Conspiracies and Fake News have not been here since Donald Trump, but they have entered all of our consciousness because of him. But what is true about the partly baseless theses that are floating around in the wide world about conspiracy theories and their propagators and believers? A fact check.
Myth I: People who believe in conspiracies are crazy and paranoid
Conspiracy narratives are not a purely marginal phenomenon. It is by no means the case that only a small group of crazy “Internet nutcases” or crazy US Americans or Russians believe in them. For this reason, it would be logically wrong to assume that everyone who thinks that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was internally agreed upon by the government of the time, or that a vacci-nation against the corona virus would actually amount to implanting a microchip for total surveillance, is crazy and paranoid. Nevertheless, this conviction is surprisingly persistent – even in research. The U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter became known, among other things, for his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published in 1964, in which he used the psychological term paranoia to describe a political personality type. According to him, paranoia is characterized especially by heated exaggeration, suspicion and conspiracy narratives. Hofstadter’s theories gained new popularity with the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president. Quite a few authors who accuse Trump of a tendency toward paranoia refer to this very scientific article.
Although conspiracy narratives are often dismissed as sick, this perspective is not always correct. They are not necessarily paranoid. The belief in conspiracies is not a product of a disturbed psyche, but, as our research in this field shows, although there is a connection between the belief in conspiracies and paranoia, the two must be considered separately. This is because they are clearly distinct in scope, both in terms of perceived threat and target.
To put it simply: While paranoid people think that virtually everyone is out to get them, conspiracy theorists think that a few powerful people are out to get almost everyone (as has been seen time and again in the corona pandemic, especially in Germany the Querdenker movement). Social conspiracy narratives can thus be clearly distin-guished from paranoid delusions: The perceived plot is directed against a collective as a nation, group, or culture, whereas a paranoid person is afraid of conspiracies against his or her own person and may even consider his or her own family as a threat. Paranoid people are fundamentally suspicious of other people, while conspiracy theorists are more suspicious of the system.
Myth 2: Conspiracy theorists are stupid and believe everything
Although many conspiracy narratives are hardly realistic, many people still adhere to them. For this reason, scientists also believed for a long time that conspiracy theorists must be dumber than the rest of the population. But is this true? We tested this thesis in a field experiment. For this purpose, we formed a scale from various moronic sentences. I would like to present two examples here: “Hidden meaning embodies incomparable abstract beauty” and “Attention and intention are the mechanisms of manifestation”. Our experiment showed that people who believe in conspiracy narratives are more likely to attach meaning to such meaningless statements than people without this inclination. But can we conclude from this that conspiracy theorists are simply dumber than the rest of the population?
Let’s disregard the truth value of information and first ask whether a conspiracy narrative is a simplified representation of reality. After all, that is what people like to claim. However, anyone who has ever had a discussion with someone who doubts the “official version” of the attacks on the World Trade Center will quickly find themselves floundering. Suddenly, we are talking about the temperatures at which steel melts, complicated questions of statics and flight angles. Anyone who did not happen to be a member of a commission on this topic and is not familiar with the subject will probably not know the answer to most of the “arguments” put forward, while the conspiracy theorist is rock-solidly convinced of the correctness of his evidence.
On the other hand, conspiracy theorists also believe in things that have already been scientifically disproved many times (for example, there are still many people in Germany and the USA who meet once a year to celebrate about the Earth being a disk). This conspiracy narrative is popular and widespread. In response, there are many research projects aimed at getting to the bottom of the existence of this belief. The result was actually clear before but is now provable with numbers: Even though the belief that the earth is a disc is absolute nonsense, one in six German citizens and one in seven US citizens still believe in it.
So, are people who believe in conspiracy narratives really stupid? Although at first glance it may seem that these people believe everything frivolously, there is no clear empirical evidence for this. It is true that there is a measurable correlation between conspiracy belief and intelligence, in the sense that low intelligence is associated with belief in conspiracy narratives. However, this correlation is vanishingly small and explains only a fraction of the factors why people believe a conspiracy narrative.
Myth 3: Conspiracy narratives have only become popular through the Internet
When media report on conspiracy narratives, we often read that only digitalization and the emergence and spread of the Internet and social media have made them big and popular. But is that true at all? The fact that belief in conspiracies is a significantly older phenomenon is proven by the SINUS study published in 1981, which looked at right-wing extremism in Germany. Even then, 40 percent believed in the narrative of the lying press. Slightly more than 20 percent thought that German politicians were a puppet government of the Americans, and a quarter of the population believed that the influence of Jews and people of other faiths on the country was too great.
Even today, people are concerned with the spread of such meaningless narratives, as we see in the corona pandemic, for example. Here, conspiracy theorists report that politicians aim to manifest a dictatorship and cut off the country’s freedom through their actions. Our analysis on this shows that just over a third of the German population firmly believes in such theses. However, there are differences to be made here: While, for example, fewer and fewer people in eastern Germany believe in conspiracy narratives, the propensity for these very narratives is increasing in western and southern Germany (and here the states of Baden-Württemberg and Hesse are particularly noteworthy). The thesis that only digitization has made conspiracy narratives more attentive is therefore nonsense.
However, we have to make a small objection, because the Internet does assume its part. Whereas in the past the belief in a conspiracy was only passed on in the family and perhaps to the closest neighbors, today, for example, the belief that the Corona vaccination contains a chip for monitoring and controlling the entire population is spread via the Internet and especially via the created construction of “social” media. They thereby reach an audience of millions, no, even billions, where they can disguise the truth and present and manifest their “truth”. Thus, it can be said that while the conventional dissemination of conspiracy narratives has always been an issue, they have been given a new importance and attention by the advent of digitalization and new media.
