Do conspiracy theorists see more patterns in randomness? Apparently not

Three experiments found no difference in conspiracists’ information processing

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[QuidNYC]

Whether or not such people actually think differently, there's got to be an identifiable psychological component. Grandiosity? Those bitten hardest by the conspiracy theory bug seem to take particular joy in asserting their superiority over the "sheeple." And once you've started viewing the entire world through that lens (with confirmation bias), I'm sure it's easy to keep going.

 

[THavoc]

It's easier for people to believe there's a conspiracy happening and that exposing said plan will make things better rather than believing life can just be unfair and sometimes bad things just happen to good people.

 

[Vincent294]

It's all a conspiracy I tell you! Wake up sheeple! (sarcasm)

 

[kdemello1980]

It seems to me that they were really testing for a conscious perception of randomness, and one that's very abstract.

I wonder if it would differ much if they augmented the perception of randomness test to include pareidolia, like potato chips shaped like presidents, the virgin Mary in grilled cheese, or Jesus:

 

[arkiel]

How about intelligence? Anything to disprove the apparent inverse relationship between conspiracy theory propensity and intelligence?

I guess you'd need to control for certain types of conspiracy theory. Most people who knew how computers worked were unsurprised by the Snowden revelations, for example.

 

[Deleted member 276317]

...there’s a correlation between paranormal belief and conspiracy belief.

Now that's interesting to me. Anyone have a good ink handy? Does religious belief qualify as paranormal?

 

[arkiel]

kdemello1980[/url]":2j2v45no]It seems to me that they were really testing for a conscious perception of randomness, and one that's very abstract.

I wonder if it would differ much if they augmented the perception of randomness test to include pareidolia, like potato chips shaped like presidents, the virgin Mary in grilled cheese, or Jesus:

Jesus Christ...
...
dammit

 

[kengi]

Scientists know exactly what makes people more likely to be conspiracy theorists, but they aren't telling us.

 

[snowman<ca>]

I have a small quibble withe subtitle, this is essentially the same experiment run on three test groups verse it more implying there was multiple experiments.

 

[hackRme]

There is a conspiracy here to prove conspiracy theorists as psychologically bent into conspiracies
/sarcasm

 

[THavoc]

hackRme[/url]":2s9x0lql]There is a conspiracy here to prove conspiracy theorists as psychologically bent into conspiracies
/sarcasm

That just hurts my brain!

Part of your conspiracy perhaps? <scowl>

 

[kdemello1980]

hackRme[/url]":2s9alqgb]There is a conspiracy here to prove conspiracy theorists as psychologically bent into conspiracies
/sarcasm

It's been done

 

[bluloo]

QuidNYC[/url]":14xczw27]Whether or not such people actually think differently, there's got to be an identifiable psychological component. Grandiosity? Those bitten hardest by the conspiracy theory bug seem to take particular joy in asserting their superiority over the "sheeple." And once you've started viewing the entire world through that lens (with confirmation bias), I'm sure it's easy to keep going.

IME, you can say much the same about various groups of people, including fans of winning sports franchises, those supporting various "scientific" causes, etc.
I think that's a growing tendency reflecting broader sociocultural forces, rather than being limited to "conspiracy theorists".

Based on this, and prior research, I think it has at least as much to do with the broader culture and belief formation (and potentially, the tendency to see larger patterns where none exist), than a specific tendency to see patterns in the simplest of random phenomena.

 

[Dilbert]

IME (at work in a tech field) techs and engineers overheard rambling on about zero point energy, moon hoax, face on mars, Alex Jones, birth certificates, etc etc etc.... also see causation in patterns that do not and often cannot be causal. There's nothing worse than a conspiracy theorist in a position where they have to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is often about discovering valid causation patterns. And the conspiracy nutjobs are terrible at it.

I know it contradicts these findings. It's just what I've observed.

 

[athan]

I wonder where conspiracy theorists would tend to land on the myers-briggs test, or at least if they tend to be emotionally/logically motivated.

My money is a skew towards logical thinking. Really, I bet there's a maddening feedback loop. Logical argument for conspiracy met with emotional dismissal, driving a person to find more logical arguments--even less grounded in reality--met with an even harder eyeroll.

