Why I don’t believe conspiracy theories

I was surprised – and to be honest shocked – when a person I was working with on a project recently told me they did not believe that American astronauts had ever landed on the moon.

When I asked this university-educated person, who has a long career working in a technical environment, why they might think this, their reasoning was that the exterior video of Neil Armstrong coming out of the lander had to be fake. Because “Who was holding the camera, Michael?”

From that foundation of doubt, “It’s all fake” seemed a reasonable conclusion to them, and ipso facto, NASA did not really go to the moon.

It’s a pity they hadn’t seen the recent movie First Man, as it shows how before stepping out, Armstrong deployed the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly from the side of the Lunar Module. This housed the camera that then filmed him famously exiting the lander. Apart from that, even cursory googling shows that various subsequent moon missions – and not all of them American – plus NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have photographed rovers, flags, footsteps, and other paraphernalia left behind on the lunar surface. It is not hard to find evidence to refute this conspiracy theory (CT).

When I pointed out the many ways the moon landings had been shown to be true, this person dismissed the whole topic, telling me, “Well, I just throw a conspiracy theory into conversation to see how people react.” I still don’t believe that (my own little conspiracy theory right there), but it got me thinking anyway, because CTs are so pervasive and so persistent that they must reflect some aspect of how we collectively view the world. And they are certainly not new, despite how trawling the internet might suggest otherwise. In her book, “Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History”, author Victoria Pagán, explores some of the conspiracies and intrigues that swirled around that ancient empire.

Contemporary ones are too numerous to recount, but generally high-profile events attract any number of CT and they are spectacularly malleable. New facts or rebuttals are accounted for by increasingly complex scenarios that become as intricate – and wrong – as early Greek philosopher Ptolemy’s celestial spheres. Shadowy government actors figure in most of the large-scale CTs, but the hallmark of an enduring CT is that it denies consensus (climate deniers, stand up and be counted) or cannot be readily proven from historical records or science.

Political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood defined a CT as “an explanation that makes reference to hidden, malevolent forces seeking to advance some nefarious aim.” Hence those shadowy government agents. Or the Illuminati. Or Big Business. Or the Globalists. Take your pick, but the common thread here is that the controlling group are elitist and hell-bent on world domination.

Incredibly, anything can trigger a CT. One of my favourite crazy ideas is that New Coke was introduced in 2005 as a deliberately poor tasting product to either increase demand for the original product, or to allow Coca-Cola to bring back the ‘original’ drink but now made with less expensive ingredients. Then Coca-Cola president Donald Keough apparently denied this with the humorous, “The truth is, we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart.” Unfortunately, having a powerful figure deny a CT is fuel to the fire, because They would say that wouldn’t they? is the obvious rebuttal to the rebuttal. Which is why the Coke Zero conspiracy still has legs.

This also highlights why it is almost impossible to logically walk someone out of their CT beliefs. Any point of truth is merely ignored, a tactic that President Trump has grabbed hold of with his “Fake News” mantra. Don’t like what’s being said? Just call it out as fake news and smile smugly. It immediately shifts the narrative to an argument over the process of truth, not the truth itself. There is hope if someone you know subscribes to a crazy CT, though. Ignore trying to present the facts, because recent studies suggest that how people respond to the CT will influence whether they continue to believe it or not. Positive feedback will reinforce it, while negative feedback will undermine it. On that basis, I’d like to think my shocked umbrage nudged that colleague to consider that perhaps we did reach the moon after all, but let’s be honest, it probably didn’t.

The consequences of CTs can be devastating, of course. Alex Jones is arguably America’s most prominent conspiracist. His claims include that the US government staged the murders of children at Sandy Hook to garner support for gun laws, which has understandably caused grave emotional distress to the parents of those children. Some of those parents are suing Jones, and I can’t blame them. Most conspiracists are not held to account for their assertions in this way, and I wonder what type of affirmative world we would live in if they were. That’s a fantasy, clearly, but what drives this apparent need we have to invent and embrace conspiracy theories?

In a well written paper from late 2017, Karen Douglas, Robbie Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka, all from the School of Psychology at the University of Kent in the UK, explore the psychological factors that drive the popularity of conspiracy theories. They propose in ‘The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories’ that three motivations – epistemic, existential, and social – underpin the ‘why’ of CT, even while coming to the interesting conclusion that while supporting a CT might be appealing, it may not be satisfying. Specifically, “the comparatively scarce research examining the consequences of conspiracy theories does not indicate that they ultimately help people fulfill these motives [epistemic, existential, or social]”.

