"Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories"

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"Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories"

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Sep 19, 2017 5:03 pm

Article itself (a secondary source) is nothing thrilling or new. I noticed it because it's currently top-post on my Reddit feed. Interesting shift in emphasis lately though ala misguided county-level anti-drinking PSAs or something, like "Hey kids, CT is for *losers*!".

The source publication ( a generous moniker) is meh. It's called "Psy Post" and it's contributors are largely undergrad and MA psych students. But what I do find intriguing is that no less than 32 stories out of only a few hundred there (many in the past few months) are about negative social consequences of being a "conspiracy theorist" : you are basically an under-educated, socially anxious, narcissistic loser with poor self-esteem if you do. In fairness, alot of this is probably true alot of the time.

But then it can feel like we're moving towards some kind of epistemological hygiene campaign or something.

Do you suffer from a nagging interest in the machinations of political power and a persistent feeling that alliances between certain of their organs is not entirely transparent to the public and that mass media may be unduly influenced, even to the point of total mistrust or skepticism, by its enmeshment within these alliances? Are you quixotically trying to map it out yourself? Don't be such a loser! Help is available. Talk to your doctor today.


Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, study finds
ERIC W. DOLAN September 17, 2017
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Man holding an anti-Obama "birther" conspiracy sign at a Tea Party protest at the Minnesota capitol in 2010. (Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue/Flickr)
New research helps to explain why the belief in election fraud is common in the United States, even though research has failed to find convincing evidence that it is a problem.

The study, published in the scientific journal Political Research Quarterly, found evidence that conspiratorial thinking and motivated partisan reasoning both have a strong influence on the belief in election-related conspiracy theories.

“My coauthor, Joseph Parent, came to me with the idea of studying conspiracy theories,” said Joseph E. Uscinski of the University of Miami. “When we got into it, there had been little systematic analysis of why people believed conspiracy theories, and what the consequences of those beliefs were. I have remained interested in the topic because it is a fun one to study most importantly, but also because it is so relevant to our current politics.”

The researchers used a survey of 1,230 Americans, conducted before and after the 2012 presidential election, to examine why some people believed widespread fraud had swung the outcome.

Before the election, 62 percent of the participants said they believed that if their preferred candidate lost, voter fraud would be involved. But that percentage dropped down to 39 percent after the election. The drop was largely correlated with partisanship.

Because Obama won, Democrats were less likely to believe in fraud while Republicans became more likely to believe that dirty tricks were involved.

“Conspiracy theories are for losers,” Uscinski told PsyPost. “People who are on the outside, people who lost, people who lack control, tend to believe in conspiracy theories.”

“We see this play out in our national debates: when Bush was president, Democrats were the ones propagating the conspiracy theories. They put forward theories about 9/11, war for oil, Halliburton, Cheney, Blackwater, etc. When Obama came to office, those theories became socially and politically inert. The prominent conspiracy theories came from Republicans and were about Obama faking his birth certificate, killing the kids at Sandy Hook, Benghazi, etc.”

“Now that Trump is president, the popular conspiracy theories come from Democrats and focus on Trump and Russia,” Uscinski said. “Conspiracy theories follow the ebb and flow of power and losers tend to propagate them the most.”

But partisanship wasn’t the only driving force behind election-related conspiracy theories. The researchers also found that conspiratorial predispositions strongly predicted the belief that if one’s preferred candidate were to lose, fraud would be involved. People with conspiratorial predispositions agreed with statements such as “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.”

“The people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to do so because of an underlying disposition towards seeing events and circumstances as the product of conspiracies,” Uscinski explained to PsyPost. “This is why some people (and we all have a friend like this) believe in almost every conspiracy theory out there, and some people reject most conspiracy theories out of hand. It isn’t really evidence that drives people to believe in conspiracy theories, it’s their own biased interpretations of evidence.”

The study found no partisan differences when it came to conspiratorial predispositions, suggesting Democrats and Republicans have an equal number of conspiracists among their ranks.

The study, “The Effect of Conspiratorial Thinking and Motivated Reasoning on Belief in Election Fraud“, was also co-authored by Jack Edelson, Alexander Alduncin, Christopher Krewson, and James A. Sieja.

