Conspiracy theories
3 important questions on Conspiracy theories
What are the necessary properties/key ingredients of conspiracy theories?
- Causality: Makes an assumption of how people, objects or events are causally interconnected
- Intentionality: Stipulates that the plan of alleged conspirators are deliberate
- Coalition: Involves a coalition or group of actors working in conjunction, meaning that there is a group of bad guys working together.
- Threat: Contain an element of threat, such that the alleged goal of the conspirators are harmful or deceptive
- Secrecy: Carries an element of secrecy and is therefore often difficult to invalidate
Explain the difference between the hypothesis that conspiracy theories may be mere cognitive by-products and the thesis that they are adaptions.
Adaption hypothesis:
By-product hypothesis:
- Recap adaption: functional solutions to fitness/survival evolved through natural selection
- Stipulates that conspiracy thinking is an adaptive feature of the human coalitional mind that evolved:
- to alert ancestral humans to the possibility that others were forming dangerous coalitions against them
- to stimulate appropriate actions to fend off such threats
By-product hypothesis:
- Recap by-product: the belly button, as a result of the umbilical cord → carried along with other mechanisms
- Argues that conspiracy theories are a by-product of a suite of cognitive mechanisms evolved for different reasons
- Don’t solve adaption problems or have functional properties
Is there any support for conspiracy theories being an adaptation in and of itself?
"If conspiracy theories were adaptive for ancestral humans, then susceptibility to such theories needs to be universal among humans" p. 776
Empirical data support the view that conspiracy theories were common before people had access to modern communication technologies.
Empirical data support the view that conspiracy theories were common before people had access to modern communication technologies.
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