Those three motives describe our general desires to understand the world and ascribe certainty to things that happen (epistemic); our desire to control our environment and live securely (existential); and the need to maintain our own positive self-image (social). Embracing the CT offers us the illusion of comfort, the explanation to some arbitrary event, or justification to some decision we have made or need to make. In an uncertain world, a CT allows us to blame an impossible-to-fight external agency instead of having to accept our actions are at fault.

Conspiracy theories are merely self-preservation people!

But what about that downside to CTs, beyond the obvious ones such as anti-vaxxers condemning their children to catching unnecessary diseases or climate deniers dooming all of us to a very unpleasant future. Perversely, believing a CT can make you feel worse about those external events, even as you become more open to continue to believe them. It seems counter intuitive, but if you are looking for excuses, and you loop back to that external agent excusing you from action, then something else needs to nudge you from your belief in the theory. Indeed, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, associate professor in social and organizational psychology at VU University Amsterdam, found that if you feel in control of your life, you are less likely to believe in CTs.

Control comes in many forms of course, but obviously, the more uncertain the times, the less control you are likely to have. Which suggests that CTs should thrive in times of conflict, economic depression, and societal change. Which they do. But change is a very personal thing, and if you are a white supremacist, a black man becoming President of your country might be seen as uncertain times. Barrack Obama spawned many CTs and even now, there are American’s who believe that he was born in Kenya and is a secret Islamist. Trump created his own fake news by promoting such untruths and if you’re feeling marginalised then perhaps you just might believe it, ignoring the long-form birth certificate Obama presented to prove his domestic heritage.

So why don’t I believe conspiracy theories?

Well, it’s not because I feel in control. The world is a crazy place where random things happen, that’s for sure, and most of us have experienced trauma and distressing events ‘just because’. I know I have.

No, I don’t believe CTs because they involve secrets. People are not geared to keep secrets. We love to share, so much so that the dictionary definition should read, “a secret is something you only tell one person at a time.” Keeping secrets is such a burden that in their ‘The experience of secrecy’ paper from last year, Michael L. Slepian, Jinseok S. Chun, and Malia F. Mason from Columbia University highlight that keeping secrets detrimentally affects your health. The best CTs require the keeping of large-scale secrets. Secrets kept by governments. Or by large corporates. Or by members of very aptly named, “secret societies”.

Because secrets are so hard to keep, I cannot reconcile CTs with the reality that someone, somewhere, will unburden themselves and once that happens, the facts of the matters inevitably leak. Indeed, if you are the holder of an impressive secret – like NASA staging the moon landings in a dark hanger in Area 51 – then you will itch to tell it to someone else. Or many else’s. Having a secret of that magnitude is essentially a social superpower. Now maybe, just maybe, if the CT involves a very small number of people, then perhaps they might keep it a secret. But most CTs are staggering in their breadth. Climate deniers would have us believe that tens of thousands of scientists are complicit in a vast conspiracy to pretend that CO2 is heating the earth. Chemtrail theorists believe that the contrails caused by planes are part of government plans to poison us/alter the weather/make us all pliant (there are multiple claims on this CT). And some conspiracists claim that the Australian government weathered aircraft parts and planted them in the Indian ocean to suggest that flight MH370 crashed.

People stridently believe these and so many other CTs despite how often even well-kept secrets are splashed across our screens as dogged investigators tease them out. Governments especially are ‘known’ to kill to keep their secrets, but even if they do, they are often caught out. Just think about how quickly the UK police worked out that two Russian military officers were sent to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Or how the NSA's intrusive PRISM surveillance was exposed. Movies such as Conspiracy Theory, in which Mel Gibson plays a paranoid taxi driver who sees arcane plots everywhere, portray those who expose CTs as living on the edge of society. But most people in a position to know the intricate details of a CT are not cranks and nutters. They are people intricate to the conspiracy, and they are going to be missed if they disappear. Put enough of them together, and you create a pattern. And patterns get noticed.

Secrets out, patterns get noticed. That's pretty much why I don't believe in conspiracy theories.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do love the mechanics and imagination that goes into a comprehensive conspiracy theory. So much so that there is one at the core of my science-fiction novel, driving the plot. And they are fun to discuss at a party, that’s for sure. Though, if you do that, it’s worth declaring your intent. Otherwise, your friends could think you’re being serious. And depending on the CT, that might not be a good thing.