Nefarious Intentions and Persecuted Victims: On the Rise of Conspiracy Theories

On 30 March 2014, I received an email from one “Alan Tarica.” He had been reading my work on the psychology of conspiracy theories and decided to send me a link to his detailed website uncovering patterns of a vast conspiracy to conceal or ignore the fact that Shakespeare’s famous sonnets were written by somebody else. Who might this be? According to Tarica, all signs point towards the Earl of Oxford. In several con­ver­sa­tions, Alan tried to convince me that when you read the Sonnets from end to beginning, starting with the last poem and working your way back to the first poem, hidden truths are revealed.

Most of my colleagues don’t typically respond to such emails, but I often feel a strong pull—like a deep desire—to learn more about what exactly motivates belief in these type of conspiracy theories. After a few emails, I sent Alan Tarica a paper about how illusory pattern perception is linked to belief in conspiracy theories. After I googled his name and discovered that TARICA is an anagram for “ART CIA,” I quickly realized that he had been obsessively emailing and attacking scholars across the board. I told him that this was not my area of expertise but that I’m sure that “the truth is out there.”

One of his emails to me read as follows:

Thanks for response but really have to wonder if you find the behaviour of your fellow academics even remotely acceptable.

Of course, the truth is out there but without a conversation how are we supposed to get at it?

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I can assure you I will make this ultimately about the contemptible behaviour of those that should be able to make informed comments. And I expect far greater participation from everyone despite their discipline.

But if you do nothing else, please pass that along.

All the best, Alan.

The truth is out there, but that wasn’t enough for Alan. He kept emailing and his last email to me read: “Why don’t you try and refute my ‘con­spiracy theory’ you useless and outrageous asshole.”

It may be that Alan feels marginalized: his views are not being heard and the scientific community is ignoring him.

What Alan doesn’t know is that his behavior fits exactly with what we found in one of our latest studies: an investigation into the language of conspiracy. Most studies in this field of research just ask regular people questions about the extent to which they endorse a myriad of conspiracy theories. But we wanted to do something novel—to examine the lan­guage used by actual conspiracy theorists, to see if there are particular patterns—or psycholinguistic features—that make conspiracy theorists distinct in the way that they express themselves online.

By analyzing the language used in hundreds of thousands of tweets from the most popular conspiracy theorists on Twitter, we found that they express much more negative emotions—particularly anger—compared to their popular-science counterparts. They also swear and talk much more about other groups and power structures. All of which is reflected in Alan’s language: he’s angry, he’s swearing at others, and he’s dismantling what he per­ceives as unfair power structures.

But Alan isn’t the only conspiracy theorist who has harassed me or my colleagues over the years. For example, my close colleague Stephan Lewandowsky (Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol) and his co-authors wrote an article in which they analyzed con­spiratorial discussion in the blogosphere about one of their past papers on the psychology of conspiracy theories. Their paper had the wonder­fully apt title “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” Lewandowsky found that many of the online arguments against the research in his first paper were also highly conspiratorial in nature. For example, skeptics would accuse him of having a hidden agenda that involved a deliberate attempt to silence the debate.

The researchers identified several recurring themes which together with our own research seemed to indicate that, in addition to linguistic markers, conspiratorial reasoning has a very predictable signature. If you start examining conspiracy theories, you will notice recurring com­mon­al­ities in their narrative. For example, con­spiracy theories mostly assume evil or nefarious intentions. The story is typically not that a group of people are colluding—in secret—to throw you a surprise birthday party. There are virtually no positive conspiracy theories.

To help people spot the conspiracy effect in everyday life, my col­leagues Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Ullrich Ecker and I like to use a guideline that ties everything we’ve just learned about the con­spira­torial worldview together into the “seven traits of conspiratorial think­ing,” using “CONSPIRE” as an acronym—which stands for Con­tra­dictory, Overriding suspicion, Nefarious intent, Something must be wrong, Per­secuted victim, Immunity to evidence, and Re-interpreting ran­dom­ness.

