I'm going to paste something from
Scientific American. It's behind a paywall so I can't provide a link.
It's too long to post the whole thing so I just chose what seemed like the most pertinent section. If anyone is interested I could copy-paste the whole thing but it's about three time the length of this.
Title:WHY WE BELIEVE CONSPIRACY THEORIES. By: Moyer, Melinda Wenner, Scientific American, 00368733, Mar2019, Vol. 320, Issue 3Database:Business Source Premier
But there are other factors at play, too. New research suggests that events happening worldwide are nurturing underlying emotions that make people more willing to believe in
conspiracies. Experiments have revealed that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. Such feelings, along with a sense of disenfranchisement, currently grip many Americans, according to surveys. In such situations, a
conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable. "People can assume that if these bad guys weren't there, then everything would be fine," Lewandowsky says. "Whereas if you don't believe in a
conspiracy theory, then you just have to say terrible things happen randomly."
Discerning fact from fiction can be difficult, however, and some seemingly wild
conspiracy ideas turn out to be true. The once scoffed at notion that Russian nationals meddled in the 2016 presidential election is now supported by a slew of guilty pleas, evidence-based indictments and U.S. intelligence agency conclusions. So how is one to know what to believe?
There, too, psychologists have been at work and have uncovered strategies that can help people distinguish plausible
theories from those that are almost certainly fake—strategies that seem to become more important by the day.
THE ANXIETY CONNECTION
IN MAY 2018 the American Psychiatric Association released the results of a national survey suggesting that 39 percent of Americans feel more anxious than they did a year ago, primarily about health, safety, finances, politics and relationships. Another 2017 report found that 63 percent of Americans are extremely worried about the future of the nation and that 59 percent consider this the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember. These feelings span the political spectrum. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that the majority of both Democrats and Republicans feel that "their side" in politics has been losing in recent years on issues they find important.
Such existential crises can promote conspiratorial thinking. In a 2015 study in the Netherlands, researchers split college students into three groups. People in one group were primed to feel powerless. The scientists asked them to recall and write about a time in their lives when they felt they were not in control of the situation they were in. Those in a second group were cued in the opposite direction. They were asked to write about a time when they felt totally in control. And still others, in a third group, were asked something neutral: to describe what they had for dinner last night. Then the researchers asked all the groups how they felt about the construction of a new subway line in Amsterdam that had been plagued by problems.
Students who had been primed to feel in control were less likely than students in the other two groups to support
conspiracy theories regarding the subway line, such as the belief that the city council was stealing from the subway's budget and that it was intentionally jeopardizing residents' safety. Other studies have uncovered similar effects. Swami and his colleagues, for instance, reported in 2016 that individuals who feel stressed are more likely than others to believe in
conspiracy theories, and a 2017 study found that promoting anxiety in people also makes them more
conspiracy-minded.
Feeling alienated or unwanted also seems to make conspiratorial thinking more attractive. In 2017 Princeton University psychologists set up an experiment with trios of people. The researchers asked all participants to write two paragraphs describing themselves and then told them that their descriptions would be shared with the other two in their group, who would use that information to decide if they would work with the person in the future. After telling some subjects that they had been accepted by their group and others that they had been rejected, the researchers evaluated the subjects' thoughts on various
conspiracy-related scenarios. The "rejected" participants, feeling alienated, were more likely than the others to think the scenarios involved a coordinated
conspiracy.
It is not just personal crises that encourage individuals to form conspiratorial suspicions. Collective social setbacks do so as well. In a 2018 study, researchers at the University of Minnesota and Lehigh University surveyed more than 3,000 Americans. They found that participants who felt that American values are eroding were more likely than others to agree with conspiratorial statements, such as that "many major events have behind them the actions of a small group of influential people." Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, and his colleagues have shown that people who dislike the current political party in power think more conspiratori- ally than those who support the controlling party. Recently in the U.S., a number of unproved conjectures have come from political liberals as conservatives have ascended to control the government. These include the charge that the White House coerced Anthony Kennedy to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court and the allegation that Russian president Vladimir Putin is blackmailing Trump with a video of him watching prostitutes urinate on a Moscow hotel bed.
When feelings of personal alienation or anxiety are combined with a sense that society is in jeopardy, people experience a kind of conspiratorial double whammy. In a study conducted in 2009, near the start of the U.S.'s Great Recession, Daniel Sullivan, a psychologist now at the University of Arizona, and his colleagues told one group that parts of their lives were largely out of their control because they could be exposed to a natural disaster or some other catastrophe and told another group that things were under their control. Then participants were asked to read essays that argued that the government was handling the economic crisis either well or poorly. Those cued about uncontrolled life situations and told their government was doing a bad job were the most likely to think that negative events in their lives would be instigated by enemies rather than random chance, which is a conspiratorial hallmark.
While humans seek solace in
conspiracy theories, however, they rarely find it. "They're appealing but not necessarily satisfying," says Daniel Jolley, a psychologist at Staffordshire University in England. For one thing, conspiratorial thinking can incite individuals to behave in a way that increases their sense of powerlessness, making them feel even worse. A 2014 study co-authored by Jolley found that people who are presented with
conspiracy theories about climate change—scientists are just chasing grant money, for instance—are less likely to plan to vote, whereas a 2017 study reported that believing in work-related
conspiracies—such as the idea that managers make decisions to protect their own interests—causes individuals to feel less committed to their job. "It can snowball and become a pretty vicious, nasty cycle of inaction and negative behavior," says Karen Douglas, a psychologist at the University of Kent in England and a co-author of the paper on work-related
conspiracies.
The negative and alienated beliefs can also promote dangerous behaviors in some, as with the Pittsburgh shootings and the pizzeria attack. But the
theories need not involve weapons to inflict harm. People who believe vaccine
conspiracy theories, for example, say they are less inclined to vaccinate their kids, which creates pockets of infectious disease that put entire communities at risk.