I don't think it's as hard as she makes it sound to recognize what's paranoid but likely true and paranoid and likely nonsense. Everyone who knew anything about security thought something like Prism existed; the same was true of Carnivore and Echelon. Meanwhile, people who know things about medicine are confident vaccines are your friend and mine. The FBI really does con people into doing things it can arrest them for, but they're hardly diabolical masterminds; they don't have to be, heavy-handed works just fine. There are ambiguous cases, but for the most part it's not that hard to tell who has a point and who's been listening to Alex Jones.
Missed one of the big studies done recently: If you believe in one conspiracy theory, you're likely to believe in multiple, contradicting conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists, then, are people who doubt for doubt's sake. There's a distrust in the official narrative and therefore, non-official narratives are given higher status simply for being non-official. Combine those two - a preference for the minority opinion and a snowball effect where doubts multiply - and you end up with a lunatic fringe pretty quickly. that is what we've all been acknowledging for centuries without really putting into words: if you doubt a few things, you're rational. If you doubt everything you're nuts. Incidentally: 1) Anna Chapman pled guilty to "spying lite." 2) Robert Wallace, former head of CIA OTS for decades (basically "Q"), describes - at great length - assassination methods and devices intended to be deployed against Castro in his book Spycraft. he also devotes a chapter on the ingenuity of a group of CIA operatives captured in Cuba for undisclosed reasons who spent several years in a Cuban prison and eventually led an uprising. So yeah, there's some conspiracy theories. Then there's "conspiracy" theories. I mean, wikipedia. Mixing stuff revealed by the Church Committee in with "elvis is alive" kind of denigrates the subject.Elvis is alive. Princess Diana is alive, or the Queen killed her because she was pregnant and converting to Islam. Anna Chapman, CEO of PropertyFinder LLC, was a Russian spy. Fidel Castro shot JFK. The CIA hired mafia assassins to kill Fidel Castro. George Bush planned 9/11. The Jews planned 9/11. We all mass-hallucinated 9/11
What happens when these nutters are shown the contradictions in their conspiracy theories?
Their convictions grow. It's the basic mechanism of cognitive dissonance: your mind is presented with conflicting signals, one of which is comfortable, one of which is uncomfortable. We resolve this intellectually by clinging more strongly to the signal we appreciate and assigning higher value to the aspects of the idea that haven't been disproven. Case in point: vaccination prejudice. This starts (in the modern era, anyway - Raggedy Ann was designed by a guy who lost his daughter to the mumps vaccine, if I recall) with Wakefield's autism link. The autism link is questioned pretty quickly. So Bobby Kennedy publishes an article in Salon linking thimerosal to autism. The article is resoundingly dismantled and pulled by Salon. So now we're going for "additives" in vaccines. "Additives" in vaccines are empirically proven to not bloody matter. So now we're assailing all of germ theory. And all along the way, some people were pruned out of the anti-vax camp by logic. Those that weren't, though, were driven further and further into teh crazeh. SEE ALSO: climate change "skeptics." Best book I've read on the subject is Drive by Dan Pink.
Why are some people more prone to respond to this and not others?And all along the way, some people were pruned out of the anti-vax camp by logic.