We can see each of these traits at play in the now infamous viral con­spiracy theory video “Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19.” The film premiered on YouTube on 4 May 2020, and featured an inter­view with a discredited medical researcher, Judy Mikovits, who advances all sorts of conspiratorial claims about the pandemic, including that the virus was bioengineered and the false notion that, “Wearing the mask liter­ally activates your own virus.” The video garnered millions of views in the two days it was online before YouTube officially took it down. Studies show that exposure to the video damaged public support for vaccination programs. It’s the conspiracy effect in action, where even brief expo­sure to conspiracy theories can harm public debate.

Plandemic exhibits all the classic CONSPIRE traits. First, conspiracy theories are nearly always characterized by internal Contradictions. In the Plandemic narrative, the logical inconsistencies emerge quickly, as the film advances two false origin stories at the same time. The first describes Covid-19 as having been bioengineered in a lab in Wuhan whilst the second explanation comes from the fact that everyone apparently already had the virus from earlier vaccinations and that by wearing masks, they are activating it! Which is it? This is clearly Contradictory.

Next, by their very nature, conspiracy theories are deeply wary of the official narrative. An Overriding suspicion is advanced in Plandemic that casts doubt on mainstream science and just about anyone who is involved in the official explanation, including the World Health Organ­iza­tion (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Question everything.

But the conspirators in question must also have sinister intentions. Nefarious intent is an explicit theme that characterizes most conspiracy theories and much of Plandemic. For example, according to the film, evil scientists—including Anthony Fauci, who leads the White House’s Covid-19 task force, apparently created the pandemic for profit, and by extension, killed hundreds of thousands of people in the process.

When challenged, conspiracy theorists have no problem abandoning specific aspects of their theory—yet Something must be wrong (which fits with the possibility of an even larger conspiracy that could explain the inconsistency). For example, when the Plandemic filmmaker Mikki Willis was asked if he honestly believed that Covid-19 was engineered for profit he replied: “I have no idea.” All he knows is that something is not right.

A good conspiracy theory must also feature a Persecuted victim. In particular, conspiracy theorists have a tendency to view themselves as marginalized victims of a conspiracy concocted by powerful elites. Alan is the victim of a powerful cabal of humanities scholars protecting the false origins of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the Plandemic video, the creators even go as far as suggesting that the whole world has fallen victim to a vast web of deception that is the Covid-19 pandemic. If you think about it, if someone is plotting to do harm, then there must be a potential victim as well, the two often go hand in hand.

Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists are often entirely Immune to evi­dence. I know I said earlier that almost nobody is immune to evi­dence—but conspiracy theorists might just be the exception. When you ask why there is no proof for the conspiracy, they will usually say that’s because the conspirators did such a good job of covering it up. What’s more, chal­leng­ing the conspiracy is just further evidence that you must be part of it all.

The last trait involves illusory pattern perception: Re-interpreting random events and imbuing them with substantive meaning. I sent Alan Tarica the article on the link between illusory pattern perception and conspiratorial thinking because I honestly felt he was seeing patterns in the sonnets where there are none. The Plandemic video is no different: it mentions (in a suggestive tone) that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Hmm, co­in­cidence?

Yes, in fact, as it is well known that the NIH funds many labs around the world. The 5G conspiracy displays a very similar tendency, where coronavirus hotspots and the location of 5G masts are suddenly causally connected as part of a sinister plot, even though a third factor can readily explain the increased presence of both phone masts and dis­ease outbreaks: population density.

You can even see the same patterns in action when you ask people to make up conspiracy theories on the spot. In our “CONSPIRE” study, we tasked people in the US state of Georgia to come up with their own conspiracy theories about the increase in Covid-19 cases follow­ing the relaxation of lockdown measures in May of 2020. Conspiracies ranged from: “The government elite wants to kill as many people as possible” (nefarious intention), to: “The Democrats have invented the corona­virus so that they can eliminate wealthy older voters” (persecuted victim).

