Where Conspiracy Theories Come From

“Eeeeeeerip”

“Did you hear that?”

“Yeah, I think it was my foot moving that chair.”

“Oh. Good ‘cause I thought it. . .”

“Eeeeeeerip”

“Definitely was a smoke alarm.”

“But we just changed the battery a month ago.”

“Maybe it’s one downstairs. . .

“Eeeeeeerip”

“Nope. It is definitely coming from upstairs.”

“Damn!. OK, I’ll replace it again, but this time I’m using the ladder. I hate standing on the top step of the kitchen stool that close to the stairs.”

“Eeeeeeerip”

“Damn!”

At this point Pip, our ten-year-old black Labrador Retriever is cowering by the sliding door to the deck trembling and barking furiously. She hates the smoke alarm so much that she begs to go out on the deck anytime I cook. (“I wish you wouldn’t use the smoke alarm as a timer,” says Billie.)

“Eeeeeeerip” OK maybe you get the idea. The replace-the-battery chirp isn’t a chirp; it is like blowing a high pitched factory whistle in your ear. You feel it in from one eardrum to another connecting across your entire head like it’s boring a hole through your brain.

Billie moved Pip outside. I went to get the ladder. Just to be sure I climbed the ladder downstairs to check that the incessant sound wasn’t coming from the alarm in the hallway outside the kitchen. Nope definitely upstairs. I took the ladder up the stairs.

“Did you check to make sure it isn’t the downstairs smoke alarm?” Billie had just come in from the deck.

“Yes.”

She checked anyway. I knew she would.

Billie and I have been married for over twenty years, second marriage for us both. We’ve known each other for more than thirty-five years. She was a single mother and a homeowner and has learned all the problem solving that goes with home maintenance and I’m a guy, who lived alone between marriages and so I think maintenance problem solving is my job.

Couple that history with what Billie describes as” our substantial individual needs for control” and we have realized that we don’t really work well together on the same task. That doesn’t stop us from continually trying to do that. We each define ourselves as problem solvers, which means that we are really “solution finders” who continually make “suggestions” as the other works.

“Eeeeeeerip”

I know I said I wouldn’t keep doing that, but you get the idea that this is continually in the background, while we mutually try to solve this problem. I climbed the ladder.

“Do you want me to do this?”

“No.”

“But it’s working over your head and I know you said that since the surgery that’s hard for you.”

“Yeah. I know, but this isn’t the same as hanging a ceiling fan.”

“OK, I’m just sayin’. . .”

“Got it.”

I took down the smoke alarm while Billie took the trembling dog to a neighbor’s. I took the nine volt battery out and after some fumbling around on the supply shelves found another battery and put it in.

“Eeeeeeerip”

“Damn.” Billie was back now. “Are you sure you’ve got it in the right way?” I took it down and let her check.

I went online with my question. Maybe dust on the sensor. I got out the vacuum cleaner.

“One guy says it might be dust on the sensor – blow it off with compressed air.” Billie was doing research and frankly she is better at that than I am.

By now I have vacuumed and blown on the sensor multiple times, but she has discovered that “These things have a ten year life and this one has been in since 2013. Home Depot doesn’t have the exact model, that has been recalled anyway, but they have lots of others.” She has printed specs. So I am off to Home Depot.

My local Home Depot may be the worst HD store in New Jersey but I find something of a similar size with the same harness. I don’t notice that I bought smoke alarm with only photoelectric sensors and not photoelectric and ionization dual sensor alarm we were replacing.

“It’s right there on the printout. I highlighted it. “ Of course she did.

I installed the new one.

“Eeeeeeerip”

“Is the battery dead on that one?”

?“I don’t know. Let me try replacing it.” (“Why does it keep beeping when I have the battery out? Maybe there’s an alarm above the junction box?” I thought.)

“Why does it keep beeping when I have the battery out?”

“There’s an alarm above the junction box.” I sounded confident, authoritative even.

