Here is an article (via MindHacks) profiling the types of people who are attracted to conspiracy theories.
It is the domain of psychology to study the specific conspiracy theories that appear and the people who advocate them, but to a game theorist the prevalence of conspiracy theories is not surprising. They fill a credibility gap. Like nature, the truth abhors a vacuum. It cannot be an equilibrium that only the truth is told and retold. Because then we would learn to believe everything we hear. That would be exploited by people trying to take advantage.
Conspiracy theories are just one example of noise that must be present in equilibrium to ensure that we don’t believe everything we hear. And arguably conspiracy theories about events that have already happened or are beyond our control are the cost-minimizing way of moderating credibility. Nobody really gets harmed.
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May 27, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Patricia Shannon
It is not always true that nobody gets harmed. Some African-Americans refuse needed medical treatment because of fears of being used for experimental purposes against their knowledge. There is, in fact, a basis for this in American history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I remember when it became public. Shocking, horrifying that my own country did this.
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/
July 25, 2002 –Thirty years ago today, the Washington Evening Star newspaper ran this headline on its front page: “Syphilis Patients Died Untreated.” With those words, one of America’s most notorious medical studies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, became public.
“For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, not given proper treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects,” Associated Press reporter Jean Heller wrote on July 25, 1972. “The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”
January 14, 2010 at 10:06 am
Amelix
Your article implies that conspiracy theorists are against balance and against truth by using cynacism. It further implies that only the truth is told by those who hide or misconstrue what is fact. The search for that truth or complete fact is not an “example of noise”.
Your article implies that without conspiracy theorists, and others who question things that don’t quite seem right, the world would be a utopia through balance. But, utopia is the opposite of balance — the very definition of which is an equality of truth and doubt, fact and lie, belief and non-belief, joy and pain. A utopia is an absence of balance in which only happiness and perfection exist. You see, you cannot have love without hate (though you can control who you hate and how you hate). You cannot have peace without conflict (whether it be personal or world-wide conflict). You cannot have fact without fiction. Even if those fictions are told to protect others from the hardship of the truth, they are still lies.
A true conspiracy theory investigator doesn’t try to prove anything… he or she tries to disprove the theory. It is not balance or non-balance they desire. It is not peace or war, confusion or enlightenment, control or freedom. It is truth. It is the right to decide for ourselves how we react to whatever that truth is — good or bad.
A true investigator deals only with fact and not with opinion… though opinion often begins the journey for the investigation or leads to new discoveries which either cement the theory or assist in disproving it.
Yes, I can believe that many who believe the theories are paranoid or disgruntled (perhapse more unsettled than that); however, there are those of us who just want to find the truth and lay the questions and theories to rest once and for all. THE truth… not your truth or my truth… not the truth we’ve been fed by the media or doctored notes or paranoid band-wagon jumpers… the actual truth so we can put them to rest.
Should everyone be told? In my honest opinion, yes. Do I care if we are “run by a bunch of reptilian alien shape-shifters who want to sell us into slavery?” (This one introduced to me by my best friend…) I personally couldn’t care less… But, they better hope and pray they don’t plan on eating me if it turns out to be true. Logic and understanding tend to be tough meats that require a lot of gnawing to get to.
With time and patience, the real truth about all of the conspiracy theories will emerge. When it does, there are going to be a lot of shocked people with egg on their faces….. on both sides of the fence.
I’m content to continue to disprove what I can, to diseminate what I can, and to allow others their opinion of me, however wrong that opinion may be. In the end, I and others like me will be vindicated and we will no longer be grouped with the “paranoid” theory-latchers who simply are not happy unless everyone sees the world their way.
Peace.