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jlf1961 -> RE: Just Pick a theory, a short list of conspiracy theories (2/7/2010 4:48:11 PM)
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I never said all conspiracy theories were wrong, I will admit that history is full of proven conspiracies. However, the short list that I provided are theories that have no basis in provable facts. Psychologists have made various studies on the subject and have come to some unique and unsettling conclusions.
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Melley seeks to explain why conspiracy theories and paranoia have become so pervasive in American culture in recent decades. He discusses some of the paranoia behind our obsessions with political assassinations, gender and race relations, stalkers, mind control, bureaucracies, and the power of corporations and governments.
Melley proposes that conspiracy thinking arises from a combination of two factors, when someone: 1) holds strong individualist values and 2) lacks a sense of control. The first attribute refers to people who care deeply about an individual's right to make their own choices and direct their own lives without interference or obligations to a larger system (like the government). But combine this with a sense of powerlessness in one's own life, and you get what Melley calls agency panic, "intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy" to outside forces or regulators.
Furthermore,
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When fervent individualists feel that they cannot exercise their independence, they experience a crisis and assume that larger forces are to blame for usurping this freedom. "For one who refuses to relinquish the assumptions of liberal individualism, such newly revealed forms of regulation frequently seem so unacceptable or unbelievable that they can only be met with anxiety, melodrama, or panic."
Although Melley doesn't present any empirical data to show that conspiracy thinking has been increasing for these reasons, some research by psychologist Jean Twenge is consistent with his hypotheses. Twenge's research examines how Americans' personality traits have been changing over the past several decades. She reviews the results of hundreds of studies published from the 1960s through the end of the century, looking at the personality scores for each year. For example, she finds that trait anxiety (or neuroticism) has been rising dramatically in both children and adults over this period.
Full article
In another study,
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"Belief in Conspiracy Theories" by Goertzel was an attempt find a correlation between these beliefs and some other factor, to see if certain kinds of people in certain situations were more likely to fall prey to this mentality. So what did he find?
The conspiracies that Goertzel looked at range from the moderate, such as the Kennedy assassination, to the absurd, such as the suggestion that the AIDS epidemic was a government-planned genocide using a man-made virus. In total, ten conspiracies were selected and a survey constructed designed to find out how many people believed in them.
The survey was conducted in southwestern New Jersey, and covered 348 people, giving a relatively large margin of error of around 5%. 211 of the respondents were white, 74 were black, 44 were Hispanic, and 19 were Asian or members of other groups. For each conspiracy the responses allowed were: "definitely true", "probably true", "probably false" and "definitely false", with "don't know" accepted if given.
The results showed that a sizable number of people believed in two or three of the conspiracy theories, with fewer believing in many or none. Belief was stronger in the Black community, less strong among Hispanics, and lower still among Whites, possibly reflecting the fairness with which these groups have been treated in the past.
The researchers noted that the minority status variable could be used as a linear relationship to allow them to correlate belief in conspiracy theories with a number of other psychology factors known to vary across the three social groups, as the table below (converted to "attitude" scales where 3 = neutral) shows:
. White Hispanic Black
Belief in Conspiracies 2.5 2.8 3.3
Anomia 3.4 3.8 4.1
Trust 3.7 3.3 3.1
"Anomia" in this sense covers "the belief that the situation of the average person is getting worse, that it is hardly fair to bring a child into today's world, and that most public officials are not interested in the average man", and trust refers to "whether respondents felt that they could trust the police, their neighbors or their relatives".
Source Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America Timothy Melley, 2000 - Social Science - 239 pages
The major problem with conspiracy theories is that there is no way to prove them, while, in many cases, there is overwhelming evidence to disprove them. In the cases where the evidence could go either way, then the following comes into play:
* Occam's razor - does the alternative story explain more of the evidence than the mainstream story, or is it just a more complicated and therefore less useful explanation of the same evidence?
* Logic - do the proofs offered follow the rules of logic, or do they employ fallacies of logic? When the theory denies the evidence presented by leaders in their respective fields, regardless of the numbers of expert who have provided evidence to disprove the theory, logic is being denied.
* Methodology - are the proofs offered for the argument well constructed, i.e., using sound methodology? Is there any clear standard to determine what evidence would prove or disprove the theory?
* Whistleblowers - how many people – and what kind – have to be loyal conspirators? - this is a real theory breaker, simply because the more people know a secret, the bigger the chance is that it will be found out, the only way to prevent such a leak is to eliminate the people who know about the conspiracy, then eliminating the eliminators.
* Falsifiability - is it possible to demonstrate that specific claims of the theory are false, or are they "unfalsifiable"?
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