In December 1996, when my editor at The Daily Telegraph asked me to write a piece about conspiracy theories on the net, we both thought of it as a light-hearted trawl through online wackiness. With Facebook, YouTube, and even Google years away, the leading social medium was Usenet, a collection of “newsgroups” that computers propagated by directly swapping files. This was two years before Andrew Wakefield published the later-withdrawn research that spawned the modern anti-vaccine movement and the year TWA’s flight 800 crashed, which, I said, “may be the first case on record where a rumor seems to have started on the Net and then moved offline, rather than the reverse.”
The piece was partly intended to tease out what, if anything, was different about internet conspiracies. I concluded, “What the Net does is what it always does: make it easier for like-minded people to meet and distribute their ideas.” Now, the law of truly large numbers applies, and traditional and digital media cycle competing claims back and forth, creating confusion. As I type this, leading British medical journalist Deborah Cohen is telling Twitter that her legitimate request for more information about a coronavirus vaccine than is contained in the company’s press release has led some to accuse her of fueling anti-vaccination sentiment.
However, it wasn’t my job to contemplate the larger implications. At the time, it probably wasn’t anybody’s job because all internet users were considered weird anyway.
In 2006, when Karen Douglas began seriously studying conspiracy theories and their psychology, “There were very few other psychologists working on this topic, so it did feel a bit ‘fringe.’” Douglas had always been interested in new communications technology and “how it influences what we think, feel, and do. Studying conspiracy theories just seemed a natural next step following on from my existing interests.”
Originally from Australia, Douglas is a professor at the University of Kent, where she oversaw Robert Brotherton’s final-year research project.
This isn’t an easy field to research if, like Douglas, you are interested in ordinary people rather than exceptional individuals such as conspiracy-minded politicians and public figures. “Whenever we would approach very strong conspiracy communities and ask for their participation in psychological research, they don’t want to do it,” she says. “They’re deeply suspicious and think you’re part of the conspiracy. We’ve been accused a lot—‘Who’s paying you to say these things?’ It does restrict what you’re able to say.”
Douglas is less interested in how conspiracy theories spread than why they appeal to people, the focus of most of her research. In a 2014 paper she explored the connection between anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and vaccination intentions. However, in a name search, the first hit was an article saying she’s found a link between beliefs in conspiracy theories and childhood trauma. This turns out to be overstated.
“This was one of those research findings that the press got hold of and framed in an unintended way,” she says. This particular piece of research was led by her PhD student Ricky Green, who was interested in how people’s early childhood experiences with their caregivers, which is always said to affect relationships later in life, might affect their propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. Given the link between insecure attachment styles and maladaptive relationship strategies, she and Green wondered if there was a link between these beliefs and attachment anxiety.
“He found there was. People who are securely attached tend not to believe anywhere near as much as people who are insecurely or anxiously attached.” The underlying reason appears to be that people who are anxiously attached tend to “catastrophize problems more.” In other words, when they look around at what’s happening, they see threats rather than things as they are, in turn making them prone to thinking the worst of every situation. For Douglas and Green this was an exciting finding because it might open the way to get at the underlying mechanism of these beliefs.
More generally, however, Douglas has found three main types of needs that may be met by believing in conspiracy theories: epistemic, existential, and social. “Epistemic” reflects the need for explanations and closure; for many people, living with open-endedness and uncertainty is uncomfortable. “Existential” reflects the desire for safety, security, and control, explaining the appeal to the powerless.
“Studies show that people who are more on the losing side of the current political situation tend to believe in conspiracy theories more and talk about them more.” This is an exploitable opening: “Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have pitched themselves as outsiders, and that appeals to a lot of people.” The third and final need, “social,” reflects people’s desire to feel good about themselves: “In a way, believing might appeal to the need to be unique … you have information that others don’t have and that might in some way make them feel better—even if it doesn’t work.”
Douglas’s interest in conspiracy theories didn’t remain “fringe” for long. “Conspiracy theories became very topical a few years ago, and the research field has blossomed since.” Skeptics, too; a couple of months ago, Mike Marshall said he believes this is the next direction for the skeptical movement after decades of first classical paranormal claims and then contested science. As Cohen’s Twitter story shows, we have a big job ahead of us.