Warum Verschwörungstheorien so unwiderstehlich sein können: Menschen, die strukturierte, regelbasierte Erklärungen bevorzugen, finden Verschwörungstheorien möglicherweise attraktiv, weil sie eine klare, geordnete Erklärung für Ereignisse bieten, die sich chaotisch anfühlen
30 Kommentare
Makes sense. It’s the same reason people turn to religion, to make unknowns less scary.
>New research led by Flinders University has found that understanding how someone processes information can be a strong predictor of whether they are drawn to conspiracy beliefs that can influence vaccine uptake, trust in institutions and responses to emergencies.
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>Rather than pointing to poor reasoning, the study highlights the role of a thinking style known as ‘systemising’, a strong drive to identify patterns and make sense of events through consistent rules, in shaping how people interpret complex information.
> In the study, the team identified different thinking profiles and found that individuals who strongly liked patterns and structure were more likely to believe conspiracy theories, even when they demonstrated good scientific reasoning skills.
[The hyper-systemizing hypothesis: how the tendency to systemize influences conspiracy beliefs and belief inflexibility in clinical and general populations | Cognitive Processing | Springer Nature Link](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10339-025-01326-0)
I’m totally into conspiracy theories these day. It’s like a hobby watching them bloom into existence only to wither and die.
A lot of „conspiracy theories“ have come true like the island we all know about and the ultra rich „drinking baby blood“ ( harvest stem cells to repair their own bodies) and much more
So no wonder more and more people start believing in them when they actually keep happening.
Also stoners are more susceptible to conspiracy theories. Someone should study that
There’s also a sense of community in ‚knowing‘ a ‚truth‘ that most others are not privy to. It directly feeds into vanity and arrogance
It’s also a result of genuinely not feeling like institutions and authority figures want people to understand things, and are asserting facts/truth for their own gain. Skepticism for skepticism’s sake.
It’s a multifaceted issue
Fascinating to have some rigorous evidence of this. I believe they also make otherwise mediocre people feel special, like they have some kind of profound insight that other people lack.
They also keep turning out to be true lately, so that’s something.
Reality is often far messier and stranger than we are willing to admit or capable of admitting.
We are in the process of discovering at least one massive conspiracy right at this moment. International sex trafficking ring funded and used by the ultra-rich… Books, movies and now millions of pages of proof to back up decades of whispers (and shouts). It has me re-evaluating every persistent but consistently dismissed conspiracy. Maybe people don’t just ‘go missing.’ Maybe they’re trafficked. Or taken. At this point I don’t think it’s reasonable to dismiss anything at all anymore without overwhelming data or lack thereof.
No more taboo. Only truth.
Every article or study that seems to denigrate efforts to seek the truth are either intentionally providing cover for actual crimes/activities, or inadvertently doing so out of conforming to trends and norms, also for grant money/paid studies.
Ah yes don’t be suspicious or attempt to make sense of the world, do not speculate as to the reasons why things are, or you are mentally ill and have no credibility, Infact, people that attempt to make sense of the world are 378% more likely to be of bad nature, or something….look it doesn’t matter just stop worrying about all the things happening in the world that seem suspect or nefarious, it’s all in good hands. Now take your meds!
There is a huge difference in lowest tier click-bait youtube conspiracy mind-rot engagement-bait, and actual ongoing open source investigatory efforts. You can tell the difference by their profit motive and signal/noise ratio.
Nearly every „official“ study on conspiracy theories, is hand wavey and operates on the premise that conspiracy theories cannot be actually true, which would be highly convenient for those who are invested in covering their misdeeds and are actually conspiring/plotting/have acted on nefarious activities, every suspicion is a theory until proven true.
>More important and more relevant to the death of expertise, however, is that conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations. Such theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there are people who would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.
– Thomas M. Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
what!?
do tell me, when it comes to flat earth, tartaria or the mud flood conspiracies ( google at your heart’s content) , where’s the clear ordered explanations?
this is just flat out wrong. conspiracies are appealing because they make people feel they’re part of a select group of people that know „the truth“, the ones that are breaking free from the heard .( of course this is just one of the main reasons ) but saying that they offer a clear ordered explanation? come on…
Well, life is chaos, so I guess those people are f***** and they gonna drag the rest of us with em.
Posting this in the midst of the single biggest conspiracy of all time being revealed as true and STILL being actively covered up is certainly not suspicious.
It just makes dumb people without a sense of nuance feel educated on a subject that is essentially meaningless.
……no they don’t? They’re *always* full of holes.
Basically: it dumbs down complex issues so dumb people have an easier time understanding them and feel less dumb.
But conspiracy theories don’t provide clear, ordered explanations. They prompt far more questions than the actual explanation.
Take the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen. How then? Where’s the evidence? How do the people making this claim know the election was stolen? Why did Republicans win so many down ticket elections if Democrats had rigged them? Where is the clear, rules based explanation for this?
Now consider the actual explanation. People were unhappy with Trump’s first term and they voted accordingly. That’s a clear, rules based explanation.
It might be the case that people with „systemic thinking“ are more likely to believe conspiracy theories, but conspiracy theories don’t provide simple explanations. They are usually much more absurd than the truth.
I’ve been saying this for years. I love conspiracy theories. It’s much more comforting to think that there’s some secret evil pulling the strings, rather than a completely rudderless ship.
You can theoretically defeat evil. You cannot apply order to an infinitely chaotic system.
I once had an online discussion with a 9/11 truther where I found out that they had been abused as a child. Physically by parents and sexually by a church leader.
I broached the idea that those experiences may have wired their brain at a young age to be distrustful of authority figures. In turn that could make them more susceptible to buying into that conspiracy theory of an „inside job“ by government leaders. After an initial denial (and some offense taken at the notion) they admitted that they thought that I might be onto something. They had recently started therapy and said that they were definitely going to bring it up in the next session.
That was the end of the discussion, but I do hope that it helped them to get the logic part of their brain out from under that shadow.
I think it’s even more interesting (only reading the title here) that the rules these conspiracy theories have are so out of left field to anyone with a working brain is wondering who TF would believe them. But lack of education does not help you understand how horizons work.
Tldr: people who like patterns find patterns and wont disregard those findings easily even when we disagree with them.
This research doesn’t suggest all conspiracy theories are incorrect. Some conspiracy theories are onto something, but when details change that some conspiracy theorists don’t like they often won’t believe the evidence.
> Even when someone has strong reasoning ability, their desire for strict explanations can overshadow their ability to question those beliefs.”
>The study also found that people with strong systemising preferences were less flexible when updating their beliefs in response to new evidence.
As an autistic person, this makes me wonder if autistic people are generally more likely to be conspiracy theorists.
I think the arrogant ones are the people who think they know everything by basically appealing to authority figures across different fields. You dont know everything, you choose to take science that you dont understand on faith. Often times, belief comes before understanding which is a massive problem in many ways.
Reality is complex fractal chaos. Humans are desperate for it to be otherwise
this is also the basis for scientific thought btw. Making order out of chaos by using logic to come up with testable predictions on how something could have happened
Or a particular theory supports a person’s pre-existing narrative. Example: A person hates a particular group. A theory blames that group for a series of problems. The person then accepts that theory as fact.
People who score highly openness to new experiences and are also low scoring in conscientiousness are prone to conspiracy thinking. Willing to believe anything because they don’t question the veracity of their own conclusions.