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Workshop Report with Julia Duetz and Patrick Brooks
496 Plays5 months ago
M talks with prior guests on the podcast Julia Duetz and Patrick Brooks about the CONSPIRACY FX Workshop they all attended at the University of Kent at the end of June 2024.
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Transcript
Understanding Conspiracy Theories
00:00:02
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy abroad!
00:00:14
Speaker
It's the final night, like I don't know if I said it's the final afternoon of the conspiracy effects, no, consequence no, No, conspiracy effects. Yeah, yeah, it's about- I don't know what FX is. so It's short for FX. Yeah. Yeah, because every, all right, so all all of these yeah ERC funded things have to have a name that fits within a certain length and code. Really? Like extremities. And say i mean so so Karen was talking about going for an e-cost group action and they also have to have strange unusual names because then the codename is how the funding gets attributed. And so they end up being known not by the actual formal name, which is consequences of belief in
Workshop and Participant Introductions
00:01:02
Speaker
conspiracy. There isn't yet known by their codename, conspiracy index.
00:01:06
Speaker
yeah Anyway, it's the it's the last day. It's the afternoon, approaching evening, going towards night. We've gone through two... Well, some of us have gone through full a full two days of workshopping. Some of us have gone through one day of workshopping. Some of us have gone through a day and a half of workshopping. So, actually, why don't I let my guests introduce themselves? Hello, I'm Patrick Brooks, and and I'm also a philosopher, a PhD student in philosophy. And I have gone to, I'm the one who's gone for two days at the workshop. like he's Yes, yes, you definitely have been to two days at the workshop. No one has been tonight at this point. All two days, every single minute has been there. I was there both times.
00:02:03
Speaker
And I'm Julia Ditz and I'm also a BSD student and in philosophy. My BSD is under social epistemology of conspiracy theories and I'm based at VU Amsterdam.
Focus on Consequences of Belief in Conspiracy Theories
00:02:16
Speaker
And we should now have maybe chairs. Yes, Merak! a so So, general thoughts on the workshop? Very... I had not anticipated enough. perhaps how different it would be from a philosophical conference. So it should be pointed out, this is a conference which is largely made up of psychologists, and actually largely social psychologists, talking about the consequences of belief in conspiracy theories. There have been a few philosophers, a few media studies, people there, a few people from other disciplines entirely, but largely
00:02:56
Speaker
it's been psychologists talking about the psychology of belief in conspiracy theories and the consequences thereof. and One thing is, like as you say, they're largely social psychologists, but I don't see why it's so social, what they're doing. There was a talk today as well about how individually focused most of this research is, right? It's like and this one person they have a certain mentality, they have certain predispositions, and those qualities bring that individual towards all these mad and dangerous, as you would say.
00:03:35
Speaker
Like conspiracy theory, so why social? Because an I kind of take it that, I mean, even though there is a branch of of psychology called applied psychology, social psychology is basically a branch of applied psychology to social beliefs.
Cultural Influence on Research
00:03:49
Speaker
And so conspiracy theory beliefs are taken to be social beliefs because they're beliefs about society and also social psychology at that point. I think that's weird because I think that there I think conspiracy theory beliefs are super social, but I think most of the experiments are not taking that into account that much. They want to look at what does this individual have kind of traits. And like, as Steph Alpers also mentioned, it's way more cultural, way more socially established, which traits you have, which information you come across.
Critique of Psychological Engagement with Conspiracy Theorists
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I thought it was interesting too, is that
00:04:29
Speaker
And of the talks that I saw, only- Which was all two days. Anyway, talk. I was there for everyone. I didn't skip anything to go see the historic sites at all. When I thought Steph's talk was like, it was the only one in which I think anybody had like gone and talked. I mean, he's a sociologist. He's not a social psychologist. He's a sociologist. I guess that would explain it. Yeah. Because there's so much like survey stuff where You know, and we've all given out about this. This is plenty. The reading group is out. Like, it's like a seven-point Likert scale, and so they they get these responses, and then they do some math at it. is are three Then they do a regression analysis, and they give us all of it. P equals 0.03, so this is a big result. You're giving about the Chrome back output.
