What conspiracy theorists get right
What conspiracy theorists get right
Reasonable #42: the epistemic vices of conspiracy theorising as epistemic virtues taken to excess
I’ve spent a long time trying to put my finger on the defining feature of conspiracy theories - what is the epistemic error which drives someone into the arms of flat earth, QAnon, faked moon landings, CIA plots to assassinate JFK etc?
One thing is clear, the defining feature of conspiracy theories isn’t conspiracies. Take 9/11 - the most widely accepted account centers on a conspiracy orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda, but believing that doesn’t make you a Conspiracy Theorist. Conspiracy Theories proper have something extra - grander organisations, stretching across time (like the Templars) across the world (like David Icke’s space lizards), connecting everything, controlling everything with malevolent ambitions (which somehow don’t stretch to stopping Conspiracy Theorists hosting podcasts, holding conferences revealing their secrets etc).
Some psychologists try and investigate the style of thinking that makes someone a conspiracy theorists (I wrote about this here: RP#29), but today I’ve been thinking about the opposite question: what do conspiracy theorists get right? Maybe by outlining the virtues of this way of thinking, the exact nature of the vices will become clearer.
I can think of at least 4 epistemic virtues of conspiracy theorists:
Virtue #1: Listening to other people
Conspiracy theories are social. Elaborate plots are conceived in the imagination of a group of conspiracy theorists, who write pamphlets, record videos and swop rumours across WhatsApp or by leaning over their neighbour’s fences. This is great! How else are we to discover truth, except as part of a collective project? Conspiracy theorists are talking about ideas and evidence, exchanging arguments and making decisions about which sources to trust. All of this is essential. Now, I might disagree with who they decide to trust, but perhaps that is just a detail?
Virtue #2: Not trusting governments
Almost universally, conspiracy theories paint governments as malevolent or co-opted by dangerous and hidden influences. A healthy skepticism towards state power seems like a virtue, even if it can sometimes be carried towards excess. Again, I might disagree with what the Conspiracy Theorist suspects the government of, but in a world where governments do conspire against their citizens the basic attitude seems reasonable.
Ron Funches makes a good point in the first 70 seconds of this clip:
Across the world, a history of living under a undemocratic, unaccountable or corrupt government is a strong predictor of the strength of conspiracy beliefs in the population:
Within countries, groups which have historically been victims of malevolent state power also more highly endorse conspiracy theories. I am not claiming that the beliefs themselves are accurate, only that the attitude has foundations which it would be wrong to call irrational.
Virtue #3: Being threat alert
The world can be a dangerous place, and for humans - apex predators - the biggest dangers often come from other people. Being sensitive to hidden coalitions makes sense - in a world where you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the coups, civil wars, ambushes and betrayals that characterise so much of human history.
Threat detection is a signal detection problem. You can set a low threshold for threats, meaning you move to high alert early, but will suffer plenty of false alarms; or you can set a high threshold meaning you seldom suffer false alarms, but you might respond late, or not at all, to true threats. What you can’t do is decide not to set a threshold. You just get to decide how you trade off false-alarms against misses. The logic of that trade-off depends on the environment. In a safe world, it rarely matters how you respond the true threats, but constant false alarms could be exhausting. In a dangerous world, you better be sure you jump at any possible sign of threat. So conspiracy theorists might have a perverse model of where danger comes from, but the basic instinct to be alive to the possibility that groups are conspiring against you is has deep roots in our psychology. In the current environment conspiracy theorists may be worrying about the wrong threats, but adjacent possible worlds make their worries look a lot more reasonable.
Virtue #4: Willing to believe the absurd
For some people, conspiracy theories are obviously absurd. For that reason, though, I respect people who can believe them. Lots of true things are also absurd - the earth spinning through space around a star, for example. Being willing to endorse things beyond what you can directly verify is the start of reason - whether it is believing testimony, or argument, from someone else, or following your own chain of inferences1.
Part of what makes conspiracy theories so infuriating is that no single piece of evidence can knock them down - there isn’t a clean refutation (in part because each refutation has its own counter from within the logic of the conspiracy - “that’s what they want you to believe” etc). This means that as much as they may be obviously absurd, conspiracy theories can’t be clearly demarked from non-conspiracy theories about fantastic or unlikely truths, things we come to believe because of a chains of reasoning which may seem just as far-fetched from the outside (like that the earth goes round the sun, or humans evolved from non-humans). For these reasons, the obvious absurdity of conspiracy theories isn’t a reason to criticise them - in fact, willingness to follow reasoning to conclusions can be seen as virtue.
Between vice and virtue
Enumerating these virtues make me even less hopeful to find a clean line between conspiracy theories and everyday, adaptive, reasoning. The vices of conspiracy theory seem only to be the virtues carried to excess, or misdirected - trusting the wrong people, for example, or not trusting the right people. One vision of rationality is that it would proceed on strictly logical grounds, weighing evidence and making calculations of safe inferences. Conspiracy theorising is a long way from that vision, but so, then, is our everyday reasoning, which we rely on to guide is in everything from who to trust, what to eat and where to go.
