which of course may or may not follow the scientific method. They conduct their own experiments that look scientific, at least, and they believe those findings, but not the ones that really truly used the scientific method.

So, we see a number of inconsistencies with the kind of ideology of conspiracy theorists. But again, all beliefs fall on a continuum, and some people who believe in conspiracy theories really line up with the population fairly well; they’re really not that much different. And others, of course, are more extreme, We just can't take all conspiracy theorists and put them in the same category and say they all believe this or that.

There are a lot of individual differences between conspiracy theorists. So, there’s a summary on some different factors of conspiracy theorists. This is, in this video, at least, where the scientific portion is going to end, essentially.

If you really just wanted to see our scientific understanding, I’ve kind of explained that. And now I’ll talk a little bit about the alien lizard humanoids and why they're kind of my favorite conspiracy theory, or one reason they might be. This story goes all the way back to 1981.

I was nine years old, and there was a television show that was on called “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”. This was, uh, an actor. .

. Gil Gerard, I think, was Buck Rogers, and in season two, there was this episode, and I saw it the night it premiered, called “Mark of the Saurian”. And in Buck Rogers, the Saurians were a race of lizard people.

In this particular episode - there was actually a lot of twists and turns in this episode, but essentially what happened is. . .

Buck Rogers got this fever that he wasn't immune to because he was born 500 years earlier. He wasn’t immune to this particular fever, and he got it onboard the ship. At the same time, these ambassadors/diplomats were visiting the ship, and they appeared human but they were actually Saurians; they were actually lizard people.

And because he had this fever, he could see this kind of green aura around them, so he knew something was off. And then, when he experienced pain, he was able to see what they really looked like and he could see that they were lizard people. Again, the plot takes some twists and turns, so people don't believe him.

He's not able to see them again. . .

. . .

but eventually, the dots are connected, Buck Rogers grabs a weapon and goes onto the bridge of the ship and kind of holds everybody hostage for a moment as he's trying to prove his point, which is that the ship is being taken over by alien lizard humanoids. What he does is he turns down the thermostat- so I guess spaceships have thermostats, too, right? Just like a house.

He turns it down and, of course, because the lizards are reptiles, they're cold blooded, and they start to hibernate. They start to fall over; they can't withstand the cold temperatures. That was kind of how Buck Rogers exposed the alien lizard people and saved the day 'cause, of course, they were up to something quite evil in the episode.

Now, you know, when you're nine years old and you see that, I guess it has some impression on you. I didn't really watch a lot of television even when I was young, and there wasn't a lot of television on when I was young, compared to what we see now. So, maybe that just stood out in my mind?

Later on when I heard about the shape-shifting alien lizard humanoids, maybe it's just kind of connected with that one episode of that TV show, and then I just found it funny? I don't know. I'll probably dig more into that.

I'll try to find out more of what the reasons are behind my preference for this particular conspiracy theory; why I find this one so interesting and I think, maybe, a little entertaining, right? I mean, the world of mental health can be a very serious world. There aren't many opportunities to have a sense of humor.

. . But when people talk about alien lizard people, that's one of those moments when, not in a clinical setting, I will kind of enjoy a little bit of a laugh.

It’s just - to me, it's just a kind of a. . a funny, uh.

. . It’s a funny conspiracy theory.

Now look, you know, it could be true. There could be alien lizard people living among us. I don't know.

I haven't done experiments myself to disprove the alien lizard people theory. I think it's interesting because it does seem kind of a little bit more “out there” than other conspiracy theories, which are grounded on something that you could say “okay, this could be true”. But the alien lizard people…I just find that one so much different; it’s so unlike the other conspiracy theories.

And again, it always assumes the worst of the lizard people. Now, of course in Buck Rogers, as I indicated, the lizard people were up to no good, so. .

. If we're gonna use that particular episode of that old TV show as a basis, then. .

. then the lizard people are dangerous, but. .

. who knows what their real intentions are, if they are among us. I'm gonna run under the assumption that that conspiracy theory is not true, and I'll be open to seeing evidence if new evidence arises.

I'll just kind of leave it at that. So, there’s my story from when I was younger. And, you know, maybe that kind of contributed to my preference to the alien lizard humanoids.

Either way, I hope that you enjoyed this video on conspiracy theories. If you have any thoughts here, you agree with me or disagree with me or have other opinions, please put those in the comments. As always, I hope you found this video on the formation of conspiracy theory beliefs to be interesting.

Thanks for watching.