This article is based on a Skeptical Inquirer Presents live online presentation on July 30, 2020.

I’m going to discuss the latest polls, particularly those about COVID-19 conspiracy theories. I’m going to consider why these theories are popular or not, and then I’m going to go meta. I don’t think I need to spend that much space addressing this audience about why conspiracy theories might be dangerous or why we should rely on authoritative information rather than on poorly sourced information.

I’ll describe what’s wrong with the popular discussions of conspiracy theories. What are the things that the journalists and perhaps some scholars are getting wrong? And I’m going to answer what I think is one of the more important questions nowadays: What are the dangers of believing the wrong things about beliefs in the wrong things?

To start, a conspiracy theory is an accusatory perception in which a small group of powerful people is acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good—and in a way that undermines our bedrock ground rules against the widespread use of force and fraud. In addition, this theory hasn’t been found to be true by the appropriate experts, using data and evidence that is available for anyone to refute.

There are numerous conspiracy theories about COVID-19 out there. There are, in fact, too many to debunk them all. We’ve seen a deluge, whether they’re about Bill Gates or George Soros being behind COVID-19 or that 5G technology is spreading the virus further. Some people have even responded by burning down cell towers. Some think that when a vaccine is released, we’re going to be microchipped and tracked by the government. Some think that Big Pharma is behind the COVID-19 “scam,” and they’re going to make money by selling us a phony vaccine for a phony disease. And others are saying that doctors and hospitals are faking patients to make money.

So there are a lot of weird theories out there. Luckily, not one of these is believed that widely.

Most COVID-19 conspiracy theories fall into two broad categories, which I’ve been polling on since March. The first is that the disease has been exaggerated for political gain, usually to hurt President Donald Trump in an election year. The other is that it is some sort of bioweapon created or spread on purpose. When we poll on the idea that COVID-19 is being exaggerated to hurt Trump, we get about 29 percent of Americans agreeing. We get a similar number, 31 percent, agreeing with the idea that it’s some form of bioweapon.

Some of the most-fringe ideas don’t convince as many people, but these two ideas do each get about a third of Americans buying in. How come? Why do people believe conspiracy theories? A more general question is why do people believe anything really? And the answer to that question is, well, there are a lot of reasons. What’s important to know is that there’s not going to be any single reason people might believe in conspiracy theories, because there are so many conspiracy theories out there, all with their own idiosyncratic reasons people would come to believe them.

So conspiracy theory is a big bucket, and there could be a lot of reasons somebody could believe in any specific theory. I’ve also been polling on other ideas that have to do with COVID-19. And conspiracy theories aren’t the only ones that are dangerous. For example, in my most recent poll of Americans, we got almost 15 percent believing that people who are right with God won’t be injured by the coronavirus; almost 30 percent believed that prayer will protect them from COVID-19. Those ideas can be just as dangerous as believing that the disease is exaggerated.

So why do people believe conspiracy theories? In my research, the big explanatory factors are the latent dispositions that people have. The two I focus on are conspiracy thinking and denialism. Conspiracy thinking exists on a continuum; we all have it to one degree or another. Some people have it very strongly; others have it far less. But most people are somewhere in the middle. People who have very high levels of conspiracy thinking tend to think that everything is the product of a shadowy conspiracy. The people on the low end tend to be resistant to conspiracy theories.

Denialism works in a similar way. Some people have an antagonistic relationship with authoritative sources of information. When they hear something on the news, from scientists, or from government agencies, they say, “Well, I’m just not going to believe it.” All of us have this to some degree in that we resist information we don’t want to hear. But the people with elevated levels just don’t believe things, whether it’s from the news, government scientists, or other authoritative sources.

Another factor that drives conspiracy beliefs is our group attachments. The group attachment I am most concerned with is our partisan political attachments. Whether a Republican, Democrat, or something else, we engage in motivated reasoning. We believe in information from groups that we trust. When our group wins, we say, “That’s how it should be, because our group is righteous and just.” But when our group loses, we sometimes say we were cheated; the other side engaged in illicit practices, and that’s why we lost.

Furthermore, we take our cues from the leaders we trust. If you follow the president and he engages in conspiracy theories, then you’ll be more likely to believe those conspiracies. The next factor is information. If we’re told information from sources that we trust that there is a conspiracy afoot, then we’ll be likely to believe it. The final factor is that we can imagine our own conspiracy theories and make them up ourselves. We don’t need someone else to share them with us. If we have high levels of conspiracy thinking, then it’s not hard to imagine that everything we encounter during the day is part of some conspiracy.

So those are the broad reasons. We can put it into a very simple conceptual model: As information comes into our brains during the day, that information will be laid over the set of dispositions that we carry with us. And that information will be interpreted by those dispositions, which will then inform our particular beliefs about the world.