00:05:23
Speaker
And so like, I think because I'm not quantitatively minded in that way, I think a lot of that stuff just kind of goes right over my head. But at the same time, and I think like some of you talked about this before, like wouldn't it be like a lucky day for just like going and talking to these people? There's like, you know, there's what Ian Miller and so and other people think, like think of conspiracy theorists. But then there's like what conspiracy theorists actually think. And it seems like very few of these psychologists are engaging with these people in the kind of way that would give them any insight into what conspiracy theorists actually think and say. Because I would bet that if you asked a conspiracy theorist, do you think ah you simultaneously believe that Princess Diana is a alive and dead and be like, no, I'm not stupid. I think that the official story is false and that
00:06:12
Speaker
She might be alive. Or she might be dead. I just don't know yeah i'm not which story to believe. I'm not in a position to know because I'm in an episode, like for most of the conspiracy theories, they're interested in and the people who believe them are not necessarily in a position to know. think They probably can't have knowledge on these things. That's the whole kind of idea that they're not in a position to know. And then guys yeah, it bothered me also that they're uh-huh, like 7-point skill or 5-point skill, that they don't discriminate between going for a 5, a 6, or a 7. Like, to me, it seems that whenever you go for a 5 on shape
Challenges in Psychological Interventions
00:06:52
Speaker
-shifting reptiles in the spiritual theory, it's so interesting. Why a 5? Like, I would think that the 5 is almost more interesting than the 7, right? Like, how would you get to the 5 and they just lock it together most of the time and then, um,
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah, trying to get results that hold for the whole group, it says. Yeah, it's an interesting discipline. I mean, we've read quite a lot of these papers, we really read them. I don't think we've ever read one of these papers and like, come away being like, that was, we learned a lot, that was awesome. But usually, we leave going like, well, They did that thing they do again that winds us up. On the like talking to conspiracy theorists in person, like with the post presentation, I mentioned to quite a few people, quite a few such psychologists that I do my best to talk to as many conspir- what they consider to be like pejoratively conspiracy theorists as possible, like as many as possible. And the responses I got was, oh, like surprise. And the other response I got was like, how do you find them?
00:08:03
Speaker
And I think that that's, I don't know, maybe a little bit indicative of like the distance they have towards the people they say they're studying. Yeah. This is how you find them. How do you find them? Yeah. Well, you know, just in my circles, they're there and they, you know, refer me to other people. And what you're telling me you personally know. Yeah. My parents have a lot of friends who believe in conspiracy theories. Oh no. I mean, it does make me wonder whether maybe one of the things which is interesting about the work in social psychology is that, because the standard surveying mechanism these days is an online survey, say through the inter- or call trip tracks, you don't have to have any content with the survey participants, you don't have to create the group, it's all done by a third party. So you are kind of isolated from the research subjects.
00:08:57
Speaker
And some people might think that it's kind of an ideal, you know, you don't have any direct connection, so there's no there's no worry about manipulation, it's just a, it's a cohort. But at the same time, not being able to go, why did you put five down there?
Survey Analysis and Belief Mapping
00:09:13
Speaker
What's that five about? I mean, you seem pretty sure there's alien-shaped shifting reptiles, but you don't seem as sure as your discourse indicates. Why are you putting five there? Why not six or seven? And when I talked to Karen Douglas, like a couple of months ago, it's a few extremism conference. She said we rarely get sevens. Like we mostly like on a five point scale, we will get threes, we will get fours, but like not a five or on a seven point scale, not necessarily like the seven is more rare. And that interests me like so much. And I don't know why they want to generalize over these differences.
00:09:55
Speaker
especially because it seems that most of them kind of are very interested in intervening, like in coming up with interventions or ways to persuade people, like the people in zones ah i that I talked to conspiracy theorists, they were like, oh, like three of them were like, oh, did you manage to persuade any of them? And I was like, no, that's not the reason why I talked to them. yeah But like, if you're interested in that, right, I'm not saying anything about that, but It seems that you would be glad that there's more, you know, people in the middle of the spectrum and not going for the the higher scores or the highest scores because apparently, you know, these people aren't sold yet. You know, if you want to intervene, like it's, it's crucial that they're, that they're not going for a seven, probably. I imagine you can't, I wonder whether you.
00:10:43
Speaker
you could do this. So you can imagine like a 5.0 Ligertzio, just sort of map that onto Cretans's, where like, you know, a 1 is Cretan 0, a 5 is Cretan 1, and then somewhere in the two and a half, three range is Cretan 0.5. Then like getting a load of threes on these questions is like not that interesting. Because you're getting a lot of people who are just like 0.5, maybe a little more. I'm not spending judgments on whether or not there are shape-shaping reptiles.
