Conspiracy theories in the age of Covid-19

The explosion of conspiracy theories

In March 2020, the new crown epidemic broke out in Europe. Faced with an unknown virus, people felt helpless. They hoped to find an explanation for this mysterious and terrible virus: What is the source of the virus? Who should be responsible for this? Officially ambiguous explanations and reports that scientists have yet to draw firm conclusions have added to the panic. One can't help but wonder: "Could the sudden and terrible outbreak be the start of a conspiracy? Who is planning this conspiracy, and what are his motives?" These questions are disturbing, and people are desperate for an explanation . When a firm, unfalsifiable explanation emerges, people flock to it, embracing the security of that explanation while giving up the freedom to think. Unfortunately, such unquestionable views are often conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories usually consist of such a narrative structure: "Someone/some group secretly planned a certain conspiracy, and their purpose is to damage the interests of the opposite party and gain the interests of their own." U.S. biological weapons” and the rumors circulating in China that “coronavirus is America’s biological weapons” belong to this narrative structure. The hallmark of such explanations is that they reduce a complex, potentially multifactorial, event to the ulterior motives of someone or an organization. Some of them are very ridiculous, such as "China spreads the virus through 5G". To break these rumors, you only need to clarify simple scientific knowledge, but you need to be vigilant that these rumors will develop their variants or upgrades at any time, as long as the facts The conspiracy theory has a steady stream of supporters without being (subjectively) convincingly clarified. As psychology researchers, we are interested in what makes people believe in a conspiracy theory and what are the cognitive mechanisms behind it.

How are our beliefs formed?

Someone who believes in a conspiracy theory is equivalent to someone taking a conspiracy theory as one of their beliefs. The formation of conspiracy theories shares a set of cognitive processes with the formation of beliefs. This set of cognitive processes can be purely rational deductive reasoning: a conclusion that must be true is obtained by following proven premises and reliable forms of logical reasoning. Yet the real world is not made up of pure mathematical and philosophical axioms, it also contains endless contingency. The limitations of inductive reasoning and our limited stock of knowledge define the boundaries of what beliefs we can form, even if we wish to arrive at firm beliefs based on reason and knowledge alone. Inductive reasoning is the drawing of general conclusions from particular phenomena, which may be infinitely close to the truth but never promise the truth. The basis of our reasoning is "known information". These knowledges that have been stored in our memory are like a big net. They are like knots, connected by different degrees of strong and weak ties. According to the model of semantic memory proposed by Collins and Loftus (Model of semantic memory, Collins and Loftus, 1975), when a knot is activated, the knots connected to it are also activated one by one. The speed of activation is determined by the strength of the bond. The stronger the correlation between propositions and the thicker the bond, the more likely it is that the propositions it connects can be quickly associated. For example, causality is a very strong connection. Rumors take advantage of this by connecting events with their simple cause-and-effect relationships, stubbornly lingering in our minds and being revived over and over again. When we talk about the new coronavirus, propositional knots such as the cause of the virus, the route of virus transmission, and viral infectious diseases are activated. If we have heard the rumor that "the new crown is a Bill Gates conspiracy" before, then whether it is correct or not, this view will serve as a "possible cause of the new crown virus", connected to the concept of the new crown virus through a causal bond.

In addition to this, the timing and frequency of information also affects whether it is more easily remembered by us. This is known as the recency effect and the frequency effect. Wyer and Srull (1980, 1981) compare this effect to documents in a paper basket, where the most recent document appears at the top of the basket, it is easily detected first, and The same documents that are frequently found in the basket are also more likely to be found. Unfortunately, social media, the hardest-hit area for rumors to spread, uses algorithms to force users to “only watch what they like to watch,” thereby exacerbating the frequency effect.

man: irrational animal

People's irrationality is exposed in the first step in his decision-making. Ideally, in order to arrive at a conclusion, one should search as much information as possible in the relevant field, find all the arguments for and against it, weigh the reliability of this information, and draw conclusions through conditional reasoning. However, a study in social psychology (Wyer, 2008) showed that people stop searching for information in memory and make choices directly when they feel they can draw conclusions.

Bounded rationality prevents people from seriously thinking about everything, but this lack of practicality is also an expedient measure to adapt to social life. In daily life, people need to think quickly and make quick judgments about countless events every day. To accomplish this challenge more efficiently, we tend to use “heuristics” instead of logical thinking, which can be understood as mental shortcuts that speed up finding solutions by reducing the cognitive burden of decision-making the process of. Availability bias is the most well-known of these: people tend to think that the easier it is to remember, the more likely it is to be true. It is a pity that we live in a world where information is complex and mixed, and frequently appearing information is not necessarily a fact, but more likely to be a lie laid out by an algorithm. When we hear the first rumor we may think it's just a joke, but as more and more people, even our friends and relatives, agree with the rumor, we tend to believe it has some truth.

I only believe what I identify with

However, just browsing rumors frequently is not enough to make someone a staunch fan of rumors. In Germany, people who firmly believe that the new crown epidemic prevention measures are just a politician's conspiracy will not follow the safety distance of 1.5 meters. They will participate in the parade without wearing a mask, holding signs "against the Bill Gates conspiracy" and "against the 5G network" to resist Christian All the scientific explanations and government anti-epidemic measures by Professor Drosten. What makes these people so strongly believe in conspiracy theories about the new coronavirus?

When a belief aligns with someone's own worldview, or even reinforces his self-worth, he is motivated by this "good self-feeling", constantly looking for evidence to support the belief and refuting those that contradict it. Arguments - This is motivated reasoning. As we mentioned earlier, simple and powerful conspiracy theories provide "scapegoats" that save people from facing the unknown, meaningless, and exhausting thinking. "The Chinese/Bill Gates should be responsible for the epidemic, not us", this view relieves the responsibility of many people, so that they are blindfolded and no longer understand the opposite Opinions, treat people with different opinions as "others", form a community with people who agree with their opinions, and only communicate with them, making their opinions more and more extreme (group polarization), this effect is also called For the echo chamber effect (echo chamber).

entertain to death

Algorithms and online communities have made the echo chamber effect more and more intense, and social media, which was supposed to be a platform for communication, has become a platform of hate and abuse - this may be the most noteworthy "entertainment to death" of modern times. Some like-minded voices are repeated and distorted in the repetition, leading most people in relatively closed environments to think that these distorted stories are all the truth. In order not to destroy the self-worth built on these distorted narratives, people not only stop listening to other opinions, but may also develop out-group hostility, viewing dissidents as heretics. In this new crown epidemic, the spread of malice is no slower than the spread of the virus, and what this will bring, history has told us.

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