Conspiracies and fake news have not been around since Donald Trump, but they have entered our consciousness because of him. But what is true about the sometimes unsubstantiated theories floating around the world about conspiracy theories, their proponents and believers? A fact check.
Conspiracy narratives are not a fringe phenomenon. It is by no means the case that only a small group of crazy "Internet wackos" or crazy Americans or Russians believe in them. For this reason, it would be logically wrong to assume that everyone who believes that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was internally approved by the government at the time, or that a vaccination against the Corona virus would actually amount to implanting a microchip for total surveillance, is crazy and paranoid. Yet this belief is surprisingly persistent, even in research. U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter is best known for his 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he used the psychological term paranoia to describe a political personality type. According to Hofstadter, paranoia is characterized by exaggeration, suspicion, and conspiracy theories. Hofstadter's theories have gained new popularity with the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president. Quite a few authors who accuse Trump of a tendency to paranoia refer to this very scholarly article.
Although conspiracy theorists are often dismissed as sick, this perspective is not always accurate. They are not necessarily paranoid. Conspiracy beliefs are not the product of a disturbed psyche, but as our research in this area shows, while there is a relationship between conspiracy beliefs and paranoia, the two must be considered separately. This is because they are quite different in scope, both in terms of perceived threat and target.
To put it simply: While paranoid people think that almost everyone is out to get them, conspiracy theorists think that a few powerful people are out to get almost everyone (as seen time and again in the corona pandemic, especially in Germany's Querdenker movement). Social conspiracy narratives can thus be clearly distinguished from paranoid delusions: The perceived conspiracy is against a collective, such as a nation, group, or culture, whereas a paranoid person fears conspiracies against his or her own person and may even consider his or her own family a threat. Paranoid people are fundamentally suspicious of other people, while conspiracy theorists are more suspicious of the system.
Although many conspiracy theories are hardly realistic, many people still cling to them. For this reason, scientists have long believed that conspiracy theorists must be dumber than the rest of the population. But is this true? We tested this theory in a field experiment. To do this, we created a scale of different stupid sentences. Here are two examples: "Hidden meaning embodies incomparable abstract beauty" and "Attention and intention are the mechanisms of manifestation". Our experiment showed that people who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to attach meaning to such meaningless statements than people who do not. But can we conclude that conspiracy theorists are simply dumber than the rest of the population?
Let's ignore 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 in a quandary. Suddenly we are talking about the temperatures at which steel melts, complicated issues of statics and flight angles. Anyone who has not happened to be a member of a commission on the subject, and who 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 solid in the correctness of his evidence.
On the other hand, conspiracy theorists also believe in things that have been scientifically disproved many times (for example, there are still many people in Germany and the USA who meet once a year to celebrate that the Earth is a disc). This conspiracy narrative is popular and widespread. In response, there have been many research projects aimed at getting to the bottom of the existence of this belief. The result was already clear, but is now provable with numbers: Although the belief that the Earth is a disc is absolute nonsense, one in six Germans and one in seven Americans still believe it.
So are people who believe in conspiracy theories really stupid? Although at first glance it might 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 beliefs 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 that lead people to believe in conspiracy theories.
When the media reports on conspiracy theories, 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 even true? The fact that belief in conspiracies is a much 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 lying press. Slightly more than 20 percent believed 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 are trying to manifest a dictatorship and cut off the country's freedom through their actions. Our analysis shows that just over a third of the German population firmly believes in such theories. However, there are differences: While, for example, fewer and fewer people in eastern Germany believe in conspiracy theories, the propensity to believe in them is on the rise in western and southern Germany (and here the states of Baden-Württemberg and Hesse are particularly noteworthy). The thesis that only digitalization has made conspiracy narratives more popular is therefore nonsense.
However, we have to make a small objection, because the Internet is doing its part. Whereas in the past the belief in a conspiracy was spread only within 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 through the Internet and especially through the created construction of "social" media. Thus, they 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 gained new importance and attention with the advent of digitalization and new media.
Computer scientist Achim Held is behind the conspiracy that the German city of Bielefeld does not exist. In May 1994, he published his story 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 does exist) persists to this day and is even used by the city government for marketing purposes. In August 2019, the city even offered a million euros as a reward to anyone who could prove that the city did not exist. 2000 people tried their luck, but in the end nobody could prove it.
When reading about conspiracy theories, you can sometimes get the feeling that you are browsing through a good to absurd joke. At the latest when it is said that the proponents of the belief that the earth is a disk allegedly post on the Internet that their movement has followers around the globe, one has to smile more than just.
In reality, however, conspiracy theories are far less exciting. People who believe that the powerful are doing what they want are more likely to turn to supposed miracle cures when they get sick, rather than trusting science and doctors. Conspiracies can also fuel 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 theories is associated with an increased likelihood of advocating violence or even becoming violent. It can therefore be described as a radical accelerator.
Thus, conspiracy theories, such as Putin's story to the Russian people that Ukraine is occupied by Nazis and must be liberated, can lead to and even legitimize violence (and in the worst case, war, as we are seeing). 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, and nip protest movements in the bud. On the other hand, as we can see from the Corona pandemic, the belief that politics wants to harm freedom and give it up can also lead to violence among the population, e.g. against the police and other state bodies (mayors, local politicians).
Who's to say that one conspiracy story or another won't eventually turn out to be true? The whistleblower Edward Snowden was able to prove that the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitors large parts of online communication. 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 in order to use the profits to financially support the Contra rebels in Nicaragua - all without the U.S. Congress. At the height of the Cold War, the MK-Ultra research program funded numerous secret projects, 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 using surgically implanted microphones. With reference to similar programs in Russia, all sorts of nonsense was apparently being promoted at the time.
Stories of real-life conspiracies can also be found in health care. The Syphilis Study in Alabama between 1932 and 1972 investigated the course of syphilis infections. In the study, 399 black Americans who were already infected were not told that they had the disease because the scientists wanted to observe how the disease progressed without treatment. The researchers had accepted that the patients would unknowingly infect their partners and children with syphilis. By the time the case became public in 1972, many of the study participants had died.
In business, too, real conspiracies are uncovered time and again. In the VW diesel affair, customers and authorities were deceived with manipulated emissions tests. The financial services provider and former "miracle" startup Wirecard presented itself with inflated figures in such a way that it was praised by politicians and businesspeople all over the world, so that investors all over the world took notice and invested a lot of money in it (which they haven't gotten back yet and won't get back). And in the U.S. there were several lawsuits against drug companies, big 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 line between healthy suspicion and a tangible conspiracy story? The fact is that the foundation and basic premise of a conspiracy narrative, the conspiracy itself, inspires further thought. It is also problematic that one's own thoughts are not questioned and are considered correct internally (the brain) and externally (the private environment, but also the general public, for example through postings on social media) and communicated for persuasion. As a result, we are no longer receptive to genuine, rational arguments, which leads to the manifestation of world views and can lead to the use of violence in the event of disagreement.
However, people who are suspicious of the actual purpose of something (e.g., the policy of guarding against the spread of the coronavirus and deciding on any restrictions to protect the population) would be wrong to blanketly place them 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 demilitarizing Ukraine and peacemaking). Being critical of government actions is not a bad thing per se: Democracies do not rely solely 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 debate. Such debates can also have positive effects, such as the demand for more transparency in political processes and institutions such as intelligence services.
Nevertheless, a threshold is crossed at the latest when it is no longer a matter of discussing hypotheses and probabilities - knowing that there is still a lack of evidence - but when doubt becomes a belief, a narrative, or even an ideology. When mistrust reaches such a level 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 keep on believing, even when all the facts are against them.