Definitions and Hypotheses of Belief
00:11:16
Speaker
That's, I think, super interesting. I think that's interesting. I mean, I think that... And if it's mostly those people, then, like, I guess that if, like, you you know, you don't have the whole scare of the, they're all super self-insulated eventually and all of that stuff, because I think in some cases,
00:11:36
Speaker
it will be difficult to, if your aim is to persuade, it will, you know, you will have to. Yeah, I mean, you might want to ask like, you know, what is it about? Why would you be agnostic about shape, shape, and graph levels? Like, that's a really good question. That's a really interesting question. But I think that when we, you know, we we read these papers, and it's not like, that's not what people are talking about, right? Like, oh my gosh, these people are so crazy. I mean, they see, they see a four and five, both, as believe, And on a seven point scale, they say, they see four or five, or no, not necessarily four, or five, six, seven as belief. And that's also where like a big difference lies with, you know, epistemic or philosophical definition of belief is belief to be true, right? Belief in the philosophical sense, probably will be a seven, like in the standard, at least non invasion, non credence sense of belief. Well, for a psychologist, that's not the case, like entertaining,
00:12:33
Speaker
And like, you know, a five, six, that's also a belief for them. So when they make like these general conclusions or judgments on the basis of their results on conspiracy theory belief, they mean also all these people in the middle. Right. Or at least, yeah, at the end of agreeing with conspiracy theory. Yeah. So I mean, I wonder, I wonder whether it would be fruitful to try to just get psychologists to change the way they think about belief.
00:13:03
Speaker
And I think that's one of the issues that we get in with pushback on Janet Williams' co-author paper rebutting the devil-aligned thing that people remember. It seems quite clear that they do believe two contradictory things. And the answer is, well, no. They entertain two inconsistent propositions. But that's not the same as believing the two inconsistent propositions are true at the same time. And it also makes sense to have these two like options. like In some cases, if the official story is false, I make this argument in my paper, what does it mean for prescription theory to be a theory? There's options, like explanatory space to be filled with multiple hypotheses, and since you're not in a position necessarily to know, or when you're not in a position to know, that means that there are multiple
Effectiveness of Psychological Interventions
00:13:58
Speaker
alternatives. And I'm not saying that every conspiracy theorist you know has options or isn't committed to any one version, but there are these cases, I guess. So there was an interesting point that Robbie Sutton made this afternoon, talking about this, about interventions, which was when has an intervention by a social psychologist ever been successful? So so we're we're talking about intervening on belief and intervening on these conspiracy theories. When has that iterate actually worked? And I thought that was a really interesting point for Robbie to make, which was we're talking about interventions. We don't have a track history of that working in any way, shape
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, and like I had a discussion about exactly this point later with someone else, and they were like, yeah, um these interventions, like but it's harmless to develop them anyways. And then my objection was, well, no, it's not. like If you're trying to also propose them to governments and you don't have any proof of which one is working way more efficiently, which one actually intervenes, you're just giving them a whole load of options here. These are all the ways in which you can intervene. Then they're just going to go with their guts, even though, you know, it might be way too close to like all the problems we've seen with nudges and stuff like that. Like it's, yeah, it's like, you know, also, um, I think it's that stock today too. He mentioned, you know, there's a further question about like, who's doing,
00:15:32
Speaker
you know the flagging or the, or who's deciding what's misinformation and disinformation. So of course, like, philosophers have been on to this for a while now. But I mean, i think it's a good question. I mean, propose these interventions. You're like, okay, well, here's, here's a way in which you might intervene. But I'm like, there's no question of, okay, but like, who's going to be doing the intervening? Not the social psychologists themselves, right they like someone in politics, maybe, or like a policymaker who had like the end, if they're going to determine what's true, what's misinformation and what's not. Right.
Academic Tone vs. Researcher Beliefs
00:16:08
Speaker
Indeed. As you say, that's the thing is that even though we're the social psychologists, it's not going to be biased, you know, here they're also not you know experts at, you know, finding out what's true in all these cases. Yeah.
00:16:22
Speaker
yeah
00:16:26
Speaker
So we, we were ranking, right. I'm being quiet. I'm being quiet, so I can speak here in the background. What positive things have you got out of this workshop? oh and So whenever I read social psychology papers, I'm always kind of scared by the the overconfidence sometimes. It seems that they, you know, present their work in, like the introductions or the conspiracy theories are on the rise, they're everywhere, they're super bad, mad and dangerous and we should do something about it and here's a whole bunch of other stuff that we've already done and we're doing a lot of research and here's this other new conclusion and I'm going to generalize over it. And that's it. And that's really not how most of them, I feel like, approach the whole project. Like it's not the case that they
00:17:17
Speaker
don't see the flaws that we also highlight. like They agree, yeah, we should be more conceptually rigorous. They agree, yeah, our experiments are biased towards a whole bunch of things. And they agree that conspiracy theories might be true. And like all of these nuances that yeah I've been hoping to see in their work Not necessarily I see in their work, but I did see for almost all of them in in talking to them personally. So that was nice. Yeah, I think that's i think that's right. And I wonder if the sort of strident tone in their papers is just ah an artifact of like what it takes to get published, right?
