very early in my career as a
psychologist when I was an undergrad in
fact I got interested in anything a
little bit weird the weird side of
psychology or anything to do with false
memories or believing in magic and
ghosts and psychic powers and Bigfoot
and stuff like that I was into that and
that's what led me to my career in the
psychology of conspiracy theories and in
those early days when I was getting
interested in weird psychology I was
very influenced by books about science
and skepticism not least of which
flim-flam by James Randi and so I want
to join everybody here in saluting Randi
so with my talk today I want to very
quickly run through a few aspects of our
psychology that can conspire so to speak
to make us susceptible to conspiracy
theories and I'd like to start with a
little thought experiment so I'd like
you to imagine that it's mid 1960s and
you work for NASA and more specifically
you work for the Apollo missions part of
the crew who've been tasked with putting
humans on the moon before the end of the
decade now president kennedy he famously
said that america would put men on the
moon before the end of the decade not
because it was easy but because it was
hard but I want you to imagine that it
turns out it's really hard it's not
going very well and bear in mind that
this is during the Cold War the Cold
War is heating up the space race is
reaching a climax the Soviets have
already put the first satellite in space
they put the first human in orbit and it
looks like now they're going to put the
first people on the moon as well so the
pressure is on this does not look good
it looks like the Soviets are gonna beat
America to the moon as well and so now
imagine that your boss comes to you and
says there's a change of plan turns out
we're not gonna be able to make it to
the moon so we're gonna fake it instead
we're gonna fake the moon landing we've
already booked the studio it's in
Arizona we've got all the prop moon
rocks we've labeled them A, B, and C we've
got Stanley Kubrick has signed on to
direct nobody is ever going to know that
we faked the moon landing
so I want you to imagine yourself in
this situation and ask yourself would
you have gone along with it would you
have been part of a conspiracy to fake
the moon landing should we do a show of
hands is anybody so that's what I
expected there are a few people willing
to admit it if somebody nearby you
raised their hand you might want to
watch your back but but most people said
no probably not
I would not fake the moon landing and so
(I think my clicker is not working) until
I based (whoops now it is - conspiracy all
right I'll give it a minute) so I based
this thought experiment on a study by
colleagues of mine Karen Douglas and
Robbie Sutton and this is what they did
basically they got a bunch of college
students and they asked them this
question if you had found yourself in
these circumstances would you have faked
the moon landing and for good measure
they also asked would you have killed
Princess Diana would you have faked
climate change data would you have
manufactured the AIDS virus would you
have covered up the existence of aliens
and reassuringly most of the college
students who they asked said no I
wouldn't dream of it on a scale of one
being definitely not to seven being
absolutely I would do all these
conspiracies I wish I could the average
was about a 2 I think the average
score was about a two so most people
said they wouldn't dream of it
but there were a few people who said
they were maybe willing under the
circumstances to take part in all these
conspiracies and the interesting thing
about these people is that the people
who said they were maybe more willing to
take part in the conspiracies they were
the same people who said I think these
conspiracy theories are true
I think the moon-landing really was
faked I think Princess Diana was killed
by a conspiracy and so on and so what
the authors argue is that this reflects
a psychological bias called the
projection bias and Sigmund Freud he
famously talked about projection as a
psychological tendency but Freud talked
about projection as this kind of illicit
thing where we project our socially
undesirable tendencies onto somebody
else and we say I am a perfectly fine
human being everybody else is terrible
and we're projecting outwards that's not
what psychologists think of projection
any more we we understand projection is
a very general
psychological bias whereby to understand
anything that happens in the world to
understand other people's behavior we
imagine ourselves in their circumstances
and this is a very useful thing to
predict other people's behavior if we
see somebody raise a glass of water to
their face we have to understand what
are they probably going to do next and
we think if I were doing this I would
probably take a sip of this water I
would not take a bite out of the glass
or something crazy like that
and so this person who I'm watching
that's probably what they're gonna do
they're gonna take a sip and so this
helps us understand the world but in
some cases like in this experiment we
are projecting outwards our
Machiavellian traits our desire our
willingness to take part in conspiracies
and if you're the kind of person who
thinks I would probably conspire given
the opportunity then you project that
out and you imagine that the world is
full of potential conspirators everybody
else probably would as well and if you
