- The modern world is full of conspiratorial thinking where people see an event and they come up with this extraordinary story, the hidden truth that explains everything. But they're simply sticky in our minds because we are predisposed to patterns and we're allergic as human beings to explanations that involve either randomness or small, seemingly unimportant changes. And this is one of the reasons why I think there is so much polarization and democratic breakdown around the world, is because we simply inhabit different realities due to the fact that there has been such a surge in conspiratorial thinking around the world.
Our brains are driven to find explanations that fit a pattern, and our brains are also driven to find explanations that fit a narrative, a story that really compels us. So when it comes to understanding conspiracy theories, there's three main cognitive biases that you need to grapple with. The first one is called narrative bias and this is where the human brain has evolved to make sense of reality through storytelling.
And the reason for that is because stories involve a very neat and tidy cause and effect. Now, because of that, if somebody tells you a story, it's very seductive to us, it sounds plausible. If somebody tells you there's no story, that's not very attractive to us.
Now, the problem with conspiracy theories is they're not just telling you a story, they're telling you a really good story, right? There's a hidden cabal behind everything that's happening, there's a secret pattern that you just have to be smart enough to detect. And once you do, you can be inducted in this group of people who understand the real truth.
Because what you have is you have a thriller versus someone telling you, "Nothing to see here," and the brain is drawn to the thriller. So even though some of these conspiracy theories are extremely insane and obviously wrong, they still have a lot of people that end up gravitating towards them because it's a good story. The second form of bias is called magnitude bias, and magnitude bias is this idea that any big event must have a big cause, right?
In a lot of our thinking about the world, we have these linear relationships in how we understand it. So anything that has a small effect must have a small cause, anything that has a big effect must have a big cause. So for example, you have the Arab Spring where a man decides to light himself on fire in central Tunisia because he's disgruntled about his economic prospects.
This is the trigger for multiple regimes collapsing and also a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Now, the conspiracy theories around this would tell you that there's something else going on, that there's some big plot, because this sort of random event of one man causing all of these catastrophes seems too strange to compute as a human brain. Now, on top of this, you have things like Princess Diana's death where there's lots of conspiratorial thinking around it.
And it's a car accident, it's basically a sort of random event where somebody was driving too fast and she died. When you have a consequential event, you want to have a consequential cause. But within conspiratorial thinking, research will show that conspiracy theorists will hold ideas that are quite clearly logically opposed to each other.
So people who believe in Princess Diana conspiracy theories will simultaneously say that, "Yes, we think that she is alive, and also that she was probably killed by the British government. " Now, these two things cannot both be true, but they would rather accept that logical impossibility than the random explanation that there was some sort of small cause that was banal, which is to say she died in a car accident. The third form of bias is called teleological bias.
Everything happens for a reason is teleological bias in a saying. Now, I can speak from personal experience, I sometimes go on the news to try to explain events, and one of the things you can't say is, "I don't know," and you also can't say, "Maybe this was just sort of arbitrary, like sometimes just sort of random things happen. " So what you have to do is you have to sort of fit the world into these really clear explanations where exactly one cause produced exactly one effect.
So conspiracy theories thrive on all of these forms of biases because they ultimately stitch them all together in a single really compelling big reason why things happen, a nice story, and one that gives you a reason to make sense of a bewildering thing that has occurred that is consequential in the world. I think one of the other reasons why conspiratorial thinking is so prominent today is because the information pipelines that we use to get knowledge about the world have completely shifted. And this is something that's different from every other human who has ever lived.
The history up until now has been a history of expanding the number of people who can consume information, but not the people who can produce information. The internet has forever shifted that calculation because for the first time ever we have drastically expanded the pool of people who can make information and then disseminate it instantly around the world. And this means the barrier to entry for crazy ideas is significantly lower than it used to be.
And so this combination of the information pipelines shifting in the way that we understand the world and navigate it, combined with our evolutionary predisposition to storytelling and pattern detection, is a perfect storm for the rise of conspiracy theories as a major driver in our modern politics. Debunking conspiracy theories is really difficult, but yet we still have to try, because it's really important to make sure that people don't fundamentally misunderstand the world or vote based on conspiracy theories that are ultimately wrong. And so the best way forward is to try to clean up the information pipelines that we have that allow people to make sense of the world to ensure that good information is provided to people, to also provide detailed fact checks that grapple with the parts of the conspiracy theory that make the good story and explain them in clear ways to show why it's incorrect.
It won't always work but I think it's definitely something that we need to do because, if we can't agree on reality, we can't compromise, and democracies are based on a shared sense of reality and then the compromise that is forged within it. - Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only community, watch videos early and unlock full interviews.
