Americans and Their Conspiracy Theories

By JEFF NESBIT
April 10, 2013 RSS Feed Print

A new poll finds many Americans subscribe to conspiracy theories, such as the belief that the Moon landing was staged.
There’s just no polite way to put it.

There are big, entire parts of American society that believe in things that just aren’t true – and a recent national survey by Public Policy Polling only confirms it.

[READ: Conspiracy Theorists Say Obama Engineered Hurricane Sandy]

Name your conspiracy theory, and some segment of America believes it, the PPP survey found. The handful of news reports and blog posts on the PPP poll last week focused on the usual political subjects that always seem to float through the Internet ether.

About a fifth of Republican voters believe President Barack Obama is the anti-christ, for instance. Three quarters of Democrats believe former President George W. Bush’s administration lied about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the Iraq war, while three quarters of Republicans don’t. A third of Republicans believe a New World Order is about to take over, while more than a fifth of Democrats believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Despite a consensus among scientists, a significant number of Republican voters don’t believe climate change is real.

“Even crazy conspiracy theories are subject to partisan polarization, especially when there are political overtones involved,” said PPP President Dean Debnam. “But most Americans reject the wackier ideas out there about fake moon landings and shape-shifting lizards.”

[ALSO: Most Americans Believe Government Keeps UFO Secrets]

Well, maybe. But there were some pretty astounding things in the survey:

– 6 percent of voters (who haven’t, apparently, yet seen “Zero Dark Thirty”) think Osama bin Laden is still alive.

– Despite decades of research that says otherwise, 51 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy at work in the JFK assassination.

– Nearly a third of Americans believe aliens exist and are, presumably, visiting Earth, and 25 percent don’t know if it’s true or not – which means that this particular conspiracy theory is mainstream, not part of the fringe of society.

– 5 percent of people believe the real Paul McCartney died and was secretly replaced in the Beatles in 1966.

– 4 percent believe that shape-shifting reptilian people (a staple of Hollywood filmmaking) control the world by taking on human form.

[AT THE EDGE: Conspiracies or Science?]

– After decades of films around space travel, 7 percent of Americans still believe the Moon landing was faked.

– Even after nearly the entire scientific community has said otherwise, more than half of Americans still question whether there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism.

– One of the more bizarre findings is this one – 14 percent of people believe the CIA intentionally distributed crack cocaine in America’s inner cities in the 1980s.

– Almost a tenth of Americans, despite thousands of public health research reports to the contrary, believe that fluoride is added to our water supply for sinister reasons.

– 14 percent of people believe in Bigfoot.

– 15 percent believe either the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals (which might explain some of those otherwise-hard-to-justify Nielsen ratings for certain television shows).

– And 15 percent believe the pharmaceutical industry conspires with physicians and medical communities to invent new diseases simply to make more money.

A few commentators from other parts of the world were comforted by the PPP survey and relieved that so few Americans actually line up behind some of the crazier conspiracy theories.

“Americans aren’t as crazy as we thought,” said one.

Well, again, maybe. But you can also look at some of these results and wonder: Just exactly what are kids learning in school that a significant part of the adult population still believes companies invent diseases just to make money; that you need a tinfoil hat in order to watch TV; or that the CIA distributed crack cocaine in American cities years ago?

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Tags: science

Just have a look around here!

From what I hear, they're learning in science class that the world was created 6,000 years ago, that the dinosaurs walked with Adam in the Garden of eden, and the only reason they went extinct was because Noah couldn't fit them into his ark.

Being the sophisticated and cynical sort myself, I long ago quit believing that an old man in the clouds existed...I still believe in Bigfoot though...

While the evidence is sketchy (to say the least), there is at least some evidence for Bigfoot's existence, so I've taken to praying to him instead. I got a partial confirmation recently when he answered one of my prayers & cleared up my warts...I'm still waiting on the leprosy thing, but if he comes thru on that, I think I'll start a church!

Fra too many on these forums stay on line 24-7 listening to Alex Jones or so it would seem...sad.

The thing that always amazes me about conspiracy theories is how elaborate they are, how flimsy alleged links are, and the enormous lengths people will go to trying to prove that a conspiracy actually happened.
And woe betide anyone who points out any huge gaping holes in the theory, they must be part of the conspiracy or have been brainwashed.

Blobology (another CT-Favorite)

“Ain’t that funny?

By analyzing photographs blown up to the point where we can see the pixels, I can read whatever I want into the pixels.”

“For example, those fuzzy black-and-white blobs right there—here, I’ll zoom in on them for you—” *zooms in to where you can’t make anything out anymore*

“OMG buildings!

OMG a wall!

OMG a face!”

Why People Believe in Conspiracies

A skeptic's take on the public's fascination with disinformation

By Michael Shermer


After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Who is they?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?”

“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.

Examples of these processes can be found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explains, noting the JFK assassination as a prime example. “Knowing what we know now ... film footage of Dealey Plaza from November 22, 1963, seems pregnant with enigmas and ironies—from the oddly expectant expressions on the faces of the onlookers on the grassy knoll in the instants before the shots were fired (What were they thinking?) to the play of shadows in the background (Could that flash up there on the overpass have been a gun barrel gleaming in the sun?). Each odd excrescence, every random lump in the visual texture seems suspicious.” Add to these factors how compellingly a good narrative story can tie it all together—think of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, both equally fictional.

What should we believe? Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and that all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim. The problem for skepticism is that transcendentalism is intuitive; empiricism is not. Or as folk rock group Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep ...

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Paranoia Strikes Deep."

Well, capitalist ideology brainwashes Americans to always think that individuals as intentional agents must be responsible for everything.

yeah right,might as well blame Capitalism for another one of Statism's Misdeeds!