“Maybe it’s the downstairs one. Change the battery on that.” I did.

We both stood downstairs. The obnoxious sound was obviously coming from upstairs. We both trekked upstairs and stood under the smoke alarm. Sound definitely coming from the ceiling.

On a lark I got down on the floor and put my ear next to the carbon monoxide alarm plugged into the wall. Ouch.

“It’s this one.”

“But I heard it coming from above!”

“Put your ear down here.”

“Damn.”

Billie unplugged the CO alarm- still beeping, but when it was unplugged and with no battery in there’s no beep.

Billie wrote manuals for a living; she saves them and reads them. I’m a guy “Why would anyone read the directions?”

She is also a research head. She read that there are three types of alarms on the CO monitor: the alarm is four ear-piercing blasts of every ten seconds, a chirp every fifteen seconds that signifies the battery, and an 85 decibel whistle blast every 30 seconds when the alarm itself is faulty.

“Eeeeeeerip” (Wait for it 29, 30) “Eeeeeeerip”

We took the battery out and ordered a new CO monitor. I put the old dual sensor smoke alarm back up and committed to replacing both it and the one downstairs with new ones as they are near the end of their useful life.

This was a few days ago. Today at breakfast we were discussing our problem-solving failure. Billie was speculating that maybe both alarms were broken. I assured her that it was definitely the CO alarm.

“But what about the alarm that’s above the junction box?”

“I totally made that up. It was the only thing that I could imagine that would explain why that thing was still beeping after it was disconnected from power and the battery was out.”

“You sounded so confident.”

“But it was totally magical thinking.”

“This is how conspiracy theories start,” Billie was right.

In the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a professor at the Harvard Business School posited the ladder of inference to explain how humans process data, come to conclusions, and solidify those conclusions into beliefs.

First we digest data. We may have filters, mental models and previous beliefs that?limit the data we see. But from whatever portion of the data set we process, we draw conclusions. We validate those conclusions with other data and at some point that conclusion becomes a belief.

There is no logical or rational argument against a belief. Once a belief is formed it is very hard to change. ?The only way to change your belief is to climb back down the ladder of inference through previous conclusions to the original data. Nobody can do that for us. We must choose to do it for ourselves.

Billie and I demonstrated how quickly a belief can form.

We listened downstairs to the smoke alarm. It was clearly upstairs.

We stood under the upstairs smoke alarm and it was clearly coming from the ceiling. We never considered that the sound from the lower CO monitor might be bouncing off the ceiling to appear as though it was coming from the smoke alarm.

Once I had established the belief that it was the smoke alarm I enlisted Billie in that belief. She checked it for herself listening to the downstairs alarm and standing in the same spot listening to reflected sound. We now had a mutually reinforced belief system.

This belief system was so strong that when faced with new data (a disconnected alarm with no battery still beeping) I made up -that’s right, completely fabricated – an explanation. When I told Billie this I didn’t express it as an hypothesis or say “I wonder if” I stated it as a conclusion. Billie says it “didn’t sound right” at the time, but she chose not to contradict me. In her “politeness she reinforced the lie to me and my belief in it.

We are just two people and we made this happen over an afternoon. We ultimately figured out the real solution because the “Eeeeeeerip” wouldn’t stop and we wanted to bring our dog home.

This kind of thought process has huge implications for safety. Suppose the belief was that a sensor had failed in a chemical plant and we didn’t have one so we just temporally piped around it. Suppose the belief was that two nations were conspiring to attack a third when they were meeting to arrange a performing artist exchange.

Magical thinking and conspiracy theories arise because we can’t think of an answer that would fit our preestablished belief, so we make up a plausible explanation. We enlist others who share our beliefs in that plausible explanation, and a mutually reinforced delusion ensues.

“We magically believed that there was an alarm above the junction box and tore out the ceiling to get to it.” “We believed the sensor was bad and the plant blew up.” “We believed that they were plotting to attack us and preemptively started a war.”

“Eeeeeeerip”