Interdisciplinary Challenges at Conferences
00:18:03
Speaker
It's probably hard to get published in a top journal.
00:18:06
Speaker
If you're like, well, you know, look, here's a thing we think, and it's like, you know, let's kind of see this again, but it's got all these problems. I don't think like that's gonna get, that's not, you know, gonna get traction or be sexy or whatever. I mean, we were the same thing in philosophy in a way, like, you gotta, you gotta be a little old. So, but it was, I agree, Julia, my experience too, it was nice to like, a lot of the talks you were just like, look, here's like, there's serious limitations here and, not so sure if this is gonna work. And then you definitely don't get that in the papers, the way you did here. And I do think too, they do seem open to this like robust, interdisciplinary kind of thing that I think this research will ultimately require this to be fruitful. No one was hostile to, I think, philosophical points or whatever. And that was kind of Or we weren't only sent in abstracting thoughts. But we don't know, maybe there weren't other philosophers that accepted as well. Well, it was weird that the event was on Phil events, right? That's how I heard about it. So I actually wanted it to be like more philosophy-y, but it was not. But it was it was strange that it was on Phil events. I didn't think it was on Phil. That's where I heard about it.
00:19:26
Speaker
Lisa emailed me the the call for papers and then I emailed you about it. But it was awesome on Philadelphia. Yeah, they do. And it was like very cool to see all the big names together in a room and like they're all like nice people, very nice and know they're yeah they're all i critical in ah in the sense that we would like to see, I guess. like the I think the the discussion talk today, like were they were just like brainstorming collectively. That was very interesting insight also because we don't often think about all the hurdles they've already overcome that already, you know, uh, stood in the way of doing these kinds of, um, research projects. And that really gave an insight in that it's really, really complicated. It's, uh, some of the stuff we're doing. Yeah.
00:20:18
Speaker
I would imagine too, just like the work it takes to get, even if we don't always do the survey stuff, it's great. I think the work it takes to do these sorts of surveys, it's like, it's pretty serious to language. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty impressive that people are doing like, you know, five surveys of 2,500 people. Like what Joe has been doing, like just like year on year polling. That's it. really impressive. Joestar was great. like I felt like that both the sociologists and the political scientists could like ah put some harmony between all the different kind of views. I don't know if you felt that as well, but yeah it was like the philosophers were excited and the psychologists were excited and media studies people were excited. It was a nice... ah Yeah, definitely.
00:21:10
Speaker
I was interesting last night talking with Joe about the presentation I gave. You know, you can make a lot of enemies here. I said, no, I think they'll take it in the right kind of mind. I mean, you were also careful. Like you were careful not to single people out too much and you were careful to put it in their serves on their serves like if you want this right yeah if you're using this definition then you probably can't borrow work from work you
00:21:45
Speaker
my definition. this case Look, there's inconsistency in your own definitional choices here. And it was interesting seeing both Robbie and Jan Woolen nod and guess, oh, yeah, yeah, actually. And I wasn't surprised that there was also a person asking, what ah definition should we use? And because that's not, that wasn't the point. yeah It wasn't the point of like prescriptive You're all doing it wrong. Here's the definition. It's a written furniture. I say, well look, the simple and broad definition would actually be a really good one to use. And actually my ah ah argument now for the psychologist is, look, use the simple, minimal definition of conspiracy theory in the explanation of an event that cites conspiracy as the same cause. And then your contrast class is the kind of conspiracy you're interested in. So you're interested in conspiracies of pith and
00:22:38
Speaker
put that conspiracies which go against conventional wisdom, use that use that as a way of developing the contrast class to go look.