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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby Grizzly » Tue Sep 19, 2017 5:26 pm

Kelly, Mattis and McMaster aren't losers...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby Elvis » Tue Sep 19, 2017 8:38 pm

“The people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to do so because of an underlying disposition towards seeing events and circumstances as the product of conspiracies,” Uscinski explained to PsyPost.


Sooo... people believe in conspiracy theories because they believe in conspiracy theories?

This guy has obviously given the matter some thought. :roll:
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby 82_28 » Tue Sep 19, 2017 8:58 pm

Aversion to conspiracy theories are funny. Nobody is telling you to believe anything. My main answer is lay it on me. That said, having an open mind often causes people to think you don't have a position or think that you do and are attempting to 'convert' them into thinking something they don't want to think. I just lay off with friends and don't even get into it. The Socratic Method probably always works best. You can learn a lot from a true believer. Losers are people who can't fathom why there would be conspiracy theory believers in the first place.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby SonicG » Wed Sep 20, 2017 6:27 am

This is a rich equivalency...

(Democrats) put forward theories about 9/11, war for oil, Halliburton, Cheney, Blackwater, etc. When Obama came to office, those theories became socially and politically inert. The prominent conspiracy theories came from Republicans and were about Obama faking his birth certificate, killing the kids at Sandy Hook, Benghazi, etc.”


Haliburton vs. a faked massacre of children? Say wot?


Lifelong member...



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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:36 pm

SonicG » Wed Sep 20, 2017 11:27 am wrote:This is a rich equivalency...


That's sort of what I was getting at - the term means something very different than it meant even 5-10 years ago. What used to be attributed (almost solely) to paranoid nationalism is now attributed to the tragic natural selection of poverty and under-education apparently.

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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby JojoCivil » Wed Sep 20, 2017 9:55 pm

Do you suffer from a nagging interest in the machinations of political power and a persistent feeling that alliances between certain of their organs is not entirely transparent to the public and that mass media may be unduly influenced, even to the point of total mistrust or skepticism, by its enmeshment within these alliances? Are you quixotically trying to map it out yourself? Don't be such a loser! Help is available. Talk to your doctor today.


what are you some erudite genius with literary and scientific interests who gets laid and paid and overthrows conception in your spare time, loser?!?

too gud mon
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby overcoming hope » Wed Sep 20, 2017 10:16 pm

It's the conspiracy theory hokey pokey, put your left foot in, now put your right foot in.
Years ago for my sanity and others I had to just take the position that it is not my job to convince anyone of anything, but I will still point out that the word conspiracy did exist before the term 'conspiracy theory'.
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby Elvis » Wed Sep 20, 2017 10:43 pm

Theory of Conspiracy
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=40525
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby lucky » Thu Sep 21, 2017 5:03 am

As they say an open mind is good unless you let everything fall out.... And de facto does that mean winners are less likely to believe in C.T's
There's holes in the sky where rain gets in
the holes are small
that's why rain is thin.
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby JojoCivil » Thu Sep 21, 2017 6:58 pm

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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby Jerky » Fri Sep 22, 2017 6:35 pm

There certainly are some conspiracy theories that appeal to those who have trouble swimming in the mainstream and going with the flow. In fact, part of the recent weaponization of conspiracy theories that the New Fascist International has undertaken (evidence of which is all around for those with a long enough memory of trends manifesting in the milieu in question) is precisely this targeting of society's "losers" and promoting narratives that tell them they've been cheated out of their rightful place at the top of the heap, regardless of the fact that so many of them are angry, pitiful, anti-social unfuckables happy to let their parents and/or the state provide for their basic needs, rather than engaging in the kind of hustle that the immigrants they so despise seem to somehow be capable of.

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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby liminalOyster » Sun Oct 22, 2017 10:56 am

Puff piece first, then source paper.

Conspiracy Theorists Have a Fundamental Cognitive Problem, Say Scientists ( And it can affect all of us).

The world’s a scary, unpredictable place, and that makes your brain mad. As a predictive organ, the brain is on the constant lookout for patterns that both explain the world and help you thrive in it. That ability helps humans make sense of the world. For example, you probably understand by now that if you see red, that means that you should be on the lookout for danger.

