Conspiracy Science

I have an
article in Slate today about the psychologists and
social scientists who study conspiracy believers. Much of their
work is flawed, I argue—and when the scholars do get it
right, the pop-science writers who cover them sometimes introduce
errors of their own. Here’s the opening:

In the run-up to last year’s
Italian elections, the country’s senate did not—I repeat: did
not—pass a bill giving legislators 134 billion euros “to find a job
in case of defeat.” But a satiric story along those lines spread on
social media, and not everyone who passed it along understood that
it was a spoof. In just one day, 36,000 people
signed a petition against the alleged law. Soon it was being
invoked at anti-government protests.

Their confusion caught the eye of a quintet of scholars, who were
observing how a large sample of Italian Facebook users engaged with
different sorts of stories: articles from the mainstream media,
articles from alternative outlets, articles from political
activists, and fake news crafted by satirists and trolls. In March,
MIT’s Technology Review covered the researchers’ work in a
piece headlined “Data
Mining Reveals How Conspiracy Theories Emerge on Facebook.” The
article began with the tale of that imaginary Italian bill and the
people who believed it was real, wrapping up the anecdote with the
line, “Welcome to the murky world of conspiracy theories.”

This was an odd way to frame the issue. The rumor involved a bill
that had supposedly been passed by the legislature, not a secret
plan being hatched by some invisible cabal; it was not in any
meaningful sense a story about a conspiracy. The larger study was
concerned with the transmission of false stories, whether
or not they involve conspiracies; the word conspiracy and
its variants appear only four times in the paper. Yet the
Technology Review piece brushes past this distinction,
then compounds the problem by generalizing rather expansively from
the research. “Conspiracy theories,” the writer speculates, “seem
to come about by a process in which ordinary satirical commentary
or obviously false content somehow jumps the credulity barrier. And
that seems to happen through groups of people who deliberately
expose themselves to alternative sources of news.” Evidently more
than one credulity barrier has been breached.

To read the rest, go
here. For my book on the history of American conspiracy
thinking, go
here.