Originally published by Rita Handrich.
The researchers briefly review the past literature on conspiracy beliefs as reflecting a desire for control of the uncontrollable. Then they wonder if “reaffirming a sense of control” could serve to decrease the strength of the (ostensibly no longer needed) belief in a conspiracy. They designed two studies and we’ll describe only the second since it was based on a US sample rather than a Dutch sample (the source for the first study).
In the second study, the researchers used an as yet unpublished dataset collected in 1999 (N = 1,256; 771 men and 479 women, 6 gender unknown; median age between 35 and 44 years, median level of education was a college degree and median household income was between $40K and $59K) as the world awaited the potentially harmful event known as the Y2K bug. If you don’t have a clear recollection of how frightened people were about this issue, this Time Magazine story describes the reality vividly. Participants were recruited from a number of internet sites (e.g., online experiment pages of several psychological societies, university websites, Yahoo (which was big in 1999) and Y2K relevant websites.
The data was collected in the last three months of 1999 and asked participants about their beliefs on the Y2K bug as well as their perceptions of the government’s trustworthiness and their beliefs in a range of “popular conspiracy theories (e.g., about the Kennedy assassination, about the cover-up of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, and various others)”. One of the “various other” conspiracy beliefs was the idea that Y2K was “an evil scheme by computer programmers and businesses to make money”.
Here is some of what they found:
Lower education level was associated with stronger belief in four out of five conspiracy theories.
The more the participants trusted the government, the less likely they were to believe in four out of five conspiracy theories.
Those participants who believed in the Y2K conspiracy were also more likely to believe in four out of five other conspiracy theories.
The more threatened participants felt by the Y2K bug, the more likely they were to believe in four out of five conspiracy theories.
The researchers say that when people (in 1999) felt threatened by the Y2K bug, their beliefs in other conspiracy theories were stronger. Yet, those who felt less threatened by the Y2K bug were less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Since this was an old dataset, we cannot tell if those who were threatened by the Y2K bug were thus more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or if those who believed in conspiracies were more likely to see Y2K as a threat. The researchers point out that when things around us are unpredictable (as in uncertainty related to economic downturns, terrorist threats, or even climate change), beliefs in conspiracy theories increase. They see their study as validating the idea that our need for control is closely coupled with our tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.
From a litigation advocacy perspective, what this says is if there are conspiracy beliefs that arise based on your case narrative, you need to address those concerns, but you also need to find ways to give jurors a sense of control so they are less afraid and less in need of their conspiracy beliefs to help them sort out what happened. The fear of the unknown will drive many anxious people toward any convenient explanation, even if it has no foundation. Reassure them, and wild conjecture diminishes.
van Prooijen, J., & Acker, M. (2015). The Influence of Control on Belief in Conspiracy Theories: Conceptual and Applied Extensions Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29 (5), 753-761 DOI: 10.1002/acp.3161
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