live in a world full of potential
conspirators then it becomes more likely
that historically somebody did that that
these conspiracy theories are true that
somebody did fake the moon landing
and so there's projection biases this is the
first inclination that psychology plays
a role in people's acceptance of
conspiracy theories it's not all to do
with the facts it's to do with our
psychological understanding of the world
as well and so for the next
psychological tendency I'd like to show
you a short video some of you may have
seen this before if you haven't please
just watch along and think about what
you see happening
so I should say first of all that this
is from an experiment a classic
experiment in social psychology from the
1940s in the original study there was no
music I've added this for dramatic
effect but the point of this study is we
see this rudimentary video of these
shapes moving around the screen and if
most of you are like the participants in
the original study you will have seen
not just an arbitrary display of shapes
moving around a screen but you will have
understood this in terms of a story a
story involving characters, characters
acting out their motivations and their
beliefs and their desires and so many
people when they see this they see it as
a story about like a jilted lover this
big triangle hassling the other two
shapes and chasing them around some
people see it as a story about children
in a school playground fighting some
people see it as a story about a witch
enticing children into her house there
are many different stories that people
see but the point is that only one
participant in the original study
described this purely in geometric terms
as a video of I guess circle moves
inside a rectangle and things like that
everybody else understood it as a story
about people characters and so this
study it shows how little it takes to
engage that aspect of our psychology the
aspect that leads us to understand the
world in terms of motives and desires
and I want to be clear that I'm not
saying it's wrong of us to see this
video as a story about characters the
researchers designed it this way they
had this in mind and they painstakingly
animated this video it was in 1940 so
they had to cut these shapes out of
cardboard and frame by frame move them
around and they deliberately made it
look like this chase scene and they
talked about that in their in their
paper but the point is it doesn't take
much to engage this aspect of our brain
just a few shapes moving around the
screen and so then there's another study
by Karen Douglas it was published last
year where they used this video they
showed participants the same video I
just showed you without the dramatic
music I assume and then instead of
asking the participants to describe what
they saw happening they used a set of
scales and they had participants rate
the shapes on these scales and the
questions referred to how conscious
were these shapes on a scale of one to
seven how alive were they
I'm motivated were they and questions
like that and so the higher participants
rated the shapes the stronger their
tendency to see the world in these terms
in terms of motives and intent and in
addition to that the researchers asked
participants about conspiracy theories
how much do you believe these various
conspiracy theories again on scales of
like one to seven, seven being I think
this is true, one being I don't think
this is true and they find that those
two scores were correlated so the more
conscious and motivated participants saw
these shapes as the more likely they
were to believe conspiracy theories so
this leads me to a study that I did
looking at this same tendency but from
quite a different angle instead of using
that video that Karen Douglass used what
we did was we used a set of ambiguous
sentences sentences that could be
understood as describing something that
happened on purpose or that could be
describing something that happened by
accident and so these are some examples
of the sentences we used: "she kicked the
dog" when you read that you might imagine
somebody coming home angry and
distracted and the dog gets in her way
and so she kicks it out of the way or
you might imagine somebody who's
carrying a pile of laundry and can't see
the dog and trips over the dog by
accident and similarly "he set the house
on fire" maybe you imagine somebody
arsonist laughing gleefully as he says
fire to a horse or maybe you imagine
somebody falling asleep with a lit
cigarette and accidentally burning down
the house and so the point is these are
ambiguous and we did a similar procedure
to what Karen Douglass did to quantify
this bias we just added up the number of
sentences that people in interpreted as
intentional and that number the number
of intentional sentences again
correlated with belief in conspiracy
theories the more of these sentences
that somebody understood as intentional
the more they tended to believe
conspiracy theories and so what I think
this represents is an intentionality
bias we all have this bias to understand
the world in terms of intent and when we
come across ambiguous events that might
have been accidental or might have been
done on purpose we are biased we're
inclined towards thinking that probably
happened on purpose and so why does this
relate to conspiracy theories
I think because conspiracy theories
paint a world in which everything
happens on purpose nothing happens by
