How to Think Like a Conspiracy Theorist
The romanticization of a sort of paranoia
Taylor Swift is a clone. Avril Lavigne was replaced by a doppelgänger named Melissa Vandella. The Apollo program was a hoax and Apollo astronauts never landed on the moon. 5G towers are built to spread coronavirus.
Why do people gravitate towards conspiracy theories? One explanation is: conspiracy theories offering simple answers to complex problems, Polish psychologists argue, may be attractive to individuals who are experiencing uncertainty or disorder and seek cognitive closure.1
Another psychological explanation argues that “collective narcissism” is especially likely to foster outgroup conspiracy beliefs. “Collective narcissism” is a form of “ingroup positivity” that inflates the sense of the ingroup’s importance, coupled with a belief that outgroups fail to sufficiently recognize the ingroup’s value. Conspiracy theories are more likely to arise when “collective narcissism” is in some way threatened or undermined. One way of dealing with threatened ingroup identity might be to place blame on imaginary enemies for any misfortunes of the ingroup.2
Conspiracy theorists are particularly active during major crises. Under such circumstances, it is quite common for anxiety or a sense of insecurity to lurk in their distrust of competing narratives.
Conspiracy theories exploded in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. The initial official report on the accident appeared on April 29, 1986, three days after the explosion, whereas it was not until May 14 that Mikhail Gorbachev delivered an official statement about the details. Till then, the Soviet government did not give the public sufficient instructions and advice on the protection from the radiation. While politicians, radios, and newspapers remained silent, rumors about various anomalies were spreading rampantly. People found strangled moles in their gardens. Bugs, wasps, beetles, and worms all disappeared. Cucumbers, fresh milk, iodine tablet or liquid, and even vodka were believed to be effective antidotes for radiation poisoning. Soon, rumors became gruesome, as people claimed to have seen three-headed birds, two-headed calves, hens pecking foxes to death, bald hedgehogs, mushrooms growing to the size of a human head, birds with two beaks, pikes without heads and fins, giant mosquitoes…3 Such rumors reflected the public panic in the face of uncertain dangers.
Some legends mystified the accident, suggesting, for instance, that the catastrophe was caused by the blasphemy of building the power plant on the site of a ruined Hasidic cemetery. Even the word “Chernobyl,” which means “wormwood” in Ukrainian, was considered inauspicious as it recalled the great star (also called Wormwood) falling from heaven, which was recorded in the New Testament. Other would rather believe that the explosion was the result of a UFO attack. Most notoriously, the KGB suspected that the Western countries were up to sabotage. Demanding transparency of information, the Western countries became panic, and some of the Western media even began to report on the death tolls. The Soviets revitalized the Cold War vocabulary and fought back by broadcasting news reports about previous nuclear accidents in the United States. The Soviet deputy foreign minister, Anatoly Kovalev, brazenly attacked the US for organizing “a campaign of hysteria.” The Soviet media also blamed Westerners for exploiting the catastrophe for political purposes and for using rumors and speculation. Then, conspiracy theories circulating about CIA sabotage or planned attacks by the US, which were believed to have caused the accident, began to take hold. When Western countries offered aid to children exposed to strong radiation after the explosion, some even alleged that the Western countries wanted to conduct experiments on their children. Many conspiracy theorists were convinced that Americans had caused the Chernobyl catastrophe.4
The Chernobyl disaster shows how people used “cognitive shortcuts”5 to make sense of changes or crises. Also worth noting is that collective narcissists were least willing to attribute the responsibility for the accident to the systemic failures of the Soviet Union and the mismanagement of the nuclear power plant.
However, not every conspiracy theorist is a collective narcissist, and those who buy into such stories do not necessarily form an ingroup. Many who became suspicious of the Soviet government’s cover-up surmised that the accident was caused by sabotage or a terrorist attack, and that the Soviet government preferred not to acknowledge its own failure to detect imminent danger. Some even presumed that the real cause of the explosion was an earthquake and that the military had intentionally concealed the truth. There was also a claim that the Soviet Union intended to use Chernobyl for nuclear radiation experiments. According to another rumor, the KGB allegedly orchestrated the explosion to secure Western reliance on the Soviet Union for energy, fostering European apprehension of nuclear power and thereby monopolizing the energy market. While Ukrainians made use of conspiracy theories to accuse Russians of deliberate genocide, a rumor among Norwegians claimed that Ukrainians blew up Chernobyl to cause damage to the Soviet Union.6 Conspiracy theories as such also blamed the Soviet Union from within, in spite of some versions of rumors revealing how conspiracy beliefs were exploited in the political struggle between Ukrainians and Russians.
Such explanations may be helpful for understanding prevailing conspiracy theories during the “9/11 attacks” or the global COVID-19 pandemic, when anxiety, insecurity, and disorder prompted “truthers” to single out someone to blame. But not for conspiracy theories involving gossip about Taylor Swift as a clone and Avril Lavigne’s doppelgänger. In such cases, conspiracy theorists appear to find oodles of entertainment in the gossip. Then how can we make sense of the social psychology behind such conspiracy theories?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Contemporary Political Ideologies to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.