More specifically Edelson’s study was on voter fraud. Again unsurprisingly, the people who thought that the election was in some way rigged or unduly influenced tended to be the people who had just been on the losing side of the election—hence the unfortunate “Conspiracy Theories Are for Losers” headline.
The insulting phrase comes from one of the paper’s authors, Joseph E. Uscinski, who coined it in a 2011 paper of the same name following a study of letters to the editor published in the New York Times between 1897 and 2010.20 In that paper Uscinski and his co-authors say:
We argue that perceived power asymmetries, indicated by international and domestic conflicts, influence when and why conspiracy theories resonate in the US. On this reasoning, conspiracy theories conform to a strategic logic that helps vulnerable groups manage threats. Further, we find that both sides of the domestic partisan divide partake in conspiracy theorizing equally, though in an alternating pattern, and foreign conspiracy theories crowd out domestic conspiracy theories during heightened foreign threat.
Which basically means that people are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories about things that they think threaten them, which includes both foreign threats and the election of politicians they voted against.
Uscinski continues on this theme in his 2014 book, American Conspiracy Theories, coauthored by Joseph M. Parent, arguing the most important factor in political polarization of conspiracy theories is the party of the president, and hence the popularity of any individual conspiracy theory will wax and wane with whoever is in power.
Anecdotally this comes through in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Since the events of 9/11 happened on the watch of President George W. Bush (a Republican) there was a tendency to blame it on a secret right-wing conspiracy. For the liberal friends of Willie this idea was so ingrained in their worldview that when he told them he no longer believed that 9/11 was an inside job, the first thing they asked him was, “Are you are Republican now?”
Former conspiracist Steve, who we will meet later in the book, also noticed something of a left-wing political bias in the early days of both the 9/11 movement and the early version of the Tea Party.
The initial part of the 9/11 movement was during the Bush administration. He’d got some characters there like Cheney who look kind of sinister, so that made it more plausible. Then the changeover from the Bush administration to the Obama administration lessened it to some degree because a lot of the group were more liberal.
The first Tea Party was in Santa Monica, California, and it had a lot of liberals in it. There were lots of anti-banking types, and 9/11 Truthers, only half of them were that conservative, it was a weird mix. The initial thing was how the people behind 9/11 were making environmental laws where the government could take over your house, or your entire life. The Tea Party is a conservative thing now, and that’s also how many of the conspiracy people are going.
Is this political polarization of conspiracy theories a useful observation? Firstly, you should avoid using the phrase “conspiracy theories are for losers,” even in jest and even if you immediately explain it. Conspiracy theorists feel bad enough about being called conspiracy theorists, so if you wave the label “loser” anywhere near them then it’s going to be a problem, causing them to raise mental barriers against whatever you say next.
If you want to bring it up with them, then you should explain the entire thing in one sentence: “People who supported the losing side in an election are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that are supposedly orchestrated by the winning side.”
Ultimately though, there’s not much to be gained in discussing the “loser” theory with the conspiracy theorists themselves until they are already on their way out of the rabbit hole. When they are deep in, this idea is going to seem to them like an attempt to belittle their concerns. Unless you yourself have been through some similar phase in the past (from which you recovered), then it’s not going to help.
On the other hand, if your friend is emerging from the rabbit hole, or especially if they are mostly out, then a degree of healthy introspection can help reinforce their new position. If their conspiracy theories were indeed largely focused on an opposing political party (like 9/11 and Bush, or gun control False Flags and Obama), then understanding that the seductiveness of the ideas was magnified by being on the losing side will go at least some way towards reinforcing their realization that the seductiveness was not based purely on facts.
Don’t Pigeonhole
Ultimately, this interesting academic research is just that: interesting, but largely academic. It may well be true that people are slightly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if they have a need for uniqueness. But, other than pandering slightly to that need, it’s not particularly useful information.
Other studies are even less useful on the individual level. Now to be fair, the purpose of these studies is generally to look at things in the aggregate, and practical benefits may be derived from them if we are to apply them to larger scale things like education policy, or even writing books on debunking. But when dealing with the individual it’s quite hard to know if they even fit in a particular pigeonhole, let alone do anything about it.
For example, in the paper: “Fake News: Incorrect, but Hard to Correct,” De Keersmaecker and Roets note three findings:
1) When people learn their attitudes are based on false information, they adjust them.
2) People low (versus high) in cognitive ability adjust attitudes to lesser extent.
3) Adjusted attitudes remained biased for people low in cognitive ability.21
This is saying: “You can change minds by debunking, but it’s harder to do with stupid people.” Now the first part is heartening—at least we know that presenting missing information has an effect—but it’s of no real use to be told it’s harder to do with people with low cognitive ability. If our friend has low cognitive ability, then what should we do, give up? (You could try to increase their cognitive ability, but that’s rarely going to be a practical approach.)
Similarly, papers like “Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Predict Conspiracy Beliefs? Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories” are rarely helpful at the individual level.22 The degree of correlation is generally small, and they deal with factors that are difficult to gauge in your friend. Note here that “narcissism” and “low self-esteem” are opposing factors. What if we think our friend is a bit narcissistic, so we push things in the opposite direction, only to find we go over into low self-esteem. It’s probably going to be a waste of time.
Let’s leave the academic aside, avoid pigeonholes, and look at the practical. How do real people actually emerge from the rabbit hole?
Routes Out of the Rabbit Hole
In discussions with former Truthers there seems to be two fairly distinct ways people find their way out of the rabbit hole: either a gradual change of perspective or a sudden realization of the fundamental flaws in their position. Sometimes it is a combination of the two.