accident everything was controlled and
planned and executed by the conspirators
and so to give a real-world example
think about the Malaysian Airlines
flight mh370 that disappeared a few
years ago one way of understanding this
would be it was probably an accident it
was a malfunction or pilot error
accidental something like that
or we could understand it as something
that happened intentionally somebody
planned this it was a terrorist action
or the pilot did it on purpose or there
was a larger government conspiracy
behind it and so to the extent that we
are indulging in our intentionality bias
or to put it another way to the extent
that we're failing to overwrite our
intentionality bias we're going to be
more receptive to these kind of
conspiracy theories so a third bias
that's relevant here is something called
the proportionality bias and that's the
fancy way of saying when something big
happens we expect that something big
probably caused it or on the other hand
when something small happens we assume
that it has a small explanation and so
to stick with the example of aviation
disasters we could think about flight
TWA 800 the plane which exploded over
Long Island New York in the 90s and
immediately provoked conspiracy theories
which are still popular to this day the
idea that maybe this was shot down some
people talked about maybe seeing a
missile being launched at this plane
maybe it was some kind of government
operation or maybe at least the
government has covered up what they know
about this event so that's a fairly big
event the plane was destroyed everybody
on board was killed this was a tragic
shocking fairly momentous event we could
compare that with a similar kind of
event but which had a smaller outcome
which had a smaller magnitude for
example the US Airways flight which
crash-landed on the Hudson a few years
ago and there was a film made about this
Sully the pilot successfully managed to
land this plane on the Hudson River
nobody was seriously harmed everybody
made it out alive and there have been
barely any conspiracy theories about
this event either at the time or since
people are satisfied with the small
mundane explanation
that this was a bird strike a bird flew
into the engine of the plane causing a
malfunction and they had to ditch into
the river and so the big event it
elicits this big explanation this was a
grand conspiracy where is the small
event we seem to be more satisfied with
a small explanation and so this has been
tested in controlled psychological
studies the general setup of the
experiments is that the researchers
create fake news stories a fictitious
news event in which the magnitude of the
outcome is manipulated so some
participants they read a story about a
president of a fictitious country being
assassinated and dying other
participants read about the same
fictitious president of the same
fictitious country there was an
assassination attempt but miraculously
the president survived and so we have a
big event and a small event when the
consequences are big the president dies
people are more receptive to conspiracy
theories when the event is small the
president survives people reject the
conspiracy theories and so there's a
perfect real-life example of this as
well of course which is the Kennedy
assassination which has provoked some of
the most enduring and popular conspiracy
theories of the 20th and 21st century
basically from the moment of the
assassination there were surveys within
a few days within a week of the
assassination and at that time something
like eight or nine out of ten Americans
thought there was more to this this was
not a lone gunman there was a conspiracy
behind this and that is true to this day
more than half of Americans think there
was a conspiracy behind the
assassination of President Kennedy and
it seems understandable from the point
of view of this proportionality bias
this was a huge momentous shocking event
it couldn't possibly be explained by
something as small and simple as a lone
gunman Lee Harvey Oswald some guy who
most people had never heard of before
just got out of bed one day and decided
to change the course of history
according to our proportionality bias
this is not an intuitively satisfying
explanation and so we might become more
receptive to bigger explanations
explanations which posit a grand
conspiracy that people knew about this
in advance there are more people
involved and it's still being covered up
and we could compare that to another
similar event but which had a different
kind of an outcome which had a smaller
outcome like the attempted
assassination of Ronald Reagan in the
1980s Reagan was shot he came very close
to dying but the doctors managed to save
his life and he survived and there have
been barely any conspiracy theories
about this assassination attempt either
at the time or subsequently this was a
much smaller event the consequences were
of smaller magnitude and so people seem
to be more satisfied with the smaller
explanation they don't need to go
looking for a bigger explanation about a
conspiracy because this was such a small
event and so the last aspect of our
psychology I want to talk about is
perhaps the most fundamental ability
that we have our ability to recognize
patterns in the world to spot patterns
and to extract meaning and so this is a
visual illusion this is one of my
favorite visual illusions because I
think this looks like some kind of
