Why conspiratorial thinking is peaking in America | Sarah Rose Cavanagh | Big Think

Why conspiratorial thinking is peaking in America
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The internet has allowed fringe groups founded on paranoid thinking to merge in ways we've never seen before.

Part of modern political polarization in American is that we're becoming a people who believes in different realities, some of which are based on fears rather than facts. Many of these conspiracy theories are targeted on groups that we believe are plotting against us.

There is a romanticization that we're going to somehow solve all of life's unknowns, Da Vinci Code-style. However, this ironically may put us at a disadvantage in terms of breaking puzzles — we look for the familiar in vague stimuli, a phenomenon known as pareidolia, which only further confounds us.
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DR. SARAH ROSE CAVANAGH

Dr. Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a psychologist, professor, writer, and Associate Director for grants and research for the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. Her research focuses on affective science, specifically emotion regulation and mood and anxiety disorders. Dr. Cavanagh is the author of Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism In Our Divided World, (Grand Central Publishing, 2019) and The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion, (West Virginia University Press, 2016). She lives in Massachusetts.
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TRANSCRIPT: Rather than look at reality and agree on one whole reality we’re becoming a society where we have these different groups that believe in different realities. And that is a big part of political polarization where people don’t just agree about their opinions, disagree about the opinions about a series of facts but they disagree about whether the facts are actually true. But we can also see it in conspiracy thinking where these fringe groups, or at least they used to be fringe groups on kind of the outskirts of thinking about what could be real or what is happening, paranoid thinking for instance.

Thinking about reptoids controlling our government. There have always been people who believe these sort of strange things but what social media and the internet in general has allowed to happen is for people with these beliefs to find each other and then when they’re hearing back those same sorts of facts or same sorts of theories then their beliefs strengthen. One thing that is particularly alarming that’s happening is what Michael Barkun calls fusion paranoia where these fringe groups who might have believed in aliens and these others that might have believed in reptoids and these others that may have believed that the JFK conspiracy are merging and that’s kind of alarming to me.

Jesse Walker wrote a wonderful book, The United States of Paranoia in which he classifies the various types of paranoid thinking that have occurred in our country right since our very founding. He classifies them into four different types. Enemies outside, enemies within, enemies above and enemies below. All of them involve fear. All of them involve belief in conspiracy style thinking but they vary in their sources. So the enemies above are those that have more power than us and they’re trying to control our lives. So pharmaceuticals, creating vaccines just to make money rather than to help people is an example of the enemies above. Enemy below tends to be people who have less power, who we have oppressed or who don’t have a lot of power kind of rising up and overthrowing things. Outside is immigration, people who are unlike us that might come and infiltrate us. Enemies within are people like secret communists or witches during the Salem witch trial. People who look like us, seem to be embedded in our society but actually are plotting against us.

I think that fear is an incredibly dangerous emotion. I think that it causes us to narrow our thinking. I think it causes us to shutdown options and there are a lot of threats in the world but I think what we need to face those threats are open, creative, playful thinking. When we think as a hivemind, when we think collectively and we do so in a fearful sense then that shuts down a lot of our thinking.

[OtherFoxes]

Maybe because countless "conspiracies" have been proven right over time ?

[JohnSmith-dvek]

"History is just a bunch of lies generally agreed upon." -Napoleon.

[DADchs]

Don’t blindly trust anything that anyone tries to convince you of. Nothing. There’s a reason and motive behind it or they wouldn’t care what you believe. Any by anyone I don’t just mean the government. Literally anyone. Question everything and be inquisitive. Including this comment

[smccowan]

maybe itll be better if everyone just agrees on what the term CONSPIRACY means. start there please

[PecerSecer]

This video is great material for a drinking game...just take a shot every time she says "I think" and you'll be hammered 30 seconds in.

[kallethordenberg]

Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean their not after me

[JE-eecd]

Whenever the word 'conspiracy' is mentioned, people tend to get divided into two groups, those who believe that everything is a conspiracy and those who believe that conspiracies do not exist (where they live). Maybe reality is somewhere in between?