A person with elevated levels of conspiracy thinking will interpret the same information very differently from a person who has lower levels. The same information can lead two people to very different conclusions about the world. It is therefore our dispositions that divide us. To varying degrees, all of us have these dispositions operating within us. I imagine that most in this audience have low levels of conspiracy thinking. But for the mass public, this is a powerful force.

In sum, people believe these things for a lot of reasons. We have our motivated reasoning at play. We have conspiracy thinking at play. Those drive us to either engage with conspiracy theories or not and then to engage with particular conspiracy theories.

Why should we care if people believe in these theories?

If our beliefs are disconnected from our shared reality, then those beliefs are potentially harmful. If you believe that COVID-19 is a hoax, then you’re not going to engage in best practices, such as frequent hand washing, mask wearing, or social distancing; you run the risk of further spreading the disease. But downstream from that, when people start to believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, it can make them distrust our institutions and our scientists, and that can lead them to believe in yet more conspiracy theories and detach themselves further from our shared reality. There are real reasons we need to fight against these beliefs.

But we need to get the causal locus right. Right now, a lot of the discussions about conspiracy theories get it wrong. With even the best intentions, journalists are saying the wrong things. The best-intentioned legislators believe the wrong things, and they may act the wrong way. And if they don’t act the right way, then they could very well injure our rights. They could wind up censoring social media. And really, they may not have any impact on conspiracy theories at all.

What if it were the case that the people in Congress who want to legislate social media to tamp down on conspiracy theories are the people who are actually spreading the most conspiracy theories? For example, if you go back a few months, there was a hearing with tech moguls in front of Congress, with legislators complaining that there are so many conspiracy theories online. They asked: What happens if politicians want to share misinformation on Facebook? The question I had was, if it is indeed political elites who are sharing these ideas, is it really the fault of Facebook? Why can’t Congress and the parties police their own if they are so concerned? Politicians would spread misinformation anyway without social media, and it would be spreading because of the people in Congress and the White House. We need to do things to dissuade politicians from sharing conspiracy theories, but social media may not be the problem.

We all have a role to play, but we should understand that the methods in which misinformation gets shared are still the old-style methods. And motivated reasoning and dispositions lead people to their beliefs. The internet may not be as much of a spreader as we think. To explain why, let’s talk about some of those misconceptions a lot of people have. Much of the reason for regulating social media would be because people are supposedly becoming more conspiratorial now than they were in the past and that that effect is due to social media.

Here’s the empirical question: Are Americans believing more conspiracy theories now than in the past? The headlines would make you think that they are. We have newspaper headlines saying we’re now in the golden age of conspiracy theories. I would forgive you if you thought that were true. The problem is, if you go look through the headlines for the past sixty years, you will find journalists saying this almost every year, and it can’t always be true, or else we would have fallen off the conspiracy cliff by now. But we haven’t.

What does the data say? First, beliefs in many conspiracy theories have not increased. Belief in Birtherism, for example, has been flat. Belief in JFK-assassination conspiracy theories have almost been cut in half from where they were in the 1970s. In fact, those beliefs were almost 80 percent for decades. And it’s only been since the introduction of the internet that they’ve come down. In my latest poll in March, they were around 44 percent. That’s perhaps the first time they haven’t been a majority belief in decades.

When we poll on conspiracy thinking over time, we find that it hasn’t gone up. I’ve been polling this since 2012, and we’re not finding that Americans are becoming more conspiratorial than in the past. Nor are we finding that they’re believing in conspiracy theories more than they have in the past; the data just doesn’t show that, at least thus far. If you have the impression that social media are turning everyone into raving conspiracy theorists, rest assured, we’re not there yet.

I think the best example I could give is the QAnon conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory that is rather fringe. And it’s extreme, too, in the sense that the beliefs are extreme. It proclaims that President Trump is fighting the deep state, which is composed of satanic pedophiles and sex traffickers. A lot of the reporting lately claims that more people are believing this conspiracy theory now. Yes, it’s true that some people who believe it are running for Congress and maybe one or two of them might win. But it’s not getting bigger.

If you look at the headlines, QAnon is scary. It’s big and getting bigger, and these beliefs are thriving on Facebook. Well, scary, yes, but big, relatively speaking? No. What do the data say? After a month of prolonged media coverage in 2018, we polled on it in Florida. We asked people what they thought about QAnon on a scale of zero to 100. And on average, people rated it poorly, at about a 24. To put that in comparison, we also asked about Fidel Castro, and if you know anything about Florida, you know Floridians don’t like Castro. QAnon came out only a few points better than Castro—not well liked at all.

I’ve repeated these polls in the past few months, both in Florida and nationwide. QAnon has not increased in popularity. Other polls that ask about it find that most Americans still don’t know what it is. And there are only about 6 percent in some polls who say that they support it or agree with it. It’s not that big; its support is deeper than it is wide.