But as scientists report in a new paper published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, sometimes people sense danger even when there is no pattern to recognize — and so their brains create their own. This phenomenon, called illusory pattern perception, they write, is what drives people who believe in conspiracy theories, like climate change deniers, 9/11 truthers, and “Pizzagate” believers.

The study is especially timely; recent polls suggest that nearly 50 percent of ordinary, non-pathological Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory.

Illusory pattern perception — the act of seeking patterns that aren’t there — has been linked to belief in conspiracy theories before, but that assumption has never really been supported with empirical evidence. The British and Dutch scientists behind the new study are some of the first to show that this explanation is, in fact, correct.

Think the Illuminati run the world? That likely depends on what patterns you see.
The researchers came to this conclusion after conducting five studies on 264 Americans who focused on the relationship between irrational beliefs and illusory pattern perception. Initial studies revealed that the compulsion to find patterns in an observable situation was in fact correlated with irrational beliefs: People who saw patterns in random coin tosses and chaotic, abstract paintings were more likely to believe in conspiratorial and supernatural theories.

The study showed how susceptible people can be to external influences, too. Reading about paranormal or conspiracy beliefs, the researchers report, caused a “slight increase in the perception of patterns in coin tosses, paintings and life,” and reading about one conspiracy theory made people more likely to believe in another one.

“Following a manipulation of belief in one conspiracy theory people saw events in the world as more strongly casually connected, which in turn predicted unrelated irrational beliefs,” write the authors.

The researchers suggest that irrational beliefs are born from pattern perception because of the “automatic tendency to make sense of the world by identifying meaningful relationships between stimuli.” But distortions can happen, and the brain can connect dots that are actually nonexistent. People are bad at judging what’s random and believe that, often times, patterns are actually coincidences, which leads to irrational connections between unrelated stimuli. For example, just because societal power is dominated by the rich does not mean those rich people are Illuminati Satanists, though that is a thing that many people believe.

Fortunately, other scientists have found a way to block the pervasiveness of illusory pattern perception: critical thinking. In a previous interview, North Carolina State University psychology professor Anne McLaughlin told Inverse that critical thinking is something that can be taught, and if people are trained in the right way, pseudoscience and false conspiracies can be combated with logic and reasoning. The brain may try to make false connections, but that doesn’t mean you have to believe it.

https://www.inverse.com/article/37463-c ... perception


Source paper:

Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural

Abstract
A common assumption is that belief in conspiracy theories and supernaturalphenomena are grounded in illusory pattern perception. In the presentresearch we systematically tested this assumption. Study 1 revealed that suchirrational beliefs are related to perceiving patterns in randomly generatedcoin toss outcomes. In Study 2, pattern search instructions exerted an indirecteffect on irrational beliefs through pattern perception. Study 3 revealed thatperceiving patterns in chaotic but not in structured paintings predictedirrational beliefs. In Study 4, we found that agreement with texts supportingparanormal phenomena or conspiracy theories predicted pattern perception.In Study 5, we manipulated belief in a specific conspiracy theory. Thismanipulation influenced the extent to which people perceive patterns inworld events, which in turn predicted unrelated irrational beliefs. Weconclude that illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanismaccounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... .2331/epdf


This stuff is pretty boring at this point I guess. But I like the shift in emphasis towards "patterns" rather than "theories" -- a la "consensus patterns," "the official pattern(ing)" and "non-ordinary patterns."
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Oct 22, 2017 6:30 pm

Losers are also more likely to believe in Santa Claus.

Of course, the conspiracy of Santa Claus proves that not just hundreds or thousands, but even millions, can and do somehow keep their mouths shut about huge conspiracies.
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Re: "Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theorie

Postby Burnt Hill » Sun Oct 22, 2017 7:52 pm

stickdog99 » Sun Oct 22, 2017 6:30 pm wrote:Losers are also more likely to believe in Santa Claus.

Of course, the conspiracy of Santa Claus proves that not just hundreds or thousands, but even millions, can and do somehow keep their mouths shut about huge conspiracies.


And the five year olds are convinced he exists! Ha ha, little fools!
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