An overview of current academic research on the topic can give us a very useful perspective. While psychological quirks might not be direct causal factors, they are certainly factors that could magnify the effect of seductive new information sources. They also help us understand why these new information sources (such as a website like Geoengineering Watch, movies like Oliver Stone’s JFK, or videos like September 11: The New Pearl Harbor) work as well as they do. What buttons are they pushing? What types of person are they most appealing to? What ordinary biases do they exploit?

As well as providing us with useful perspective, an understanding of psychological factors also provides us with useful tools in talking to our conspiracy-minded friends. Try not to bring up the idea of specific psychological quirks with your friend, as that inevitably results in them thinking you are saying they are mentally ill. But you should certainly be able to bring up the idea of normal cognitive biases—precisely because they are biases that we all share.

There’s an immediate type of common ground there that you can establish, particularly if you can give honest examples of your own experiences—for instance, many people will be familiar with personal examples of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon (seeing or hearing something frequently after hearing about it for the first time), even if they have not heard the word before. You can share your own experiences (“I got a new car, now I see that car everywhere”), see if they will share theirs, and then maybe you can contrast that with how they never saw “Chemtrails” in the sky before they got interested in the Chemtrail conspiracy theory.

Academic research into the causes of conspiracism has been done for decades. In the US this academic interest was spiked by the conspiracist responses to key traumatic events in American history: the 1963 assassination of JFK, the 1993 Waco siege, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and most significantly the 2001 9/11 attacks. The simple existence of these events is obviously one of the factors involved in why people believe, but they also provided a framework for academic studies into what led people to suspect there was some kind of government conspiracy behind them.

Academic Research into Conspiracy Thinking

One of the more commonly cited academic papers in recent years is the 2014 publication “Measuring Belief in Conspiracy Theories: The Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale,” by Robert Brotherton, Christopher French, and Alan Pickering. The paper begins with a statement that you would be wise to keep in mind in the reading of any paper or popular article on the causes of conspiracy theories, or in listening to any supposed expert on the topic, myself included:

A significant part of the reason why this is true is that psychology itself, the working of the human brain, is not yet well understood. We cannot understand the brain in the same way we understand a car engine, or even in the same way that we understand a complex computer program. Individual descriptions of events and feelings are often highly subjective. Many events and situations (like the way a person experienced 9/11, or their own family life) are unique and not repeatable. Everyone is different, and where we might make scientifically valid observations and deductions, these are generally statistical aggregates of many people. Sometimes these findings apply to the individual, but often they do not.

In the growing field of conspiracy theory psychological research in the 1990s and early 2000s there was another problem, a lack of a clear definition of a conspiracy theorist. How can we measure how a conspiracy theorist differs from the general population if we don’t have a clear measure of what a conspiracy theorist is? Further, could research about low-level “Big Pharma” or “global warming” conspiracy theorists at one end of the spectrum even apply to “Chemtrails” and “Flat Earth” theorists at the other?

Brotherton attempted to bring some order here by creating a way of measuring of your position on a conspiracy spectrum, specifically the “Generic Conspiracist Beliefs (GCB) Scale,” which gives a relatively simple measure of how much of a conspiracy theorist a person is. This is not the first or the only such scale, but it has quickly become a popular one used by many researchers in their studies.

Most of those studies try to determine if there is a statistically significant correlation between a pre-existing factor (e.g., social anxiety, intelligence, or personality type) and the subsequent development of conspiracism, as measured by something like the GCB scale. In many cases a small but significant correlation was found. Unfortunately, this type of study is often reported in the popular press as if that one factor was the sole causal factor behind the conspiracism. You’ll get headlines like these (actual headlines):

• Studies Find the Need to Feel Unique Is Linked to Belief in Conspiracy Theories8

• Conspiracy Theorists Have a Fundamental Cognitive Problem illusory pattern perception, Say Scientists9

• Losers Are More Likely to Believe in Conspiracy Theories, Study Finds10

• People Who Believe in Conspiracy Theories More Likely to Be Suffering from Stress, Study Finds11

• Narcissism and Low Self-Esteem Predict Conspiracy Beliefs12

• Conspiracy Theories: Why More Educated People Don’t Believe Them13

• Study: The Personal Need to Eliminate Uncertainty Predicts Belief in Conspiracy Theories14

• Conspiracy Theories Mostly Believed by People on Far Left, Right of Political Spectrum15

It’s quite straightforward! Your friend is a conspiracy theorist because they are narcissistic, suffer from stress, and have low self-esteem. They desire to feel unique and eliminate uncertainty; they tend to see patterns where there are none. They are poorly educated and are far left or far right wing, and recently were on the losing side of an election.

Clearly that’s both overcomplicating things (it’s unlikely all those factors are relevant to a significant degree in any one individual), and oversimplifying things. The oversimplification is the real danger here. If we were to take any one of the headlines alone (especially the versions in the tabloid press) it looks like scientists have discovered the sole reason people believe in conspiracy theories.

Even if you read the original work in depth, getting much out of these studies is still difficult. They are essentially taking a very complex situation and only looking at a very simple, narrow aspect of it. The subjects of the tests are often not particularly representative of the group of conspiracists that you might be interested in, and rarely will they match a particular individual like your friend. They represent a slice of society, sometimes in another country, and you can’t extrapolate the results with much confidence. It just gives you a statistical correlation, often expressed in mathematic notion that is difficult to understand.