Specific Focus in Conspiracy Theory Research
00:22:46
Speaker
We're interested in conspiracy theories with but with the focus being this particular type of conspiratorial activity. And and like linking that to Robbie Sutton's talk where he was like, you have testing of conspiracy theory beliefs, specific conspiracy theories, and you have the testing of conspiracy mentality, like the more general predisposition. And I think that it would be so cool if more research in social psychology would focus on a single theory or a set of theories like
00:23:20
Speaker
yeah I think the conference kind of showed that already that they're doing like, they were just doing COVID-19 conspiracy theories and it will make a lot of sense that you could track like only believe in that conspiracy theories through or variations of it or like, you know, soft conspiracy theories, whatever you want to call it, but to stick with only that set and then you don't have to even discuss conspiracy theories in general, you're just saying, we're doing this one. yeah And we're doing only JFK or like we're tracking all the data on JFK through the papers that i have already been published. That would be awesome because I think there's so many differences between being a flat earther and being a Diana dead or alive person. Like it would really surprise me if the psychological predispositions are generalizable over
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I thought one thing that was interesting about the content of a lot of these talks was, I mean, it was, I think, I mentioned to you earlier and like, I think like three quarters of them seem to just be about vaccine hesitancy and not about any like anti-vaccine conspiracy theories in particular. a Like so many of them are just like, now these people are worried about vaccines, so what do we say
Real-world Implications and Misinterpretations
00:24:43
Speaker
about it? It's just like, well, that's not, that need not be a conspiracy. can just be an overly concerned parent, or someone whose risk calculus is much different than you think it ought to be. But I think there was a bit of mixed messaging with some of the talks where like, this is about conspiracy theories, here's somebody who's vaccine hesitant. And you're like, well, but that's not, doesn't entail. I think they focus on the anti-vaxxers because that is like an obvious one with real life consequences, which are a danger to society.
00:25:17
Speaker
I think, like, believing I was still alive is not a danger to society. and they if If you want to intervene, if you want to say they're on being undemocratic or they're harming other people, like the conference was called Consequences of Conspiracy Theory, but I haven't really heard a lot of arguments for these are all the bad consequences of people believing in conspiracy theories. Yeah, that's right. But I mean, certainly I think there's like a bunch to say about anti-vax conspiracy stuff. it's It seemed like no one, at least not a lot of people, were really doing that. Mostly just saying, like like the the blood level talk today it was like, and then people read about blood. That was very bad. I'm like, well, why? Why was that bad? Why don't you go into why? But I think they they just don't, they take so much for granted, I think.
00:26:09
Speaker
which I guess like we're all particularists. So of course you think like, well, no, you should look carefully at what the people say to see whether it is that crazy rather than just being like, well, it seems crazy. So probably it's crazy. Yeah. And most people that have talked about this too was they said, well, yeah, no, I look at Reddit, but I think like there are so many conspiracy theories that work for which there are like books self published by people who believe the theories.
Sources for Understanding Conspiracy Theories
00:26:37
Speaker
which I think give a way better presentation of the best version of that theory than going on to a Reddit page where like some people are trolling, some people are like mingling, some people are throwing other hypotheses in the air. Well, for Flat Earth, for example, you have great books of like the most popular and most followed Flat Earth opponents. I think it gives a way better representation to look at that than to look at all the stuff on Reddit where
00:27:07
Speaker
you know, like the mark sergeants of the world, they're not in, in those Reddit conversations because they're way too like micro celebrity, I think someone called it today. They're micro celebrities in their fields. And know but the in the books they write, because for like for MH370, there are a lot of books for Three Mile Islands. yeah And there they actually like intentionally make an effort to present the best version of the theory they for sure the only problem with regret is that there's redditors on there. Like, that's the real worry. I mean, this is it. The basic issue with doing any research is human beings. I mean, I don't know whether you have met any, but some of them are trolls. And actually, I think most of them are, actually. It's a species. It's a very trolly species. We are for sure. We are for sure, yeah. Yeah. I think we do. We do love to. Academic trolls. Why people love. Philosophers are actually academic trolls, maybe.
00:28:07
Speaker
Maybe, which is why I think but i thing this ah that's the best argument for the fact that Joey Jusinski is actually a philosopher.