spooky symbol that could be like the
seal of a secret society or something
this is a famous illusion it's called
the Kanizsa triangle and as you look
at this you will see it's composed of
two overlapping triangles one doesn't
have an outline the other one has a
black outline and one of the triangles
is sitting on top of these three circles
and the most remarkable thing about this
illusion I think is that the white
triangle the one that doesn't have an
outline the one that's sitting on top
it seems to be like whiter than white it
seems to pop out it seems to be a
different shade of white to the
background and it doesn't necessarily
work that well on screens like this but
when you see it in a nice printed
version on a piece of paper this really
pops out at you this white triangle on
top seems to be whiter than the rest of
it and of course none of this is true
none of that exists these there are no
triangles there there are no circles
they're just these incomplete parts
there's these three acute angles that
seem to form one of the triangles and
there's these three incomplete circles
that look like pac-man sort of things
none of the complete shapes are there
your brain is filling in the details
it's connecting the dots it's saying
this looks like it should be these
complete shapes and they're sort of
being overlapped and it fills in the
details behind the scenes and that's why
the triangle on top looks whiter than
white because your brain is telling you
this is a real thing this exists it is
there but it doesn't and
there is no different shade of white
here that triangle on top is exactly the
same shade as the background there is no
difference here this is all in your mind
and so in the real world when we're not
looking at visual illusions which have
been designed to trick us we often come
across these ambiguous visual
arrangements and we have to go looking
for the meaning there we have to think
is there a pattern here can I spot the
meaning and I've taken a couple of
pictures from a psychological study
where participants were presented with
these noisy visual arrays there was some
visual static maybe there's a pattern
hidden in there and so as you look at
this one you can probably see a shape
there
looks like the planet Saturn or UFO or
something like that but there's a shape
in there there's a pattern this is
another one from the same experiment
this is one of these noisy visual arrays
and as you look at this you might see a
pattern a lot of people say they see
like a human figure or a face in here or
something like that but an actual fact
there's nothing there this is purely
random visual static if you see a
pattern it's because your brain is
tricking you
your brain is connecting the dots
connecting them up into something that
makes sense but something which is not
actually there and so this is from a
study by Jennifer Whitson and Adam
Galinsky from 2008 they looked at
various forms of seeing illusory
patterns like this they looked at the
kind of visual patterns that I showed
you in those two pictures they also
looked at superstitions so thinking that
one event was somehow spookily related
to a particular outcome they looked at
seeing trends in the stock market
thinking that a raise in price or
decline in price was associated with
some event that came before that and
crucially for us they also looked at
conspiracies the idea that there was
some kind of conspiracy to cause a
particular outcome and what they find is
that for all of these different forms of
thinking these different kinds of tasks
people were more likely to see patterns
under certain circumstances when people
were made to feel like they lacked
control that they didn't have control
over their own circumstances they were
more likely to see visual patterns in
the kind of images I showed you a minute
a moment ago they were more likely to
endorse superstitious claims they were
more likely
see illusory correlations in stock
market data and they were more likely to
endorse conspiracy theories they're more
likely to think that somebody had
plotted to make something happen when
they were made to feel a lack of control
and so the authors argue that all these
different forms of thinking they
represent the same underlying tendency
that the ceaseless search for patterns
and for meanings we're constantly
meaning we're all we're constantly
trying to understand the world to take
in ambiguous data and turn it into
something that makes sense so whether
we're looking at ambiguous visual
images or stock market data or claims
about conspiracy theories these are all
representations of our search to
understand the world to spot the
patterns that are there and so to give
you a real-world example of
this I want to talk about one of my
favorite conspiracy theories conspiracy
ideas some of you may have heard of but
it's one of the more obscure conspiracy
theories to do with the Kennedy
assassination so this is a frame from
the Zapruder film which is very famous
many of you will have seen this is a
frame from just after the the Kennedy's
motorcade has emerged from behind this
street sign it was momentarily out of
view and this is kind of the first
moment that it becomes clear something
is wrong Kennedy's clutching his throat
in this unnatural way the first bullet
that hit him has struck and we all know
what happens next the gruesome head
shot but at this moment there's
something else here which seems a little
