Conspiracy theory

• 1. Introduction

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  Conspiracy theory, as a phrase, was first used in print by the American author Charles Astor Bristed in a letter to the editor of The New York Times on the 11th of January 1863. He was writing about claims that British aristocrats were deliberately weakening the United States during the Civil War to protect their financial interests. He called it absurd. He could not have imagined that the phrase he used so casually would one day describe one of the most powerful and dangerous forces in modern public life.

  The government of South Africa, driven by conspiracy theories, denied AIDS treatment to its citizens, contributing to an estimated 330,000 deaths. The government of Zambia, persuaded by conspiracy theories about genetically modified foods, turned away emergency food aid while 3 million people inside its borders went hungry. In the United States, QAnon and denial of the 2020 presidential election results led directly to the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

  So what actually is a conspiracy theory? How is it different from a real conspiracy? What makes these beliefs so sticky, so resistant to evidence, and so capable of inspiring violence? And what, if anything, can be done about them?

• 2. Definition and Origins

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  The Oxford English Dictionary defines a conspiracy theory as the belief that some covert but influential agency, typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent, is responsible for an unexplained event. That sounds dry enough. But the meaning of the term has shifted considerably since Bristed first wrote it.

  In the nineteenth century, according to researcher Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, the phrase simply suggested a plausible hypothesis. It carried no particular negative weight. By the time the Warren Commission published its findings on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1964, The New York Times alone ran five stories that year using the phrase, and political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith observed in his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America that it had entered everyday American language in a new and more charged way.

  A theory about the term itself has since taken hold: that the CIA deliberately promoted the phrase to discredit critics of the Warren Commission. Michael Butter, a Professor of American Literary and Cultural History at the University of Tubingen, examined the CIA document most often cited as evidence of this and found that it uses the term conspiracy theories only once, in a sentence noting that such theories had wrongly accused the CIA itself. The actual record, Butter wrote in 2020, shows that recorded use of the phrase dates to at least 1863, and it appeared in coverage of the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield, more than six decades before the CIA existed.

  The author and activist George Monbiot has argued that the label conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist are misleading, since real conspiracies do exist and theories are, by definition, rational explanations that can be disproved. He proposed the terms conspiracy fiction and conspiracy fantasist instead. The Watergate scandal, he and others have noted, is the standard reference point here: theories about Watergate that turned out to be correct are called investigative journalism, while hypotheses that the convicted were actually victims of a deeper conspiracy are called the Watergate conspiracy theory.

• 3. How They Work

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  Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist who studies conspiracy beliefs, has observed a striking property: the stronger the evidence against a conspiracy, the more persuasive it becomes to the believer that the conspirators must want people to think that. This is not a quirk of fringe thinking. It is the structural engine that makes conspiracy theories nearly impossible to refute from the outside.

  The logical mechanism has a name: circular reasoning. Evidence against the conspiracy is reinterpreted as proof of it. Absence of evidence is taken as proof that the cover-up is working. When new facts emerge that seem to undermine the theory, the theory simply expands to absorb them, by claiming that even more people must be involved in hiding the truth. Researchers call this epistemic self-insulation. Each new contradicting fact demands not revision but an expanded cast of conspirators.

  Michael Barkun describes a conspiracy theory as a template imposed on the world to give the appearance of order to events. Real conspiracies, he notes, are messy, prone to failure, and hard to conceal. Conspiracy theories, by contrast, posit groups of conspirators operating with near-perfect competence and secrecy. As described by Robert Brotherton, the malevolent intent assumed by most conspiracy theories goes far beyond ordinary corruption or self-interest; the postulated conspirators are not merely people with selfish agendas but forces of evil striving to destroy everything we hold dear.

  Murray Rothbard drew a distinction between what he called shallow and deep conspiracy theorists. The shallow theorist sees an event, asks who benefits, and assigns blame. The deep theorist begins with a hunch and then searches for confirming evidence. Rothbard described this second mode as using facts to confirm one's initial paranoia. One striking research finding confirms how deep the belief can run: people who accept one conspiracy theory are more likely to accept others, even when those theories directly contradict each other. A person who believes Osama bin Laden was already dead before his compound was raided is also more likely to believe he is still alive. The content of the theory is less important than the conviction of cover-up.

• 4. Who Believes and Why

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  Frank P. Mintz, an academic who popularized the term conspiracism in the 1980s, defined it as belief in the primacy of conspiracies in the unfolding of history. Conspiracism, he wrote, identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action removes them from power.

