Schizotypy – The Rise of Conspiracy Theory

The mid-terms are over. The Senate, almost never in doubt given the vast array of Democratic seats at risk and the very few GOP slots not firmly within Republican control, belongs to Donald Trump. Anything from treaties to judicial appointments that requires only Senate approval are his. The House, regardless of voter restrictions and gerrymandering in red states, belongs to the Democrats. Expect House committees to launch multiple investigations previously stifled by Trump’s GOP colleagues, noting also that all appropriations bills must originate in the House. The country seems poised for increasing gridlock, polarization on steroids. War is not pretty. The 2020 presidential election is not that far off, and as Donald Trump rolling rallies prove, the President never stopped running for office.

But as this election has illustrated, smaller and smaller margins are determining the victor in all but the most red/blue committed regions. Segments of voters who never mattered before, either because they didn’t vote or because their numbers are so few, clearly made a difference. Social media has empowered tiny pockets of strange believers to aggregate online to create a hitherto otherwise small force of voters who have finally made a difference. Donald Trump’s base, a mixture of angry and displaced blue-collar workers, evangelicals, ultra-right-wing social conservatives and conspiracy theorists, has proven to be a solid and almost immutable bloc of his most committed supporters.

Conspiracy theorists are perhaps the most interesting subset of the Trump base, a breed apart. They see secret cabals in government (the Q-Anon vs. deep state) and espouse strange and scientifically unsustainable beliefs (like the flat-earthers), often believe that MSM (mainstream media) is left wing collective aimed at toppling Donald Trump and traditional white Christian American values or that Democrats are recruiting undocumented aliens from overseas to increase the number of non-white voters favoring liberal diversity polices.

Back on August 19^th in my Conspiracy Theories, Right on Q blog, I noted: Until recently, political conspiracy theorists have mostly arisen from that segment of any population that is out of political power, attacking the incumbents with dark secrets about how the winners stole that power from “the people.” Mostly, these people sit on the periphery of activism and usually do not vote in what they think is a system that will ignore their choice no matter the election process. But a strange phenomenon has occurred: today’s dominant conspiracy theorists come from the political party that controls both houses of Congress, the presidency, and most state legislatures and governorships. Huh?

It started with an unlikely, highly illogical, candidate whose political positions shifted like desert sands. To knock off a substantial flock of Republican presidential wannabes, Donald Trump instinctively understood that he could not use convention tactics. He needed a destabilizing political campaign laced with allegations against opponents that were devastating but unproveable. Like accusing Ted Cruz’ father of having participated in the assassination of John F Kennedy. Conspiracy theorists perked up their ears.

They also joined in a chorus of accusers that fabricated a litany of truly absurd claims against Hillary Clinton… and Donald Trump knew he had found a force that no presidential candidate had ever used before. “Lock her up!” they cried. Trump quoted statements from popular conspiracy theorists, people who had been making a living as “shock jocks” in the radio world where there were enough listeners to create a viable ad-supported model, as if they were true. The Internet was born to support conspiracy theories, and particularly older users – used to believing what they read in public media without question – were particularly vulnerable.

Beleaguered Trump used conspiracy theories to dislodge his opponents, one-by-one, with catchy epithets (Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Crooked Hillary) and totally fabricated statistics that resonated with this “whacky” conspiracy theory body of people… who actually became voters again. Trump was the underdog, and the old-line GOP and their “liberal” Democrats were the enemy, up to dirty tricks and rigging elections. Conspiracy theorists love underdogs.

But who are these individuals with such passionate beliefs in the absurd? How do they wind up so committed to outlandish and easily refutable beliefs, unwilling to entertain any logical explanation to the contrary? In Volume 10, Number 6, November 2015, the Journal of the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making reproduced excepts from an article by   Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler and Jonathan A. Fugelsang  On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit: “The Oxford English Dictionary defines bullshit as, simply, ‘rubbish’ and ‘nonsense,’ which unfortunately does not get to the core of bullshit…

“What might cause someone to erroneously rate pseudo-profound bullshit as profound? In our view, there are two candidate mechanisms that might explain a general ‘receptivity’ to bullshit. The first mechanism relates to the possibility that some people may have a stronger bias toward accepting things as true or meaningful from the outset…

“The second mechanism relates to a potential inability to detect bullshit, which may cause one to confuse vagueness for profundity.”

In an article entitled “See the Threads of Conspiracy Thinking” (reproduced in the November 14^th Lexology.com) citing the above work, Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm, a psychologist who helps trial lawyers delve into the psyches of potential jurors, recently focused on those who held firm conspiracy theory beliefs, tracking four variables that push (pull?) individuals into such strange theories:

Distrust and Eccentricity

The strongest psychological factor that accompanies conspiracy thinking is something called “Schizotypy.” It means interpersonal suspiciousness, social anxiety, and isolation. It characterizes those who distrust what they’re told, believe that events are controlled by others, feel ill at ease with the world, and see themselves as “having special insight into the machinations of these malevolent actors.”…

Belief in a Dangerous World

A second psychological factor characterizing conspiracy thinking is a belief in a lack of safety. Conspiracy thinkers are committed to the view that “the world is a dangerous place full of bad people.” As the authors point out, that is a relatively strange worldview to adopt because, typically, people will chose a worldview that makes them feel more comfortable (e.g., a “belief in a just world” would be at the other end of the spectrum). Belief in a dangerous world, however, might also add comfort in providing a ready explanation for everything…

Gullibility… and the Best-Named Psychological Scale Ever

The scale is called “Receptivity to Bullshit” (Pennycook et al., 2015 [see above quotes]). Yes, that is the actual, official, academically acknowledged and used name for this psychological scale, And it is exactly what it sounds like: A measure of how readily a person will accept something that is meaningless or unsupported. It is, the authors write, a “tendency to perceive profundity in nonsensical but superficially meaningful ideas,” or an “eagerness to seek or find meaning or patterns in ambiguous or random information.” It is measured by getting reactions to statements that seem to have come from a random-quote generator: “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena,” or “Imagination is inside exponential space time events.”…

Belief in Agency

The final factor, belief in agency, was found to lack a strong independent connection to conspiracy thinking, with most of the associated variation being explained by “Receptivity to Bullshit.” … A belief in agency refers to the psychological tendency to see intention behind actions and events. In other words, instead of saying “shit happens,” they are more likely to see purpose, reason, and motives even when, potentially, there aren’t any.

Fake news is the currency of conspiracy theorists. They manufacture that disinformation in droves. They reinforce each other with fabricated-“facts”-cited-as-reality, often vindicated by a quote or a tweet from the President himself based on such self-reinforcing “fabricated facts” to prove the premise. Circular reasoning that starts with a manufactured statement that virally achieves “legitimacy” the more often it is repeated. The sheer volume of viral messages, some repeaters adding their names to the false statement as if they vetted their “facts,” continues to validate the false underlying premise. The Russians have mastered the use of political disinformation, particularly preying on the gullibility of conspiracy theorists, to destabilize our electoral process, and they are hardly alone.

Without fake news, conspiracy theory taken as fact, there is no Donald Trump. But in the tug of war between the free speech provisions of the First Amendment and the ability to spread falsehood as fact though social media and ultimately into traditional media, is American democracy itself threatened when so many voters no longer vote based on what is real? How do we balance the dictates of free speech, essential to a modern democracy, with speech that threatens to disable democracy at its core?

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless we can begin to solve this conundrum in the immediate future, democracy may in fact fade into the oblivion of history books forcing all of us to live in a dark future of plutocracy or autocracy where the few control the rest… with an iron hand.