Critique of Academic Models and Historical Parallels
00:28:15
Speaker
He seems like he really delights in wiping people up. like oh that he got born into his presentation was hilarious. He promised me much more explicit porn last night I'll tell you that. but wait Like last night when he was like your time is really gonna make a lot of people like he lit up his face lit up and he was like you're gonna make a lot of enemies. But then then when when someone asked like, oh yeah, are we contributing to the problem like of making it seem like conspiracy theories are a very imminent, big danger, he was like, I don't know, it's not your fault. So I was like, yeah. It's not anybody cares what we say. so Yeah, but also like... yeah
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's not the answer he's given in other times. And I know, like, that's not funny really, but yeah, like, you're staring at a room full of people who otherwise would, like, strike the wrong way, right? Anyway, I mean, Joe's talk, like mine, was a throwing the cat amongst the pigeons talk. And we're both doing it in a fairly gentle way, we're not doing it in a confronting way of saying your models are wrong, or your definitions are wrong, we're going to have a look. According to the standards of your own discipline, now you need to be thinking about definitions in a more rigorous way, and you need to be talking about the causality of symptom versus cause in a much more nuanced way. Yeah, the correlation of cause, yeah. Yeah, because, Joe's got to look, if you accept the empirical data, and you are social scientists who are really into numbers,
00:29:51
Speaker
i'm the do The consequence of that is these beliefs naturally fall out of the characters. I think that's always the strongest way on these like social matters to to go about. If you want to argue with someone or discuss it, then show them that by someone's own
00:30:17
Speaker
they're fading, that's, I think, is a very strong argument. You know, it's it's interesting, too. let's Just thinking about Joe's compliment more now. like The analogy to the satanic panic stuff, I think, is super apt. I don't know if you all remember. like So, in the 80s and all this stuff, like all this the Night Stalker was killing a bunch of people, and like an ACDC cat had fallen out of his bag. And people were like, oh my god. Rock and roll. made this guy get all these women and like anti-christ devil child yeah yeah oh there was like but it was i don't think judas priest had to go testify before congress twisted sister had you to testify with before congress is i twisted said twisted
00:31:03
Speaker
assistive in retrospe No way. No way Shane will form a duck. No, not at all. But there's that wonderful, you can watch it on YouTube, that wonderful video of D Snyder's testimony. He's like the lead singer, twisted sister. and He just embarrasses the congressional people. Like, it's great. But yes, like, it was it was this sort of retro causality thing, right? well Well, these people were bad. They must be bad because of like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But probably like, like Joe was saying, like, no they just have like, there are people who were mad. And then they happened to have listened to, you know, Iron Maiden. And then they remained bad, but also listened to Iron Maiden. There's no court, there's no real Iron Maiden didn't make them mad. They were bad the whole time. And I think that's like a... I wonder whether they've done like psychological studies on like people who support you here. Like,
00:32:00
Speaker
yeah It's a stretch, but like, are you gonna say that all of them have exactly the same psychological predispositions? Or are you just gonna say, like, Joe, no, they were just bad? Yeah, like, if you're an asshole, and you read my comp, and you're like, hell yeah. yeah You're still an asshole. You're still the worst kind of asshole. Yeah, but it's not just the mind gump that, you know. Yeah, but it is like, it is so... I wonder if anybody other than Joe has really thought about the satanic panic parallel, because it is kind of one-to-one, it seems.
00:32:33
Speaker
They're like, you have these people doing nutty stuff, and they're like, why are they doing it? Ah, it's Q, or it's David Icke, or it's Alex Jones. Or people playing D&D. Yeah, D&D is the same deal. There's a great Netflix documentary. It's called Sons of Sam. Other of you watch this? No, I know. I haven't watched it. So it's fantastic. It kind of leads, it kind of lets you know how the whole satanic panic business started, in a way. So there's a ton of Sam killings in the 70s, New York, all the people died, and they never really, when they caught, it was David Berkowitz, who the other story is, his dog was telling him the murders before. But there was this journalist whose name is escaping me now, like a serious journalist, and he was like, I don't know, this just doesn't add up, it's too clean.
00:33:26
Speaker
And so he sort of starts, he finds out that Berkowitz like lived in this town, and in the park in this town, there was a cubby under the gazebo in the park with like satanic imagery, and Berkowitz hung out there, allegedly. And then he just goes down this like crazy rabbit hole. and starts finding all these weird it Satanism things, these weird connections with the occult and all this dark forces business. And then he goes on, you know, Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphael and all these like days on talk shows like with this book. And like, so he had all these people who were working with him and all these friends and all these theories about like, oh, this was actually a ritual killing. This didn't happen and the cops were wrong about it. And he had like lost his mind a bit. And I think the country lost their mind.
00:34:14
Speaker
with him. But that the documentary end, this little slight spoiler, like there was this case where he was like, that security guard was a Satanist and he killed that lady. It was a ritual killing. It was like, no, that's crazy. The documentary end is like 30 years later. It was a ritual killing. The security guard did it. It was a ritual killing. That guy was right. This journalist was right about like tons of stuff. But it's it's interesting, like that's where it started. The son of Sam stuff, and then this guy writes all these books. And the next thing you know, if you listen to rock and roll, or you play D and&D, or yeah you like wizards and stuff, you're on the way to hell or whatever.