bit odd apart from Kennedy clutching his
throat like this there's another odd
object which is this umbrella right here
I'll point it out over here too it looks like
this umbrella in front of the street
sign half hidden we can't see the person
who's holding it but somebody has an
open umbrella here and people noticed
this and they said that doesn't really
make sense
it was raining earlier that morning in
Dallas but now it's a bright sunny day
it was sort of breezy
it wasn't umbrella weather nobody else
along the motorcade route had an open
umbrella just this one person who
happens to be right next to Kennedy
almost at the moment of his
assassination how can we explain this
and this is not an illusion this was a
real thing that was really there there
are other pictures from the scene of
this guy holding this
umbrella here's one he's circled there
here's another you can see him standing
there and even more intriguingly
eyewitnesses who saw this guy there they
said he wasn't just holding up this
umbrella but he was acting kind of
strangely with it he was hoisting it up
and down and twirling it around a little
bit in a conspicuous way and he wasn't
interviewed by the police at the time he
kind of left the scene and nobody spoke
to him and he was lost to history
for many years so conspiracy theorists
noticed this they said what is this out
to place umbrella doing here and right
next to Kennedy at the moment of his
assassination this must be connected
there must be a pattern here and so some
people thought maybe maybe he sees us
and maybe hiding in plain sight this is
the guy who assassinated Kennedy maybe
inside his umbrella there was some kind
of projectile firing mechanism maybe
this is the guy who shot Kennedy and you
know that's one hypothesis maybe we
wouldn't have known except that the
government tracked down this guy they
tracked down this umbrella man in the
1970s when they were reinvestigating
the assassination they found this guy
they put an ad for it in newspapers saying if
anybody knows who this guy with this
umbrella is let us know and a friend of
his did and he went in front of this
government investigation he was an
insurance salesman who lived in Dallas
at the time of the assassination called
Louis Stephen Witt remarkably this was
about 15 years after the assassination
and he still had the same umbrella
things were made to last back then you
can see it on the table in front of him
that is the very same umbrella and so of
course the first thing the government
did was they said let us take a look at
this umbrella let us open it up look for
a gun in there and it splayed itself
inside out like this obligingly and the
chairman of the committee said I guess
there's no gun in it he seemed kind of
disappointed by this but and so they
said well what why did you have this
umbrella what were you doing there and
Louis Stephen Witt he explained and it
turned out he was there he was
doing something intentionally but it was
far more obscure than anybody could have
possibly guessed he said this was a
heckle basically he knew that the black
umbrella was a sore spot for the Kennedy
family because JFK's dad
Joseph Kennedy had been ambassador to
Britain in the runup to
- World War 2 the British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain was criticised for
his policy of appeasement towards the
Nazis and Chamberlain was also noted for
carrying around a black umbrella and so
by extension this black umbrella
became a sore spot for the Kennedy
family Louis Stephen Witt he said oh the
President Kennedy's coming through town
I have a black umbrella I don't really
like Kennedy I'm gonna go and heckle him
I'm gonna wave this umbrella around that's
gonna tick him off a little bit and so
he did and unfortunately for Louie
Stephen Witt Kennedy got assassinated
basically the moment that he was passing
by Louis Stephen Witt he said in his
testimony if there was a Guinness world
record for being in the wrong place at
the wrong time doing the wrong thing he
would have won it and there wouldn't have
even have been a close runner-up so I
came across a quote I want to finish by
considering this quote describing this
umbrella man this is a quote from the
writer John Updike which he he wrote
this in 1967 in a talk of the town peace
for The New Yorker when the first book
had come out talking about this umbrella
man it still wasn't known who he was or
what he was doing John Updike said this
umbrella man our search to understand
this he said it shows how perilously
empiricism verges on magic and what he
was saying is we have these two facts
here we have this open umbrella we have
this assassinated President and of
course we want to see what is the
meaning here are these things connected
how can we explain this but those facts
don't exist in isolation those facts
require somebody to interpret them and
to explain them that's the hard part
that's up to us and for some people
relying on their psychological biases
towards seeing intentionality towards
proportionality towards finding patterns
they're going to be receptive to
conspiracy theories but this is much
more general than that we all rely on
these biases pretty much all the time to
understand the world around us it just
so happens I think that conspiracy
theories are particularly conspicuous
they demonstrate these biases in stark
relief whereas in most of our daily life
they just slip by unnoticed
so thank you for listening