Escapes by changes in perspective often start with a seed of doubt—they discover that some foundational piece of their conspiracy theory was incorrect, and they begin to look at other parts of the theory that they had assumed to be true. But it can also simply come from learning more about how the world works and gaining more life experience. They emerge a bit at a time, slowly learning new things until they find themselves on the other side of what they thought was an impassable line.
Escapes by sudden realization come only after a build-up of new information that is initially strongly resisted. While they are learning new things, they are rejecting those things as false disinformation. Eventually their knowledge of the evidence against their theory builds up and leads to a more sudden realization they were wrong, a breaking of the dam, and a rapid movement over their own demarcation line.
But there’s a single prime mover here in both routes: exposure to new information. Conspiracy theorists flourish in walled gardens. When asked where they get their news they will often point only to alternative fringe sites like Alex Jones’ Infowars, or more esoteric conspiracy theory sites like Rense.com, or even David Icke’s reptilian Illuminati related news.
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule describe this as a “crippled epistemology”—simply defined as having “a sharply limited number of relevant informational sources.”23 You can be a new information source for your friend, but it’s equally important that you introduce them to (or help rehabilitate) other relevant information sources.
These two main ways in which exposure to new information (and information sources) can help people out of the rabbit hole can be seen in two escaped 9/11 Truth activists: Abby Martin and Charlie Veitch.
Abby Martin seemingly changed her mind about 9/11 in the more gradual way, by gaining perspective. In 2008, she was a supporter of the 9/11 Truth movement and described the 9/11 attacks as an “inside job” as she participated in a 9/11 Truth march in Santa Monica, California. In 2012 she moved to Washington, DC, to work for RT America. This gave her access to a lot more people in varying positions of power and allowed her to observe “how the government really works.” Her discovery of Washington as a corrupt yet lumbering bureaucracy simply did not fit with the type of super-competent, all-powerful evil entity required to pull off the version of a 9/11 conspiracy theory she previously subscribed to. It seems she emerged slowly, with a gradual realization that her previous belief made no real sense in the context of the world as she now understood it.
Veitch was an energetic and outspoken Truther for several years, seemingly deep down a 9/11 rabbit hole he got into via the Alex Jones movie Terrorstorm. His exposure to new information came suddenly over a few days in a road trip organized by the BBC. He met many of the people intimately involved in 9/11—from the architects of the Twin Towers, to the first responders, and the families of the victims. They told him face to face what really happened to them, what they knew, and what they thought happened. For Veitch, this was simply information that he had no access to before, although he was aware of the general objections to his theory. The things they were telling him made sense to him, and after some initial emphatic resistance he quickly recognized the wrongness of his previous position. He emerged from that rabbit hole rapidly, and nearly completely, over the course of a few days.
The routes out vary, but the bottom line is that exposure to new information and new perspectives does change minds.
Where People End Up
Just as the routes in and out of the rabbit hole are varied, there’s a variety of different places people can end up after they finally get out. For some people the change is a binary one, a near 180-degree flip-flop from believer to skeptic. Willie is now entertained by debunking where he was once entertained by conspiracies. Later we will meet Steve who was once a hard-core conspiracy theorist, a believer in 9/11 controlled demolitions. But he changed, fairly rapidly, and went from being an attendee at conspiracy marches to someone who went to them simply to try to convince the attendees (many of whom knew him) that they were barking up the wrong tree. Like some former smokers, or former religious people, his reaction to discovering a new truth was to become as passionate and evangelical for that truth as he was for his old “truth.”
Not everyone makes such a polarized switch; some people keep at least one foot in the rabbit hole. A 9/11 conspiracy theorist might go from thinking for sure that a missile (not a plane) had hit the Pentagon, to thinking that there was simply a lot wrong with the official story. Sure, maybe the towers were not destroyed by pre-planted explosives, but they still have questions about who the hijackers really were, who really planned 9/11, and who paid for it. The certainty is gone, but the suspicion, and sometime the investigative fervor, remains. It’s just a shift in where they draw their demarcation line.
Many people who emerge from the rabbit hole simply lose interest. They largely drop the subject of conspiracy theories from their lives and move on. Like Scott, a participant on the BBC’s UFO episode on Conspiracy Road Trip, after being intensively deluged with new information for several days:
I came here thinking that I might get some kind of facts or answer, but I haven’t got anything, which makes me think that there isn’t an answer. I don’t want to sit around anymore thinking what’s true and what’s not. You know, I’d rather just forget about it, and focus on other things.24
Recognizing that his own theories regarding the cover-up of UFOs did not really hold water, Scott also seems to recognize that reality is complicated and not always amenable to straightforward explanations. This is, in a way, a very honest and self-aware realization. We can’t explain everything, we can’t understand the math and science behind everything that happens any more than we can know what goes on behind closed doors in the upper levels of government. While it’s great to be more interested in science, it’s also a perfectly valid position, shared by many scientists on different topics, to simply say that you don’t know the answers to everything. Some people continue with an interest in politics and corruption, but it’s not for everyone. Do what you can, but recognize your limitations, and get on with your life.
Regardless of how people get in and out of the rabbit hole and where they end up, the bottom line is that their escape is for them a highly positive and often life-changing experience. I’ve had many emails, some from the people whose journeys are chronicled in this book, thanking me for helping them out of their conspiratorial mindsets.
Let’s move on the next stage: how exactly do we help people escape the rabbit hole? What are the best practices and practical steps?