What is the role of the internet? We hear a lot that the internet spreads conspiracy theories. First, we have to be careful with the word spreads. When we say it is spreading, does that mean that it’s changing minds? Or do we mean that it’s just able to be accessed in other parts of the world? Because if we mean the latter, then, yes, obviously we can access things on the internet that we couldn’t before. But is it changing minds? That’s a very different matter.

Beliefs in conspiracy theories haven’t gone up in recent decades. The forces that drive conspiracy theorizing exist regardless of the internet. And it may very well be the case that in previous decades or centuries, conspiracy theories either spread faster or had worse consequences. If you go back in this country 400 years, we were drowning and crushing “witches” for conspiring with Satan. There was an Illuminati panic 200 years ago. Shortly after that, there was a Freemason freak-out in the 1830s and 1840s. There were two Red Scares in the past century. It’s not clear that people were immune to conspiracy theorizing in the good old days. Obviously, they exist today, but it’s not clear that they exist more or have more of an impact now. And, even if they did, it’s not clear that it would be due to the internet.

Another thing we must think about is that we have libraries that we carry with us everywhere in our pockets. Now accessible through our phone, we have the world’s knowledge available to us at the touch of a button. But we seem to think that on the internet, only the conspiracy theories have an influence on us and that somehow when we go to the internet, it’s only a swamp of conspiracy theories. That’s just not true.

Furthermore, there’s a hundred years of media-effects research that shows that news, campaigns, and political advertisements just don’t have that much of an effect on people as we commonly think that they do. In fact, the more recent studies show that the net impact of campaigns is almost zero. I imagine many people, including this audience, are not going to be affected by campaign communications this year. You knew who you’re going to vote for a long time ago. And that’s the case in many elections. Many of our political choices are made long before we even know who the candidates are, because our dispositions, which are longstanding, drive this stuff. When we go on to the internet, we’re not just lemmings who are getting tossed one direction or the other by different sets of information that changes our mind back and forth. We’re picking and choosing. And we tend to seek out things that we already agree with because it makes us feel good; we don’t change our minds very often. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what’s on the internet. We still have to choose to access it and then we still have to accept it. It still has to comport with the things that we already believe. So, yes, it’s true that there are problems with the information on the internet, and we need to clean it up. But it may not be quite as impactful as people say.

A lot of people thought that the 2016 election was decided by Russian bots or something like that. The studies coming out show that the impact just wasn’t as big as some think. The fake news didn’t have the impact that people originally thought it did.

Another claim that’s popular is that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. There are, of course, good reasons to believe this. You had a Republican Senator walk onto the Senate floor with a snowball and say because he was able to make a snowball climate change didn’t exist. And you’ve got a fellow in the White House who makes all sorts of crazy conspiracy claims. I think the kookiest is that Ted Cruz’s dad was behind the assassination of JFK. But here’s the thing. Those are two elites, and they don’t represent a lot of Republicans in the mass public.

What do the data say? First, many conspiracy theories are believed about equally by people on the left and the right. In my recent polls, I asked if Jeffrey Epstein was assassinated to cover up what he knows. I found near equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats answering affirmatively. Conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination are believed equally by people on the left and the right. Fringier conspiracy theories, whether it’s the Freemasons or AIDS being created in a laboratory, are also believed equally by people on the left and the right. There are also conspiracy theories that are believed more by people on the left—whether it’s ideas that Trump conspired with Russia or that the 1 percent and corporations control everything for some nefarious purpose. Those who believe those are more on the left than the right.

There are good reasons for this. The forces that drive people to believe in conspiracy theories, whether it’s motivated reasoning or other mechanisms, operate on both the left and right. When we measure conspiracy thinking in the mass public, we find that it’s near equal on the left and right.

Another claim we hear in the media is that conspiracy theories are for political extremists. Well, the fact is it depends on what we mean by political and what we mean by extremist. Some conspiracy theories are going to be believed by the “political extremist,” strong partisans and strong conservatives, as long as that conspiracy is somehow attached to conservatism or it’s being pushed by Republican and conservative elites, for example. We find the people who tend to be strong Republicans are very likely to believe in climate change conspiracy theories but only because they listen to what Republican elites tell them and because Republican elites keep saying that climate change is a hoax. But this is less about extremism and more about listening to party leaders. After every election, the losing side always thinks that the other side cheated. That has to do with motivated reasoning: no one likes to look in the mirror and say, “Well, gee, our ideas aren’t that good or our candidate wasn’t that good.” Instead, it must be that the other side cheated. I also find this with COVID-19 being exaggerated, because the president and conservative media elites have said that COVID-19 is a deep state hoax or a Democrat hoax, or, as Rush Limbaugh said, Dr. Fauci isn’t even a real doctor. Some personalities from Fox News were tweeting about how people should film the hospitals because there aren’t real patients there. Well, that’s going to drive conservatives and Republicans who are paying attention to believe in those theories.