 

[bluloo]

Dilbert[/url]":3f0icfoj]IME (at work in a tech field) techs and engineers overheard rambling on about zero point energy, moon hoax, face on mars, Alex Jones, birth certificates, etc etc etc.... also see causation in patterns that do not and often cannot be causal. There's nothing worse than a conspiracy theorist in a position where they have to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is often about discovering valid causation patterns. And the conspiracy nutjobs are terrible at it.

I know it contradicts these findings. It's just what I've observed.

It doesn't necessarily contradict the study findings, as they only looked at very simple systems. The perceived patterns, nature and strength of relationships between entire knowledge systems of information (vs a simple string of letters or numbers) is going to be more complex.

 

[ScifiGeek]

IMO it is largely a case of erecting barriers against cherished beliefs being challenged. No group is immune.

On a tech site like this, you will see near universal belief that Engineers/Scientist are incorruptible good, and management/executives are evil (slight exaggeration).

We can see the results in other threads happening on Ars right now, related to the VW diesel fraud.

Nearly everyone is claiming there is no way engineers could commit fraud on their own, it had to be ordered by executives. What is bizarre this isn't evidence based and many are simply claiming it on the notions engineers being better people.

I predict that if/when external investigators get to the root cause, if it is lower level engineers, nearly everyone here will refuse to believe it and will instead believe in their own conspiracy theories instead.

Because the cherished belief is that engineers good, executives bad. That belief must be protected.

 

[MatthiasF]

(all psychology undergraduates)

Study invalidated. Haven't we learned already that psychologists studying psychologists on psychological issues is like SETI trying to find intelligent life in Times Square.

 

[adminfoo]

ScifiGeek[/url]":1i0ft9d6]IMO it is largely a case of erecting barriers against cherished beliefs being challenged. No group is immune.

This.

MY cherished beliefs are correct and proper. Those who say otherwise are knowingly propagating falsehoods either for profit or in service to some other motive I cannot fathom. The more of them there are, the bigger the conspiracy. It is obvious! Can't you see it?

 

[Fatesrider]

THavoc[/url]":l0macqn4]It's easier for people to believe there's a conspiracy happening and that exposing said plan will make things better rather than believing life can just be unfair and sometimes bad things just happen to good people.

The notion that life is fair, the good guys always win, the government is for the people, cops are your friend, and the other fairy tales we're taught as kids plays into crushed expectations and disillusionment. It's when people start looking at WHY things are the way they are that they tend to go off the rails at times.

So it doesn't surprise me that they're not going to find conspiracy in randomness. They aren't emotionally invested in the data being presented. The conspiracy theorist is like a religion in that there is a preconceived conclusion and the "randomness" provides "support" for that conclusion.

They're not looking at random facts and coming up with conspiracy theories. They're coming up with conspiracy theories and then cherry-picking facts from randomness to support it.

Furthermore, the exceptionally small and specialized sample size (all college undergraduates, all interested in psychology, all knowing that SOMETHING about their psychological makeup is being tested) almost certainly will skew the results.

But even if they find folks with full blown psychological delusions (the earth is flat, for example) and test them, because the data being presented has no emotional investment for them, the confirmation bias is absent. Present random BS data that CAN be linked to their favorite tin-foil-hat theory, and you'll find them cherry picking stuff out.

I'm going to guess that the author(s) of this survey (I hesitate to call it a study given the minuscule sample size) have emotionally gotten over being lied to as a kid. Frankly, I think that's what starts these conspiracy theories. They're told the holy trinity of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus aren't real, but Big Daddy, Junior and the Spook are, get confused and try to prove nothing they're told is true.

At that point they can become presidential advisers, talking heads for various news outlets, radio DJ's everyone laughs at, philosophers and/or those guys being taken advantage of by some wise-asses selling rotten meat in a gorilla suit.

Still, if someone is inclined to believe things without checking their validity through more rational sources, they have the seeds of a conspiracy nutjob within them. What get scary is when those more rational sources are saying the same awful thing and it really does turn out that one's pet "conspiracy theory" is true.

The satisfaction of saying "I told you so!" about a conspiracy theory is exactly like anticipating opening a gift you "just know" is a pair of smelly, dirty, ugly socks, and getting a pair of smelly, dirty ugly socks.

It actually kind of sucks.

 

[Fukengruven]

ScifiGeek[/url]":3kiqpq4i]Nearly everyone is claiming there is no way engineers could commit fraud on their own, it had to be ordered by executives. What is bizarre this isn't evidence based and many are simply claiming it on the notions engineers being better people.