The conclusion is double-sided, with good news as well as bad. Conspiracy theorists aren’t an alien species or the victims of some single, irrecovable, damage to their faculties. A good chunk of conspiracy theorising is ordinary reason, something we have in common, and so we all share common vulnerability to conspiracy theories. And if our ordinary reason, stretched too far, can lead any of us to conspiracy theory, it can also lead us back.
References
Cordonier, L., & Cafiero, F. (2023, May 16). Public Sector Corruption is Fertile Ground for Conspiracy Beliefs: A Comparison Between 26 Western and Non-Western Countries. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/b24gk
(related:
Alper, S. (2022). There are higher levels of conspiracy beliefs in more corrupt countries. European Journal of Social Psychology . https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2919)
REVIEW: The Fake News about Fake News
Daniel Williams reviews Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity (2023) by Sander van der Linden
This is key
[The book’s] central assumption—that there is something intrinsic about misinformation, a DNA that we can be trained to recognize—is radically implausible.
The fundamental problem is that there are no intrinsic differences between true and false claims. That is, whether a claim is right or wrong—or informative or misleading—depends not on characteristics of the claim itself but on whether it accurately represents how things are
Link: The Fake News about Fake News
PREPRINT: Exposure to Higher Rates of False News Erodes Media Trust and Fuels Skepticism in News Judgment
“In a between-subjects design where U.S. participants rated the accuracy of true and false news, we manipulated the proportions of false news participants were exposed to (17%, 33%, 50%, 66% 83%). We found that exposure to higher proportions of false news decreased trust in the news and increased skepticism in news judgments.”
Altay, S., Lyons, B., & Modirrousta-Galian, A. (2023, April 5). Exposure to Higher Rates of False News Erodes Media Trust and Fuels Skepticism in News Judgment. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t9r43
BOOK: The Cognitive Science of Belief: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Musolino, Sommer & Hemmer (2022, Eds). Cambridge University Press.
I haven't enjoyed an edited collection as much for a long time. Recommend
ACTIVITY: Pre-mortems
"A pre-mortem is the opposite of a post-mortem. It is designed to identify the potential causes of failure before that failure happens, allowing you to improve the initiative or vision as it develops. It is a technique that consistently identifies new risks, issues and ideas not spotted before."
Link: Jisc guide on running pre-mortems.
I ran one of these recently and am a complete convert
[self-promotion disclosure for the next three items]
PAPER: DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving
This has been accepted to CSCW'2023. Pre-print available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05271
Group deliberation enables people to collaborate and solve problems, however, it is understudied due to a lack of resources. To this end, we introduce the first publicly available dataset containing collaborative conversations on solving a well-established cognitive task, consisting of 500 group dialogues and 14k utterances. In 64% of these conversations, the group members are able to find a better solution than they had identified individually, and in 43.8% of the groups who had a correct answer as their final solution, none of the participants had solved the task correctly by themselves. Furthermore, we propose a novel annotation schema that captures deliberation cues and release all 14k utterances annotated with it. Finally, we use the proposed dataset to develop and evaluate two methods for generating deliberation utterances. The data collection platform, dataset and annotated corpus are publicly available at https://delibot.xyz.
Karadzhov, G., Stafford, T., & Vlachos, A. (2021). DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.05271.
TALK: "Faith in Reason: Prospects for fact checking in a world of bias"
Keynote by me at the EACL'23 workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER), 2023-05-25. Slides are here. Abstract:
Fact checking requires some optimism about human reasoning. We hope that, once checked, errors will be corrected, misinformation will be slowed and false beliefs will be diminished. Pessimists point to abundant signs of polarisation, biased evaluation and motivated reasoning. The truth does not lie somewhere in the middle. I will review evidence from our studies, and those of others, which tells us something about how we reason in the face of potentially mind-changing arguments and evidence. Only by properly understanding the nature of human bias can we have realistic expectations for fact-checking, and even keep some optimism about our capacity to change each other’s minds.
No recording, but I did take this lovely picture of Dubrovnik
PREPRINT: What makes online political ads unacceptable? Interrogating public attitudes to inform regulatory responses
Abstract:
Online political advertising is often portrayed in a negative light, yet there is limited evidence about what exactly the public deems unacceptable about it. This paper provides new insights into public attitudes through an online survey where 1,881 respondents evaluated all political ads placed on Facebook during the 2019 UK General Election. We find that citizens do not inherently think political ads are problematic. Examining two possible regulatory responses, first, we find that compliance with existing regulatory protocols for non-political advertising is a strong predictor of political ad acceptability, suggesting a case for extending the existing regulatory regime to include political ads. We also find that people had particular concerns about the content and tone of unacceptable ads, highlighting the value of codes of conduct to promote good practice. Overall, this paper offers a nuanced account of attitudes towards online political advertising and identifies possible pathways for regulatory reform.
Zhu, J., Dommett, K., & Stafford, T. (2023). What makes online political ads unacceptable? Interrogating public attitudes to inform regulatory responses.
And finally…
How social science metrics work.
END
There’s an wrinkle here, that many conspiracy theories manage to combine absurdity on the one hand with strong alignment with common intuitions on the other. Yes, the earth does - for most people, most of the time, look flat. It seems plausible that injecting someone with a form of a disease would be harmful, rather than beneficial, as it can be in the case of vaccinations