Cultural Fears and Belief Systems
00:34:56
Speaker
I think that it also ties in then like the all attempt but i think joe also ti in with fear, right? So the moments, you know, you can all rally behind something you collectively fear. That's a very powerful and often also like, maybe irrational theorizing, invoking kind of state to me in like, in the Netherlands, we had, like, I was raised with a scare in the back of my mind of the smiley gang. The smiley gang allegedly would you know get girls, drag them off their bikes, rape them and then leave them with them like a smiley in their in their on their cheeks. And it's still a surprise to people if I tell them that there's never been an incident in the Netherlands in the last 60 years where something like that has happened.
00:35:50
Speaker
And it was like all my friends were scared of this mining game. All the parents, you know, were sharing these like urban legends, if you will, on like, you know, like a very hyperbolic sense of you should be careful. Yeah. I mean, it is like, I do wonder whether to what extent a lot of these things sort of hang together. So, Kind of these weird rumors, urban legends, um you know, paranormal sighting type stuff, conspiracy theory. It seems like these things, you know, might form a kind of class. In some cases, for some conspiracy theories, yeah I think like for, you know, a lot of like, at least I saw like personally in my environment with my parents' friends and stuff, like the moment they were like, there they are,
00:36:43
Speaker
There are quite a lot of entrepreneurs amongst them. And just like during COVID, like if there was a lockdown, they were all like <unk> like the Dutch Prime Minister. He's like evil, satanic, pet father. The moment the lockdown lifted, the moment they started, you know, had financial security again, and like, you know, were preoccupied elsewhere, they were like, nah, nah, no. You know, yeah, I thought that, but like, it's also not something they felt they had to negate or apologize for. It was like, no, I was just, you know, like, there's all these different cases and of definitely some of them hang together in this way with satanic panic and fear and, you know, but others don't, I guess. Yeah, I think that's right.
00:37:35
Speaker
During the conference, I keep my ear out for it. I did hear lot a lot of song. Song, because we're serious, in some cases. I definitely did hear quite a lot of song claims, which I was also happy about. Sounds good. so so um I mean, it's a start. yeah We have to see it go into the actual published literature. I mean, that's always been the kind of weird dichotomy between the published literature and psychology and then talking with psychologists about their root research. So, Molina Sapos and I found last year when we were at the conference in Italy, if you ask people like Gianna Willem or Alexandra what do you do think is possible for conspiracy theories to be true? Yeah, of course.
00:38:25
Speaker
Of course it is. We are only interested in this particular subset over here. But you don't necessarily get that from the literature. And that's that's always been the bug there. If I recall correctly, at the during a panel, I think Ann Middleham said something like, well, yeah, you know we but we have a different word for that. We just call that corruption. these sort of run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories that like we talk about when we're like, these are true sometimes, I think he said, like well, that's just, we just call that corruption. We're like, well, yeah. But that's, that's, so, what are we fighting about? I think we're all happy to say that some conspiracy theories are wacky. And I think, like, Jan Villa and Co. would say that same thing. But it's just like, we can't see the like can't seem to agree about
00:39:21
Speaker
Well, no, like, some are wacky and some are not. And whether they're wacky or not is going to depend on, I don't know, something crazy, like, the particulars of the situation. Well, if only we could deal with the particulars of the situation and not generalize.
Nuance in Academic Discussions
00:39:38
Speaker
Well, that's just not sexy, I think, when you said before, like, it's... Nuance doesn't really sell that well. That's true. Right. But I mean, none of our books sell that well anyway. So, and then there's two points out, no one listens to us. So why not be slightly more nuanced given our work isn't going to change the world. If it's not going to sell and if no one listens to it, then why not just be nuanced? Yeah. I mean, it is, it is hilarious, right? Like every time there's one of these new government, like
00:40:11
Speaker
disinformation boards or whatever like you look at who's on it and it's you think it'd be at least one person that we know and it never is it's never anybody who has like an expertise in this kind of stuff it's just a you know just further out of this that no one's really reading what we write yeah yeah it's very unfortunate now talking about things that no one is reading tell me about your poster hu plus Yeah, so we've been preparing a chapter for Melina Zappos and David Cody's edit
Presenting Academic Research
00:40:47
Speaker
volume. and Which is a handbook on conspiracy theories. Yes. So are papers meant to be about standpoint theory and conspiracy theories?
00:40:59
Speaker
And we're doing, we're riffing on that a bit. Yeah, we're, ex examples we're, Oh, we're examiners? Okay. I thought we were just, I thought we were just trying to say that this, this is like in that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. We were first writing and a different paper on like, that has to do with cancelling and we thought it would also be about conspiracy theories, ended up not being about conspiracy theories that much. Not really. So then I was like, okay, you have the whole biological belief system and I think that's been like reputed. So it did appear a few times today. I know, I sure did.