You're assuming the basis for those arguments to the exclusion of other, more plausible explanations. For example, what are the chances that 1 or 2 engineers could spend the amount of time necessary to build an emissions defeating system with all the detection required to accomplish that goal AND get it into the final product unnoticed by their peers and higher-ups at a company that likely has very strict process control?

You're quick to judge engineers poorly; Personal bias?

 

[Zak]

Do conspiracy theorists see more patterns in randomness?

No, they just have too much time and no real hobby.

 

[bluloo]

athan[/url]":14fjtvlw]I wonder where conspiracy theorists would tend to land on the myers-briggs test, or at least if they tend to be emotionally/logically motivated.

My money is a skew towards logical thinking. Really, I bet there's a maddening feedback loop. Logical argument for conspiracy met with emotional dismissal, driving a person to find more logical arguments--even less grounded in reality--met with an even harder eyeroll.

Your general sentiment not withstanding, Meyers-Briggs isn't regarded as a valid instrument.
Though relatively common, it's basically pop-culture info-tainment, and heavy on the entertainment and rather light on the info.

 

[fitten]

I wonder if there's a correlation between religion and conspiracy theorists. I wonder if it's some deep seated need to believe that things aren't random, but instead always a part of some plan.

 

[RRob]

Zak[/url]":2hnjxurr]...they just have too much time and no real hobby.

Clearly it's a secret hobby for some of them, trolling the public with their "you know you can't disprove this" arguments.

I'm most annoyed by the people who aren't even creative in their theories.

 

[THavoc]

RRob[/url]"xf8yjnn]

Zak[/url]"xf8yjnn]...they just have too much time and no real hobby.

Clearly it's a secret hobby for some of them, trolling the public with their "you know you can't disprove this" arguments.

I'm most annoyed by the people who aren't even creative in their theories.

Those heliocentric people really bother me the most! Why people seem to think that objects go around the most massive body in our Solar System is beyond me.

 

[Dilbert]

THavoc[/url]":71y8jxea]

RRob[/url]":71y8jxea]

Zak[/url]":71y8jxea]...they just have too much time and no real hobby.

Clearly it's a secret hobby for some of them, trolling the public with their "you know you can't disprove this" arguments.

I'm most annoyed by the people who aren't even creative in their theories.

Those heliocentric people really bother me the most! Why people seem to think that objects go around the most massive body in our Solar System is beyond me.

Everyone knows the reason, man. The solar system is governed by electric forces! Not gravity. Wake up!!!

I'm not making that up. That's actually a thing with conspiracy nutjobs.

 

[THavoc]

Dilbert[/url]":2xx7zre2]

THavoc[/url]":2xx7zre2]

RRob[/url]":2xx7zre2]

Zak[/url]":2xx7zre2]...they just have too much time and no real hobby.

Clearly it's a secret hobby for some of them, trolling the public with their "you know you can't disprove this" arguments.

I'm most annoyed by the people who aren't even creative in their theories.

Those heliocentric people really bother me the most! Why people seem to think that objects go around the most massive body in our Solar System is beyond me.

Everyone knows the reason, man. The solar system is governed by electric forces! Not gravity. Wake up!!!

I'm not making that up. That's actually a thing with conspiracy nutjobs.

This makes me die a little more on the inside.

So they take the positive / negative atom bonds and extend it to a macro scale?

 

[Dilbert]

THavoc[/url]":1lrltnrr]

Dilbert[/url]":1lrltnrr]

THavoc[/url]":1lrltnrr]

RRob[/url]":1lrltnrr]

Zak[/url]":1lrltnrr]...they just have too much time and no real hobby.

Clearly it's a secret hobby for some of them, trolling the public with their "you know you can't disprove this" arguments.

I'm most annoyed by the people who aren't even creative in their theories.

Those heliocentric people really bother me the most! Why people seem to think that objects go around the most massive body in our Solar System is beyond me.

Everyone knows the reason, man. The solar system is governed by electric forces! Not gravity. Wake up!!!

I'm not making that up. That's actually a thing with conspiracy nutjobs.

This makes me die a little more on the inside.

So they take the positive / negative atom bonds and extend it to a macro scale?

/don't understand what you just said, so I'll ignore it, pretend I didn't hear, and repeat the blatantly wrong assertion I just made earlier.

That too is a thing.

