Why smart people fall for conspiracy theories
Three ways to stop yourself from going down the rabbit hole.
When I think about the old adage that it’s good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out, the name that pops into my head is Bret Weinstein.
Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, formerly of Evergreen State College in Washington. In 2017, some faculty and student activists proposed a “day of absence” for white people on campus as a form of protest against racism. Weinstein objected, saying that “one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.” In the ensuing blowup, his classroom was occupied by protesters accusing him of racism and the campus was shut down due to threats. Their positions untenable, he and his wife, Heather Heying, sued and then resigned in a $500,000 settlement from the college. It was genuinely unfair and they were genuinely wronged for expressing a reasonable critique of campus activists.
But since then, Weinstein has become a full-on conspiracy theorist. In his mild, professorial voice, he has suggested that the October 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel may have been an attempt to divide the vaccine-skeptic community (of which he is an ardent member); that China might be smuggling soldiers into the United States via the Darién Gap; and that Kamala Harris’s earrings at the debate were designed to look like they might contain an earpiece feeding her the answers to questions, so as to bait online sleuths, even though they were in fact just earrings (he was correct about that last part).
Rather than damaging his prospects, Weinstein’s descent into crankery has allowed him to build a new career as a public (pseudo) intellectual: he cohosts a successful podcast with his wife, has a million followers on X, and has almost a half-million YouTube subscribers. He has established himself as a guru, treated with reverence by a large and growing fanbase. Other, even more prominent conspiracy theorists including Tim Pool are enjoying boom times as well, and you could have added Alex Jones to that list if he hadn’t managed to get sued into bankruptcy after engaging in the most execrable Sandy Hook conspiracy theorizing imaginable.
I reached out to Weinstein on X to ask if he would discuss some of the specific conspiracies he has promoted. He said he wouldn’t “participate in a hit piece.”
What I find most challenging about the present online misinformation ecosystem is that there is often an undeniable kernel of truth to the cranks’ complaints: Major outlets, famous academics, and other sources of mainstream authority often do get important things wrong.
To take just three out of the countless available examples, look up the details of the controversy over an encounter between a Covington Catholic High School student and a Native American protester at the Lincoln Memorial; the early, panicky insistence that the coronavirus couldn’t possibly have come from a lab; or the blatant and widespread misreporting about the shooting of Jacob Blake, who, contrary to some reporting, was armed with a knife at the moment he was shot and had resisted officers’ attempts to arrest him — misreporting that surely contributed to the rioting and deadly violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
These examples and others demonstrate that an informed, educated person shouldn’t take mainstream voices as gospel. But when does skepticism lead to all-out crankery?
There isn’t an easy answer, but I have spent a lot of time writing and thinking about online misinformation — the first feature story I ever wrote was a Globe article about anti-Obama rumors — and I’ve noticed that those who go off the rails exhibit some consistent hallmarks. Taking note of these can help keep us from falling down the rabbit hole ourselves.
First, conspiracy theorists speak in totalizing language that erases the nuances of human beings and human organizations. The star conservative conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, for example, has called the Democratic Party a “criminal enterprise,” casting it as a vast mafialike organization capable of just about any sort of depravity (including, yes, “stealing” the 2020 election). Clearly, the Democratic Party, whatever you think of it, is a big, messy institution consisting of all sorts of individual actors and factions, often with competing agendas. When you acknowledge this reality, it’s harder to treat it as some faceless Other with a bottomless capacity for evil.
Second, conspiracy theorists have great difficulty accurately expressing the views of their perceived adversaries. Take the common liberal trope about Donald Trump’s supporters: to argue that they support Trump simply because they are racist is to engage in caricature (especially given Trump’s rising support among many groups of nonwhite voters). The left-leaning University of California-Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild provides an excellent primer on not caricaturing other groups in her book Strangers in Their Own Land, a moving (and — to this liberal — jarring) 2016 ethnography of Tea Party Republicans in Louisiana.
Understanding a perspective does not require agreeing with it, but if you are incapable of even describing your ideological opponents’ views without making them sound like monsters, you’re probably on the wrong track.
Finally, conspiracy theorists rarely acknowledge when their predictions have been wrong, and why. Members of QAnon, for instance, hang on even after Q’s so-called prophecies fail to come true again and again. If you find it difficult to honestly reckon with the times you’ve been wrong, that’s a red flag.
Maybe this all comes down to something simple: Find the person who makes the most unhinged possible claims on YouTube, make note of their cognitive habits, and then endeavor to do the opposite. Will this completely inoculate you against conspiracy theories? Of course not — we’re all human. But given how inundated we are with information — and given that simply accepting mainstream sources of authority at face value is no solution at all — a little bit of thinking about our internal processes for sifting truth from fiction can go a long way.
Jesse Singal is the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, cohost of the podcast Blocked and Reported, and author of the newsletter Singal-Minded. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