But absent these theories having partisan or ideological content, cues, or circumstances, you’re not going to find political extremists believing in them. In fact, you’ll find people from both parties and independents buying in. There isn’t really a strong ideological or partisan valence to Rothschild conspiracy theories or Freemason conspiracy theories or ideas about vaccines, GMOs, or the Holocaust being exaggerated because those don’t really have much to do with mainstream politics—or Republicans or Democrats.

When we poll on QAnon, we find that very few people like it. But we also find that equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats claim to support it. And even though it’s always called a far-right-wing conspiracy theory, there’s nothing really right wing about it. There’s nothing conservative about it. The people who support it come from all across the political spectrum. What binds those people together is a disdain for the political establishment and elevated levels of conspiracy thinking.

It’s not like somebody got into researching George W. Bush and that led them down the path to reading Ronald Reagan’s speech, and then they read Milton Friedman, and then all of a sudden it’s Satanic baby eaters. It just doesn’t work like that. If you are a strong Republican or you’re a strong Democrat, you’re ingrained in the political system. You’re not going to believe a lot of these wacky conspiracy theories because you feel comfortable in your part of the system. People who feel disconnected from the political establishment are going to buy into these wacky conspiracy theories.

We tend to think that conspiracy theorizing is an us-versus-them dynamic, that we’re the rational ones and everyone else is a conspiracy kook out there. Well it’s not an us-versus-them. There are an infinite number of conspiracy theories out there. On any given poll, I can’t ask about all of them because there are just too many. But what we find is this: the more conspiracy theories we ask about on any given survey, the fewer people we find believing in none of them. In March, I asked about twenty-three conspiracy theories; I had 91 percent believing at least one. Imagine if I was to ask about fifty or 100 conspiracy theories. I would probably have everyone buying into at least one if not a few.

Again, this is just part of the human condition, and we’re all going to fall victim from time to time to a conspiracy theory. There’s nothing really wrong or pathological about it. But we do want to make sure that our beliefs are tethered to evidence.

The second-to-final misconception I want to address is: Are these beliefs just an attempt by people to find a big cause for a big event? The answer is not really; this is just an optical illusion. There are conspiracy theories about big events, such as 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, and COVID-19. But all events attract conspiracy theories in varying degrees. There are conspiracy theories about everything, big and small.

What we need to think about is the fact that “big event” is a subjective idea to everybody, just as “big cause” is. Even if we all were looking to attach big causes to big events, it doesn’t mean we’d get to any particular conspiracy theory about any particular event. For example, Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories had 80 percent of people believing them for decades. But far more people believe in Kennedy conspiracy theories than in the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Was Kennedy really bigger than 9/11? Three times bigger? Or the moon landing conspiracy theories? When we poll on them, we get about 5 percent belief. And deep state conspiracy theories, when I polled on that in March, we got 50 percent believing in a deep state. What event is that about that people are trying to explain? Or when people say aliens landed in Roswell and it’s being covered up by the government? Was that really a big event that somebody found tinfoil and sticks in the desert? And now 30 percent of Americans believe it. That didn’t seem like that big of an event. And what are the events that are driving GMO conspiracy theories or vaccine conspiracy theories? I go back to the idea that it’s really our dispositions that drive us to these beliefs and not some sort of search for a particular type of cause or explanation.

COVID-19 conspiracy theories are new. It does seem that these ideas are dangerous and scary because so many of them are wacky. But here’s the thing: I’ve heard so many conspiracy theories that I’m just bored by all of them. Just as people say that COVID-19 is a bioweapon, people were saying Zika virus was a bioweapon, the swine flu was a bioweapon, and AIDS was a bioweapon. Every new disease is a bioweapon. It’s the same theory using different nouns. Now people are saying that Bill Gates is behind it. But before him it was George Soros and the Koch brothers. Before them, it was the Rothschilds, the Freemasons, or the Kennedys. It’s always some famous, rich person who’s behind everything. There’s really nothing new there. There is much more continuity than change in the conspiracy theorizing that Americans do.

Indeed, conspiracy theories can be very troublesome. We should work to keep our beliefs tethered to the truth and the best evidence as much as we can, because bad actions can spring from bad beliefs. This is especially true during a pandemic. We need to make sure that we’re following the World Health Organization and the CDC and not Todd from Twitter. With that said, there are reasons to be somewhat hopeful and have some faith in humanity. There is more continuity than change. Our believing in conspiracy theories is nothing new, and it’s not necessarily worse. We shouldn’t be blaming old human problems on new technologies. We should be blaming ourselves! If anything, we should try to steer believers toward better beliefs with sympathy and empathy. But the mechanisms that lead to conspiracy theories are longstanding—and they’re just part of being human.