  Researchers have identified three categories of psychological motive for conspiracy belief: epistemic, existential, and social. Epistemic motives involve a desire for certainty and understanding in a chaotic world. Existential motives involve a need for safety and control. Social motives involve the desire to maintain a positive sense of one's own group. The political scientist Michael Barkun identified three sources of appeal: conspiracy theories claim to explain what ordinary analysis cannot, they do so in appealingly simple terms by dividing the world into good and evil, and they offer believers the flattery of secret knowledge. Roland Imhoff, a professor of social psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, found that the smaller the minority holding a belief, the more attractive that belief becomes to conspiracy-minded individuals.

  Historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, noted the phenomenon of psychological projection at work: the enemy of the conspiracy theorist often looks like a dark mirror of the theorist's own ideals. He cited the Ku Klux Klan imitating the ritual structure of the Catholic Church it claimed to oppose, and the John Birch Society emulating the cell structure of the Communist movement it feared. Christopher Hitchens described conspiracy theories as the exhaust fumes of democracy, the unavoidable result of large amounts of information circulating among large numbers of people.

  A 2020 review article found that most cognitive scientists now view conspiracy theorizing as typically nonpathological. Unfounded belief in conspiracy is common across historical and contemporary cultures, and may reflect innate human tendencies toward gossip, group cohesion, and religious thinking. One historical review found that fear, uncertainty, and feelings of being out of control increase the likelihood of perceiving conspiracies in social situations.

• 5. Real Costs

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  Timothy McVeigh, Anders Breivik, and Brenton Tarrant each held strong conspiracy beliefs and used them as justification for mass murder. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used conspiracy theories as instruments of state policy. These are the most visible consequences, but they are far from the only ones.

  In public health, conspiracy beliefs about vaccines have driven down vaccination rates and have been linked to outbreaks of diseases that could otherwise be prevented. Conspiracy theories contributed to the impact of the Lancet MMR autism fraud. Resistance to water fluoridation is regularly fueled by conspiratorial claims. People who believe health-related conspiracy theories are less likely to follow medical advice and more likely to turn to alternative medicine. A short educational intervention can help: research led by Penn State scholars and published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that videos explaining concepts like correlation and causation, shown to more than 2,700 participants, reduced endorsement of conspiracy theories.

  In the workplace, conspiracy theorizing leads to lower job satisfaction, reduced commitment, and higher staff turnover. Managers face reduced profits and damaged organizational trust. Broader economic consequences follow from the climate of distrust that conspiracy theories generate.

  Physicist David Robert Grimes estimated, using data from the PRISM surveillance program, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the FBI forensic scandal, how long various alleged conspiracies would take to be exposed. A faked Moon landing would require 411,000 participants and would unravel within approximately 3.68 years. A vaccination conspiracy would need at least 22,000 participants and would last between roughly 3 and 35 years. A conspiracy to suppress a cure for cancer would require 714,000 people and would be revealed within about 3.17 years. Grimes noted his model only accounted for exposure from within the alleged conspiracy, not from independent outside investigation.

• 6. Countering Belief

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  Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, described the central problem of conspiracy theories as a fundamental attribution error: the assumption that every significant event is the result of intentional human design, with no allowance for randomness, accident, or unintended consequences. Joseph Pierre has argued that mistrust in authoritative institutions is the core component underlying most conspiracy theories, creating what he called an epistemic vacuum that leaves people searching for answers vulnerable to misinformation.

  Strategies for reducing conspiracy belief fall into two categories: those aimed at people who already believe, and those aimed at the general public. Reaching people already committed to a conspiracy theory is substantially harder, because their belief systems use circular logic in which every element is supported by other conspiracist beliefs. Researchers who have studied what does work describe several approaches: presenting arguments through trusted messengers, including former members of extremist groups; affirming that the person values critical thinking and then redirecting that impulse toward the conspiracy theory itself; and demonstrating empathy rather than attacking the theory with ridicule.

  For the general public, interventions that promote analytical thinking have shown consistent effectiveness. Prebunking, also called inoculation, involves informing people in advance that they may encounter misleading information and explaining why it should be rejected; this approach has been demonstrated to put people on guard. Researchers Carlos Diaz Ruiz and Tomas Nilsson have proposed both technical interventions on social media, such as flagging sources, demonetizing conspiracist content, and slowing algorithmic spread, and rhetorical ones, such as enlisting spokespeople perceived as allies and giving believers what they called an exit ramp to disengage without facing ridicule.

  One concern in this literature is the backfire effect: the idea that directly countering misinformation can reinforce it. A 2020 review found widespread failures to replicate this effect, even under conditions designed to produce it. Brendan Nyhan, one of the researchers who originally proposed the backfire effect, wrote in 2021 that the persistence of misinformation is most likely explained by other factors. Presenting factual corrections, and highlighting logical contradictions in conspiracy theories, has been shown to have positive effects in many circumstances, including among believers in theories about the September 11th attacks.