The reason why conspiracy theories spread so easily is because they are psychologically attractive; they offer simple explanations for com­plex events; they restore a sense of agency and control in a world increasingly filled with chaos and uncertainty. Demand for the kind of narratives that Knodel, B.o.B, Tarica, and Mikovits have to offer is increasing. Importantly, what’s so dangerous about this is that once the conspiracy effect takes hold, it won’t let go: it latches on like a real virus and reproduces fast and efficiently. Before you know it, you no longer believe in one con­spir­acy theory but two or three and you start to see the larger picture; it’s all connected.

Moreover, we don’t need the whole population oper­ating on the extreme side of the post-truth danger spectrum in order to undermine the status of “facts” in democracy. This is a common mis­per­ception. Many influential elections are decided on narrow margins. Fake news just needs to dupe a few people. Study after study has shown that the people who spread the most fake news are highly politically active: they’re extreme, they’re motivated, they’re super-spreaders. They are notmost people.

But what if conspiracy theories are becoming more common? In May 2022, I was asked this question by members of the subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism of the US Congress House of Rep­re­sentatives. I told them that we know that extremist organizations are more likely to use conspiratorial narratives in their writings to attract new followers, and that more studies are documenting a link between belief in conspiracy theories and the endorsement of political violence. But is it true that more people than ever are embracing them? In 2021, over 20 per cent of those polled in over twenty countries think that a single group of people control world events.

However, such information by itself doesn’t tell us whether that is high or low, at least historically speaking. Unfortunately, it’s a difficult question to answer as very little global trend data is available. We have only reliably—but often not consistently—tracked public belief in con­spir­acy theories for a few decades.

A colleague of mine, Joseph Uscinski, Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, used to visit me in Cambridge with his summer school students to discuss the latest research on conspiracy theories. He often notes that every few years the media declares another “golden age of conspiracy.” Joe is skeptical. After all, did conspiracy theories not lead people to burn “witches” at the stake for being in cahoots with Satan? Or cause the persecution of millions of Jews during the Second World War? Are things really worse now? He makes a valid point. In one study, Joe examined public belief in about thirty-seven conspiracy theories between 1966 and 2020 and finds that while endorsement of some conspiracy theories has increased, belief in others has decreased or remained fairly stable over time.

Joe has an interesting theory, though, namely that conspiracy the­or­ies are for “losers.” What he means is that those out of (political) power are typically more likely to espouse conspiracy theories about those in power and, indeed, empirical research across many countries shows sup­port for the idea that conspiratorial thinking, on average, is higher for supporters of political parties who are currently not in power (especially on the far-right). Several scholars, including myself, think that although this is definitely a piece of the puzzle, the trend is much broader so that endorsement of conspiracy theories seems to fluctuate more generally as a function of societal and political unrest.

For example, Gallup has been tracking the JFK assassination con­spir­acy since 1963, when it found that 52 per cent of people believed in the conspiracy that others were involved. This number rose to 81 per cent during most of the 1990s, when the popular Oliver Stone film JFK was released, before dropping off again to 61 per cent in 2011.

A recent Cambridge–YouGov poll surveyed people about the same conspiracy theories for three consecutive years. For example, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-vaccination conspiracies were endorsed by about 13 per cent of the population in the United States, whereas this number jumped to a concerning 33 per cent in 2020, when coverage about the Covid-19 vaccines started to take off.

The basic theory is that whenever we feel uncertain and powerless due to a global crisis or socio-political turmoil, people are more likely to turn to conspiracy theories for psychological comfort and reassurance. These narratives then become part of history through social and cultural trans­mission.

If this is correct, then the massive global challenges we’re facing repre­sent the perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories. In fact, what is clear is that the internet and social media have allowed the social trans­mis­sion of conspiracy theories to flourish, enter the mainstream, and spread in new and unprecedented ways.

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Excerpted from Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity by Sander van der Linden. Copyright © 2023. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.