Why Do People Believe Whacko Conspiracy Theories?

By Shlomo Maital  

Caption: “He just won’t get out of his own way!” (Toronto Star)

   Consider Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the late Bobby Kennedy.  He spews horrendous whacko conspiracy ideas, some about vaccines, profits enormously from them, and by some polls has support among 20% of Democrats for his destructive presidential campaign.  Kennedy has compared vaccines — which have saved millions of lives — with the genocide of the Holocaust.

    In December 2016, TIME magazine reported that “a 28-year-old man was arrested on Sunday for allegedly walking into a Washington, D.C., pizza joint with an assault rifle, saying he wanted to investigate claims that the restaurant was running a pedophile ring from its basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.“

    Why?  Why do whacko conspiracy theories gain so much traction?

    A massive study to uncover the motivational and personological correlates of conspiratorial ideation spanned 170 studies, 257 samples, 52 variables, 1,429 effect sizes, and 158,473 participants.*  

      The researchers found this:  “Overall, the strongest correlates of conspiratorial ideation pertained to  (a) perceiving danger and threat, (b) relying on intuition and having odd beliefs and experiences, and (c) being antagonistic and acting superior.

      Let me translate this. 

      *  If you are, say, part of a white poorly-educated minority in a nation with growing brown and black populations, and a flood of migrants, you perceive danger and threat.  Especially in times of great uncertainty and chaos – like, now.

      *   If you are relatively poorly educated, you will be more open to wild whacko ideas. (Note: some of those who purvey them, like Robert Kennedy, are well educated, but cynically see opportunity to gain influence and wealth by disseminating them).

     * And finally, if you perceive you are becoming an underclass, you fight back by espousing ideas that make you seem superior, antagonistic to those who you think are trying to replace you.  It is one way to fight those who oppose you.  

     There is no easy answer.  Conspiracy theories will get wilder and wilder.  They are fallout from a divisive, divided, massively unequal society with huge extremes of wealth and poverty.  And social media make it trivially easy to spread crackpot theories, the wilder the better.  A former US President was a happy participant, embracing openly QAnon in 2022. 

   I guess, in society, you sow what you reap.  Sow poor schools, deep poverty amidst armies of billionaires, and a threatened white minority, and you will reap conspiracies.  Putting the genie back into the bottle may no longer be possible.      

* Bowes, S. M., Costello, T. H., & Tasimi, A. (2023). The conspiratorial mind: A meta-analytic review of motivational and personological correlates. Psychological Bulletin.