 

[timeodanaos]

Putting all so-called conspiracy theories in one big bowl is the fallacy of thinking here, and it seems rather arrogant and ignorant, as if only the agreed common consensus is the one and only truth.

While some theories like chem-trails or aliens on earth seem rather far fetched and probably could be attributed to very imaginative, perhaps even naïve people, other theories (enter many things that happened in the last ten or fifteen years here) are often well within the bound of the possible and could propably be more associated with overly logically thinking people without much sense for political correctness, more in the direction of Aspergers, so to speak.

 

[ScifiGeek]

Fukengruven[/url]":mmc514nr]

You're assuming the basis for those arguments to the exclusion of other, more plausible explanations. For example, what are the chances that 1 or 2 engineers could spend the amount of time necessary to build an emissions defeating system with all the detection required to accomplish that goal AND get it into the final product unnoticed by their peers and higher-ups at a company that likely has very strict process control?

You're quick to judge engineers poorly; Personal bias?

How I am judging engineers poorly. Either they did it on their own, or they did from following orders. Neither is exactly exemplary ethics.

While not at an automotive company, I did a similar job. So bias against myself?

As far as plausibility. This isn't rocket science. Detecting you are on a treadmill is dead simple. After that you can simply simply increase regen cycles for the LNT filter, and/or use a less aggressive fuel mappings. You probably would have already explored the limits of options before cheating.

It probably wouldn't take much more than days effort for someone already deep into the problem.

If I am biased against anything, it is conspiracy theories. To me, the more people involved, the greater the chance of a weak link spilling the beans.

 

[linnen]

You're so naive, Roxy. You see the good in everyone, even when it's not there. You're living a fantasy! There is no Easter Bunny, there is no Tooth Fairy, and there is no Queen of England! This is the real world, and you need to wake up!

 

[THavoc]

Dilbert[/url]":1uft93ll]
/don't understand what you just said, so I'll ignore it, pretend I didn't hear, and repeat the blatantly wrong assertion I just made earlier.

That too is a thing.

Actually, I meant that as a serious question. Was trying to figure out how electrical charges would explain the Solar System...

 

[Dilbert]

It can't. Unless you are willing to believe rather than to understand. Then anything is possible. But no explanation is forthcoming.

 

[Greenwizard88]

I'd be interested in understanding how they qualify conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theories, and what level of conspiracy the researchers were targeting. Some conspiracy theorists assert that the earth is flat, while other conspiracy theorists contend that Oswald did not act alone, or that the government can listen in on all of your phone calls and web browsing.

 

[Chuckstar]

I would have expected this outcome. Conspiracy theorists do not, in general, form their opinions after looking at a lot of data. They generally form their opinion first, and then go cherry pick corroborating data. In my limited experience with friends who tend towards conspiracies, frankly they don't want to see a wide swath of data. They prefer to be hand-fed data that supports their pre-determined opinion.

 

[vartec]

Remember when "the government is spying on us" was a conspiracy theory? ;-)

 

[w1retap]

From my various research, some "conspiracy theories" have turned out to be true, while others are just blatant lies. There's varying degrees of conspiracy theories from what I see:

- Some that are completely false to generate click bait / revenue on social media
- Some that are pieced together from unrelated events (usually always false)
- Some that are pieced together from related events (sometimes turn out true)
- Some that are pieced together from a combination of direct evidence and covering up evidence (sometimes true and/or more than likely true)
- Some that are from direct evidence where the authorities state a false reasons/data (usually true)

I take interest in researching the events for myself, but it's often hard because the media never seems to get the facts right. I've encountered this when I have experienced first-hand the event that gets reported, and it's reported improperly.

Some of the best examples of conspiracy theories we had years ago were the government spying grids.. which have now turned out to be true. Conspiracy theorists and disgruntled ex-government employees were labeled as crazy and tin foil hat wearers, now all of a sudden, media outlets are paying big bucks to try to nab interviews with them. Direct lies for years were shoved down our throats from government officials that they weren't listening into domestic phone calls or archiving any metadata from citizens on the web. Now you get put on a terrorist no fly list for some obscure keyword in an email.

There's one thing I know for sure though.. it's not to trust political figure mouthpieces, and take skepticism in people that call themselves journalists. We've been seeing more and more cover-ups (especially technology related) in the past 15 years than we know how to process, and separating reality from fiction is almost impossible.