[wwtory]

Are you implying we should stop thinking by ourselves and just start believing everything that one site you named says?

I’m not a flatearther or something like that, that’s just what it sounded like at the end of the video.

[mysteryguest]

Monetizing the information and truth leads to conspiracy thinking.

[paulknight]

Pharmaceutical companies are corporations. The number one incentive for a corporation is to make a profit. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a factual analysis of how the institution works.

[philosophicalharmonics]

It's not paranoia if they're really after you

[Symbolicliving]

It's because people don't trust the people at the top because they lie so much to get what they want. It's as simple as that. Liars Are conspierers and they conspire together. The ends justify the means.

[anthonypc]

most Americans don't trust experts. Or they just resent them.
Feels more "empowering" to #TRUSTYOURGUT

Or listen to the most confidently held claims and opinions of more relatable people.
Y'know, people with a more emotionally appealing backstory or identity,
a similar vernacular and limited vocabulary, and a familiar A E S T H E T I C.
A representative from within our own tribe, essentially.

[LeoStaley]

She recommends getting your info from snopes, then says not to trust what you read on the internet.

[bearcolombia]

Rely on one website to debunk everything. Rely on experts but only mainstream experts, all others are not experts. I'm happy the dislike ratio on this almost one third, not 10% or 1% as it is in logical videos.

[cammro]

man, witches is a good example. conspiracies seem to arise out of people being skeptical and curious, but not curious enough to learn the history or skeptical enough to see their own idea, is unfounded, contains leaps of logic, drawing lines that aren't there, and being too charitable to their own idea because they created it their self. it's more fun to do that than to learn about the NASA history of a mathematician, a physicist and another kind of mathematician.
but at the same time when a public figure or entity goes out of it's way to call something a conspiracy it's because it wants to prevent further investigation.

[joekuntzman]

Some conspiracies are much more plausible than others.

[PaulThronson]

She has the secret on YouTube. The answer is don't go to YouTube. Diabolical!

[a-guess-at-the-riddle]

A belief about an experience can be phenomenological. I mean it can be more so pre-theoretic (in the limit). It seems we don't teach people to conceptualize their experience in this perception-emphasizing manner. Because we don't, in the scientific and conspiracy theory context we don't ever presuppose testimonies can have possibly different layers of precision and scope (nor do we understand why a generous habit of interpretation might be more fruitful). How that can be the case I have no idea.

Someone can even relay an account that is incorrect at a precise scope but nevertheless the sort of improbable pattern that repeatedly deviates from the 'grammar' of that context (speaking metaphorically). This might imply that there is valuable data to salvage from their in-the-moment excited (lacking humility) explanation. For example if I might constantly make the same class of odd sounding grammatical errors over and over such that to you it "sounds off". You wouldn't have to be theoretically right to say that you perceived something anomalous about my speech (in this hypothetical example) in general. This is a very general pattern (syntax) which we might differentiate from the semantic content (mostly).

In the modern world conspiracy-like phenomena emerge spontaneously as network phase transitions in which correlative association and causal inference transition (invert) in their relative values (for specific contexts). If a set of conspiracies all carry the questionable property of economically implausible near-perfect secrecy and dually we aggregate enough pre-theoretic testimony of anomalies, the notion that we might find aggregating them isn't necessarily as much as a fallacy as one might think.

Until this point is raised in these authority-figure discussions on conspiracy theory, it seems a waste of everyone's time.

[TheeBohemian]

Your proposal presupposes that they exists a singular narrative of which all parties concerned can ‘agree’ upon, yet this assumes that there can only exist one descriptive model for our collective experiences and that all others are trivially inconsequential. It is necessary to question our assumptions as well as these supposed ‘experts’ or figures of authority for no healthy society can function without all being on equal standing to each other in our values and our efforts to discover more about our shared reality.