The Science of Conspiracy Theories

Millions of people hold delusional beliefs about everything from the Baltimore bridge collapse to the moon landing to QAnon. What does science tell us about why such false lunacy is so widespread?

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. Some of this edition is for paid subscribers only. To unlock the full article—and to support my work—please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $4/month. If you’re interested in conspiracy theories, I also produced this podcast episode for Power Corrupts about them—which will give you further insights.

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Last week, a ship lost power, rammed into a Baltimore bridge, and killed six immigrant workers. It was a terrible accident. But tragedy didn’t stop the conspiracists from pouncing.

Something was going on, they insisted. Perhaps the captain of the ship was incapacitated by a covid-19 vaccine. Or, maybe Biden was really behind it, inexplicably damaging the American economy and taking out a crucial bridge for…unknown reasons. Crackpot-turned-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who has previously suggested that wildfires were sparked by Jewish Space Lasers, speculated that the Baltimore bridge was an “intentional” attack.

In one video that has been viewed 1.9 million times on TikTok, a conspiracy theorist influencer tried to connect the dots—with vague insinuations—between P. Diddy’s home being raided by US law enforcement and the Baltimore bridge tragedy. One of the top comments on that video, with nearly a thousand likes, notes: “Not to mention the [solar] eclipse that’s coming. It’s something about to happen when that darkness comes, we have to be prepared.”

Tinfoil factories must be operating on overdrive, because everywhere you look these days, conspiracy theories abound. From QAnon to vaccine lunacy, and shadowy deep state plots to Kate Middleton being cloned, millions of people make sense of a rapidly changing modern world through weird, wild, and wacky theories that yield a bogus “hidden truth.”

According to YouGov surveys, thirty-one percent of Americans believe that: “Regardless of who is officially in charge of governments and other organisations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” (Lest European readers start feeling smug, the same is true of 27 percent of the population in France; 42 percent in Spain; and 18 percent of Britons; in Kenya, the figure spikes to 72 percent).

Even more bizarre: eighteen percent of Americans agree with this statement: “A secret group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media.”

Such deranged, conspiratorial thinking is warping modern society. It’s not just confined to online discourse, either. Conspiracy theories sway our politics, incite violence, and alter the way that millions upon millions of people try to grapple with the bewildering nature of our complex modern societies.

The notion that “everything happens for a reason” isn’t just a false mantra of comfort that we stitch on flowery pillows; it’s also a delusion that imagines a world of perfect, top-down control, in which random accidents never happen and everything has significant, hidden meaning—if you only dare to look close enough.

Break with the sheep. Do your own research. Connect the dots that they don’t want you to connect.

Has the world lost its collective mind?

There is a science to understand conspiracist thinking, but most cursory explorations of modern conspiracism tend to focus on one aspect while ignoring the others. This creates a skewed, incomplete perception of how and why conspiracy theories have taken hold in modern life.

In this edition, I’ll draw several strands of empirical research together, explaining the scientific evidence about why conspiracy theories are flourishing, from fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, political science, and anthropology.

Once you’ve seen the evidence, the craziness isn’t any more comforting, but at least the social plague of our modern mass delusions will make a lot more sense.