The night before the election, videos spread on right-wing social media profiles claiming to show that electronic voting machines were rigged to vote for Clinton. “One of the things I think that is most revealing is how quickly conspiracy fears have shifted to the left, especially in the States, since the election,” he says. And it’s not only right-wing Americans who are susceptible. Yet though the psychology behind conspiracies is timeless, Brotherton does note that certain factors exacerbate our willingness to believe. Brotherton explains, for example, that after the Watergate scandal was exposed, conspiracy theorists weren’t vindicated like you would expect – but instead believed that the official narrative was a cover-up and that Nixon was set up.Ī Pizzagate post on 4Chan, outlining alleged patterns and meanings Once these biases lead someone towards a conspiracy theory, they might develop a “conspiracy worldview”, whereby everything becomes suspicious. “Confirmation bias” also means that we accept information that confirms our beliefs and ignore that which doesn’t. Humans also have a propensity to seek patterns, so we bend over backwards to connect unrelated facts (side note: why do the two psychologists thus far in this piece have remarkably similar names? Is there a psychologist Illuminati?). Some of us can accept when this isn’t the case – when a lone gunman, for example, is responsible for assassinating the president from a grassy knoll – but others go looking for alternative explanations. The “proportionality bias” means that if something big happens, we intuitively assume that something big must have caused it. “A certain proportion of people have always been receptive to conspiracy theories.” But who are these people – and what happens to make them fervently believe in gay frogs?īrotherton emphasises that the psychological biases at work in conspiracy theorists’ minds are biases that we all possess to some extent.
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