The Crazy of Conspiracy (A Repost from a Long Time Ago)

May 21, 2012

According to recent studies, a person who believes in conspiracy theories tends to do so as a compulsive search for meaning. This compulsion has been shown to be powerful enough to drive conspiracists to believe illogical and often contradictory information. For example, a recent study found that people who believe Osama Bin Laden was captured alive by Americans are likely to also believe that Bin Laden was actually killed prior to the 2011 raid. Once cognized, confirmation bias and avoidance of cognitive dissonance may reinforce the belief. In a context where a conspiracy theory has become popular within a social group, communal reinforcement may equally play a part. This obsessive compulsion to believe, prove, or re-tell a conspiracy theory may indicate one or a combination of well-understood psychological conditions: paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, and mean world syndrome. This coupled with pareidolia, the genetic tendency of human beings to find patterns in mere coincidence, allows for the discovery of conspiracy in any event, despite evidence to the contrary. This is due, in part, because it is more consoling to think that complications and upheavals in human affairs are created by human beings rather than factors beyond human control. Belief in such a conspiracy is a psychological device for reassuring oneself that certain occurrences are not random, but ordered by a human intelligence. This renders such occurrences comprehensible and potentially controllable to a psyche not adept at understanding when confronted with complexity.