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As we break for Easter, real life increasingly feels like fiction. Who needs conspiracy theories, when America’s president acts as if he really is a Russian agent? A new poll has found a significant decline in active adult use of social media over the past year, as people withdraw from the noise. But too many of us know someone who has fallen down the rabbit hole.
An old university friend has come to believe that climate change is a hoax. Whatever I say, he claims I’ve been hoodwinked. Like all good conspiracists, he bolsters his case with some genuine facts: the IPCC was wrong to claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; polar bear numbers are rising in some places. This was maddening enough, but then he started hinting that “the Jews” were behind it. An easy-going, intelligent man has gone from curiosity to dogmatism to that particular form of racism which pops up throughout history as a warning to us all. I’ve shut him out.
Misinformation long predates the internet. The Great Fire of Rome in AD64 was followed by allegations that Nero had started it deliberately.
And there is good evidence that the prevalence of conspiracy theories rises during unsettling historical shifts. A painstaking analysis by Joseph E Uscinski and Joseph M Parent, of letters written to US newspapers between 1890 and 2010, found two spikes in conspiracy beliefs: the first was just before the year 1900, at the height of the second industrial revolution. The second was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at the start of the cold war.
So while today’s online fragmentation of news and the cesspool of social media are deeply unhelpful, our deeper problem may be politics. We humans have a basic need to understand why the unexpected happens, especially when it’s negative. We need to maintain a positive image of our particular group. At times of disjuncture, we become more willing to turn to outlandish sources of information. If we don’t trust our institutions, this may get worse.
Last year, two studies found majorities in most western countries expressing dissatisfaction with democracy, and ratings have worsened in most places. In 2020, Cambridge researchers found that dissatisfaction with democracy was at its highest level for 25 years, especially in the UK and US.
The internet has certainly given licence to talking heads in pursuit of clickbait. But many leaders and institutions have also proved wanting. After the 2008 financial crisis, almost no one (outside Iceland) went to jail. Rich bankers elsewhere, as far as most people could see, just went merrily on. Then carmakers were found to have been fixing their emissions tests for years. Pharmaceutical companies made billions out of fuelling an opioid crisis. It may still turn out that Covid-19 emerged from a Wuhan lab — we just don’t know. Real scandals, of course, are exposed by journalists, scientists and whistleblowers, not by fanatics on Reddit. But you can see why people become cynical.
The literature suggests that people can be drawn to the rabbit hole inadvertently, attracted by the sheer entertainment value, or by genuine interest in a topic which then becomes a gateway to other beliefs. They don’t always notice what is happening in the early stages. Later, they start to “connect the dots” between unrelated things. A classic example is the utterly bizarre QAnon narrative, which encompasses the origins of Covid-19 and the idea that Democrats ran a paedophile ring out of a Washington DC pizza parlour. By the time they reach this stage of delusion, believers have locked themselves into the echo chamber.
Debunking is hard, because logic doesn’t work. Offering a mainstream explanation leads to accusations that you’ve been taken in by the monopoly media (an argument I am familiar with, from my extensive practice with the obsessives among London taxi drivers). Experts suggest that one strategy is to discover what emotional need the conspiracy is satisfying, and then supply it in another way. Some neuroscience research, for example, suggests that conspiracies engage the same brain region as love and friendship: which seems to indicate we should reach out to someone rather than cut them off. That’s a big ask. Studies tend to describe conspiracists as being socially isolated, avoiding people who challenge their beliefs.
What’s terrifying is that we are all susceptible. In experiments, the Cambridge psychology professor Sander van der Linden has found that only 4 per cent of people can correctly identify all of the bogus stories presented to them, because we all tend to accept information that is consistent with our prior beliefs, and reject the opposite. In his book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity he suggests we should inoculate ourselves against fake news through “prebunking”: preparing our mental defences before we come across false information — rather as a defence lawyer might forewarn a jury of the prosecutor’s case.
As an example, he cites the Oregon Petition, signed by thousands of experts rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, of whom few are climate scientists. Van der Linden found that people predisposed to climate denial become more sceptical of this petition when they are told in advance that conservative lobbyists are using it to conceal the extent of expert consensus, in order to protect oil company profits.
I would try this on my friend if I was still talking to him. Instead, I’ve decided that I will make an extra effort to read things I disagree with, and avoid the temptation to blame people I don’t know. This may be the only way to stay sane.