Myth 4: Conspiracy narratives are harmless, sometimes funny
Computer scientist Achim Held is behind the conspiracy that the German city of Bielefeld does not actually exist. In May 1994, he published his tale about the alleged non-existence of the city to ridicule common conspiracy narratives. The myth (and we know, of course, that the city of Bielefeld actually exists) persists to this day and is now even used by the city administration for marketing purposes. In August 2019, the city even offered one million euros as a reward for anyone who manages to prove that the city does not exist. 2000 people tried their luck in total, but in the end, no one could prove it.
When reading about conspiracy narratives, one can sometimes get the feeling that one is browsing through a good to absurd joke. At the latest when it is said that advocates of the belief that the earth is a disc allegedly post on the Internet that their movement has followers around the globe, one has to more than just smile.
In reality, however, conspiracy narratives are considerably less exhilarating. People who believe that the powerful do what they want are more likely to turn to supposed miracle cures when they fall ill instead of trusting science and doctors. Conspiracies can also be a driver for violence. This can be seen right now in the Putin war, where the president claims that Ukraine is a Nazi regime of Western Europe and must be denazified in order to regain peace. Our scientific research on this shows that the individual tendency to believe in conspiracy narratives is associated with an increased likelihood of advocating violence or even becoming violent oneself. It can therefore be called a radical accelerant.
Thus, conspiracy narratives, such as Putin’s narrative to the Russian people that Ukraine is occupied by Nazis and must now be liberated, can lead to and even legitimize violence (and in the worst case, war, as we see). At the same time, they reject their own group of critics, i.e., the Russian people who oppose Putin’s urge to wage war against Ukraine and pan-European democracy, nip protest movements in the bud. On the other hand, as we see with regard to the Corona pandemic, the belief that politics wants to harm freedom and cede it can also result in violence among the population, e.g. against police and other state-bearing bodies (mayors, local politicians).
Myth 5: There are true conspiracies
Who’s to say that one conspiracy narrative or another won’t turn out to be true in the end? The whistleblower Edward Snowden was able to prove that the U.S. intelligence agency NSA monitors large parts of online communications. In the 1980s, the so-called Iran-Contra affair caused a stir: despite an arms embargo, U.S. authorities had secretly sold weapons to Iran to use the profits to financially support the Contra rebels in Nicaragua – all bypassing the U.S. Congress. At the height of the Cold War, numerous secret projects were funded under the MK-Ultra research program, including studies to test LSD and mescaline as truth serums and experiments in mind control. There was even a CIA project that attempted to turn live cats into listening devices by means of surgically implanted microphones. With reference to similar programs of Russia, all kinds of nonsense were obviously promoted at that time.
Stories of real-life conspiracies can also be found in healthcare. In the context of the syphilis study in the US state of Alabama between 1932 and 1972, the course of syphilis infections was researched. In the process, 399 already infected black Americans were not told that they had the disease, because the scientists wanted to observe how the disease progresses without treatment. The researchers had accepted that the patients would unknowingly infect their partners and children with syphilis. When the case became public in 1972, numerous study participants had already died.
In the economy, too, there are always real conspiracies that are uncovered. In the VW diesel affair, customers and authorities were hoodwinked with manipulated emissions tests. The financial services provider and the former “miracle” startup Wirecard presented itself with embellished figures in such a way that it was praised by politics and business all over the world, so that investors all over the world took notice of it and invested a lot of money in it (they haven’t gotten the money back so far and won’t again). And in the USA, there were several lawsuits against drug manufacturers, large chains and pharmacy chains. They were accused of deliberately causing tens of thousands of patients to become addicted to opiates.
So where is the healthy dividing line between healthy suspicion and a tangible conspiracy narrative? The fact is that the foundation and basic premise of a conspiracy narrative, the conspiracy itself, instigates further thought. It is also problematic here that one’s own considerations are not questioned and are seen as correct internally (the brain) and externally (the private environment, but also the general public, for example through postings on social media) and are communicated for persuasion. Consequently, we are no longer receptive to genuine, rational arguments, which leads to the manifestation of ways of looking at the world and can result in the use of violence in the event of disagreements.
However, people who have a distrust of the intrinsic purpose of something (e.g., the policy of guarding against a spread of the coronavirus and deciding on any restrictions to protect the population) would be wrong to place them blanketly in the conspiracy community. In countries with limited or no freedom of the press, it is plausible to view some media as an extension of the ruling party (as seen in Russia, where the pro-government media dismiss Putin’s war as demilitarization of Ukraine and peacemaking). Being critical of government actions is not a bad thing per se: Democracies are not based exclusively on trust for good reason but have established checks and balances through the separation of powers to minimize the risk of abuse of power. Making assumptions about possible conspiracies and implausible “official” explanations is part of political debates. Such discussions can also trigger positive effects, such as the demand for more transparency in political procedures and institutions such as secret services.
Nevertheless, a threshold is crossed at the latest at the point when it is no longer a matter of discussing hypotheses and probabilities – in the knowledge that there is still a lack of evidence – but when doubt becomes a belief, a narrative or even an ideology. When distrust reaches such an extent that the controlling authorities are no longer trusted even when there are no objective reasons for doing so. When people see conspiracies where there are none. And when they want to continue to believe in it even when all the facts speak against it.