All that said, let’s have a more detailed look at two of the more popular studies, and see what can usefully be applied.

The Need for Uniqueness

In “I Know Things They Don’t Know!” French researchers Lantian, Muller, Nurra, and Douglas investigate if a motivational underpinning of conspiracy belief is simply the desire to be unique. Firstly, they surveyed people to find out if there was a simple correlation between belief in conspiracy theories and a sense of possessing unique knowledge. The participants (mostly French people in their twenties) were given an inventory test to rank them on the conspiracy belief spectrum (similar to the GCB scale, an inventory test just asks how much they agree with various conspiracy theory statements like “Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone”). They then were asked to rank how unique the information was that they used to answer the questions, and if they got the information themselves or from someone else. Rather unsurprisingly, the higher on the conspiracy spectrum they were, the more unique they considered their knowledge, and the more they tended to think of it as knowledge they had acquired themselves. Lantian considered this as evidence that conspiracy theories would satisfy a need for uniqueness, but did not establish any causal link.

The second study set out to answer if people who had a chronic need for uniqueness ranked higher on the conspiracy spectrum. This second study was conducted on participants in the US using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system which allows a series of questions to be put to a large number of demographically specific people for a relatively low cost (thirty cents per person in this case). As before, the participants were ranked on a conspiracy spectrum (using Brotherton’s GCB scale). Using a similar questionnaire technique, they are also given a measure on a scale of “Need for Uniqueness.”

The results of this study were that: “A higher need for uniqueness was associated with higher belief in conspiracy theories.” But how much? The short answer is “not a lot.” The authors give a correlation coefficient “r” of 0.17. A correlation coefficient is a measure of how much two things can be statistically linked—the closer to 1.0, the stronger the link; and inversely coefficients closer to 0.0 reflect weaker links. This means the variation with need for uniqueness was associated with about 3 percent of the variation in belief in conspiracy theories.16

Not that impressive sounding, and a far cry from the headlines of popular articles reporting on this study. The popular science site IFLScience declared, “People Who Believe Conspiracy Theories Just Want to Be Unique, Say Psychologists.”17 It does not seem like they even read the paper though, as they were paraphrasing another site, PsyPost, whose headline read: “Studies Find the Need to Feel Unique Is Linked to Belief in Conspiracy Theories.”18

Lantian’s paper goes somewhat beyond establishing a simple correlation; in the next two studies they attempted to manipulate people’s likelihood to believe in conspiracy theories. The third study was inconclusive, but the fourth appeared to show a possible causal link between conspiracy belief and a desired for uniqueness. This means if you encourage people to see uniqueness as a positive thing then they became more likely to believe in conspiracies than a person who was encouraged to think fitting in, or fighting for a common cause, was a good thing.

A causal relationship is important because it gets us closer to understanding what is actually going on. If we simply found that a need for uniqueness was correlated with belief in conspiracy theories, it does not necessarily follow that the need for uniqueness actually caused that belief, or even that it contributed towards it. The belief in conspiracies might have actually led to your friend experiencing the uniqueness of having special knowledge, and then enjoying that, and then seeking out more of the same. Correlation is not causation.

But the last part of the Lantian study does seem to suggest that in this case there is actually some causation. If they can manipulate people’s conspiracy thinking via changing their need for uniqueness, then that means their need for uniqueness is, at least in some small way, leading to the conspiracy thinking.

But again, how much? It’s hard to say because here the measure is still rather indirect. We are not measuring how having a need for uniqueness led to conspiracy thinking over several years. The measurement is of how much the conspiracy belief tendency of a person shifted immediately in the five minutes after being fed a few suggestive questions to make them think more highly of uniqueness. It’s only measuring that one artificial moment in time.

But if we take this idea of the need for uniqueness from the academic into the more subjectively observed real world then there’s something to this. While it’s not entirely clear what people’s need for uniqueness was before they got into conspiracy theories, it’s very clear in a large number of cases of people who got in and then got out of the rabbit hole that a large motivation for them to stay down there, and a large motivation for them digging a deeper hole with more “research,” was that they really enjoyed feeling special.

If this is indeed the case with your friend, then you will want to avoid anything that makes them feel ordinary. It is quite factually true that an inquiring mind is a great thing to have. That they are asking questions and not blindly accepting everything they are told is indeed something special. Try to convey this to them, but combine it with the need to also get things correct.

There’s also the possibility that a need for uniqueness can be satisfied by becoming an advocate for science and reason. Many (but not all) of the stories in this book are from people who actually enjoy a different kind of special knowledge. They now know exactly why their old beliefs were wrong, and they know more about the world. As Willie put it:

They still get that little buzz from “I know things they don’t know.” But now they know things that are actually correct, which is even better.

“Losers”

One of the more unfortunate recent headlines regarding conspiracy theories has been “Conspiracy Theories Are for Losers.” This is actually something of a play on words, the actual study being referenced is titled “The Effect of Conspiratorial Thinking and Motivated Reasoning on Belief in Election Fraud” by Edelson et al.19 The study is not about what the word “losers” typically suggests (people who have failed at life though their own incompetence), but rather refers to the unsurprising finding that the people who identify with the political party that is not in power (i.e., that lost the most recent election) are more likely to believe in some conspiracy carried out by the party in power. Or more simply, conservatives are more likely to believe that Obama was a Kenyan, liberals are more likely to believe that Trump colluded with Russia.