And it's not only right-wing Americans who are susceptible. Yet though the psychology behind conspiracies is timeless, Brotherton does note that certain factors exacerbate our willingness to believe. Brotherton explains, for example, that after the Watergate scandal was exposed, conspiracy theorists weren't vindicated like you would expect - but instead believed that the official narrative was a cover-up and that Nixon was set up.Ī Pizzagate post on 4Chan, outlining alleged patterns and meanings Once these biases lead someone towards a conspiracy theory, they might develop a “conspiracy worldview”, whereby everything becomes suspicious. “Confirmation bias” also means that we accept information that confirms our beliefs and ignore that which doesn’t. Humans also have a propensity to seek patterns, so we bend over backwards to connect unrelated facts (side note: why do the two psychologists thus far in this piece have remarkably similar names? Is there a psychologist Illuminati?). Some of us can accept when this isn’t the case – when a lone gunman, for example, is responsible for assassinating the president from a grassy knoll – but others go looking for alternative explanations.
The “proportionality bias” means that if something big happens, we intuitively assume that something big must have caused it. “A certain proportion of people have always been receptive to conspiracy theories.” But who are these people – and what happens to make them fervently believe in gay frogs?īrotherton emphasises that the psychological biases at work in conspiracy theorists’ minds are biases that we all possess to some extent. “Conspiracy theories are a product of our psychology and our psychology doesn’t really change over time,” says Dr Robert Brotherton, author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. Yet though social media helps conspiracies to spread, the psychology behind them is age-old. “A person who believes that Obama wasn’t born in the US can just visit sites that reinforce his or her beliefs." Batholomew explains that because of the internet, conspiracies can be passed on “at the speed of light”, while other experts have noted that emotions can also spread online, in a process known as “ emotional contagion”. “We now live in a niche world, making it easier for people to construct their own reality - a world as they want it to be, not as it is,” he says.
Dr Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who specialises in mass delusions, believes that social media has exacerbated conspiracy culture. From Hillary Clinton’s paedophile pizza parlour, to Russian hackers, Red Pillers, Obama's communist coup and Trump’s 4D Chess – the internet has been flooded with conspiracies from both the Left and Right. We seem to be living in an era where conspiracy theories are booming. Yet despite the ridiculousness of the red-faced ranter, he has a large and vocal fan base that even includes the 45th president of the United States himself. The blatant absurdity of this conspiracy theory makes it one of the most widely mocked and memed of Jones’ outbursts (though one 2010 study showed that pesticides can turn male frogs to females, this is very different from an active government plan to make frogs homosexual). Chemicals in the water are turning the (frigging) frogs gay. If you have ever watched a video by the internet’s premier conspiracy theorist, Infowars’ Alex Jones, you will know that this is an undeniable fact.