00:41:35
Speaker
I know it was sad, but I feel like that's been dealt with. But you still hear a lot of these like weaker claims, like, okay, well, maybe your you know your blue system is not more logical, but at least if you believe one, you believe an unrelated other, like at least one other. and um Yeah, I said that maybe we should like dive into that a little bit. And that's also something that we could present at this conference, because I think that a lot of psychologists, especially make this claim that, yeah, well, if you believe one, you believe another. And that's the most robust finding we have. And like, I think the wink is you're irrational, if that's the case, you know? Yeah, I think, you know, I think there's a way of understanding what we're doing here as
00:42:24
Speaker
I think sort of applying particularism in its most kind of robust way, right? I think the claim is that if you do that, if you make good on the particularist sort of ideal and look carefully at the conspiracy theories in which we're interested, you find that a lot of the times, even if they're wacky, They do hang together in an interesting way. So, for example, I mean, this is, Julie, I mentioned this, and I totally agree, like, if you think the Earth is fine, and you also think that the moon landing is fake, I think, if that's all you know, you might just think, like, one of the, these people are, they believe unrelated crazy things.
00:43:10
Speaker
but if you believe one you believe another But if you think carefully about what the flat earth theory says, and you think carefully about what that would entail cosmologically, then that just means that you kind of have to think the movement will stay. Because if the earth's flat and we live on like a ah flat disc under some sort of inescapable firmament, that we couldn't have gone to the moon. It just, it just follows. So yeah, maybe it's wacky, but it's not, you know, it's not irrational. In fact, like it's straightforwardly like that's what you got to believe. If you believe this one thing, you have to believe the other. But to find it out, as you said, you still first have to look at what these theories actually say when they actually until like, another thought was like,
00:44:01
Speaker
Yeah, of course. you know There's ah there's like this connection between believing that abortion rights should be um you know bigger than they are now and also believing that we should do stuff about the climate. From a distance, it seems that you know your opinion on one shouldn't really matter for your opinion on the other, but in reality, it just happens to be the case. very logically, that if you really dissect the two statements, then you get to a more leftist political ideology, and that's what's underneath both of them.
Rationality and Cultural Influence in Belief Systems
00:44:37
Speaker
And I think that that also the the same principle can hold for conspiracy theories. Yeah, but I think i think it's think what's interesting is that it holds a different think it holds it in a different way. So I think like if you have a sort of baseline ideology,
00:44:53
Speaker
And that like just happens to have a bunch of sort of like political planks, right? A bunch of sort of party lines. That's like, I think that's a different kind of thing than being like, well, look, I believe this thing about how the government works. And so that means that in this other instance, the government has to work that way too, or probably does work that way too. And so if i'm I'm worried about this, I should be worried about this other thing. And that's less sort of baseline ideology and more just like baseline, I think, rationality, which is, I think, great for us. I think that's 100% true. But it's also in some cases like my contractor, again, for those who don't know, I've been renovating my house for a year. My contractor,
00:45:44
Speaker
awesome. We've been becoming friends, but he believes every and any conspiracy theory as there are pejoratively labeled that you can think of. And like, you know, being Iranian, right? It means that, like, I don't necessarily mean ideology. I mean, like, default. Like, if you think of the web of beliefs, like coins, beliefs, You're the center of your beliefs. They kind of determine, you know, which other things you're going to find plausible as he's saw Iranian. He doesn't think that highly of the United States, he knows that the United States infiltrate other countries have way too much influence and shouldn't have and do evil things. And at least that's all what he believes. Right. And then he doesn't necessarily generalize from that, but he does make inferences from there.
00:46:35
Speaker
And so, yeah, he believes that George Soros is a satanic pedophile and it doesn't necessarily hang together from an outborn outsider. But if you talk to him, you find out like, yeah, of course, like I, I don't have any of these like priors and I, my web is very different, but I get why you specifically having also experienced a lot of racism in the Netherlands and, you know, just a whole, you know, range of, uh, uh, sad experiences, why you have come to your conclusions. I get that. Like, I'm not going to say, oh, you know, my judgment is irrational, irrational, irrational. I just feel like that's like, besides the point that in those cases. Yeah, no, i totally I totally agree. And I think that's like, I mean, I think Quine even talks about this, like in this earlier sort of epistemology stuff where he says, like, look, if you believe that someone's out to get you,
00:47:35
Speaker
But even if there's no one out to get you, if you believe that and you behave accordingly, like there's a sense in which you're behaving rationally.
Trust and Social Status in Conspiracy Beliefs
00:47:42
Speaker
If you really think someone's out to get you, you should act in such a way as someone's out to get you. And I think the same thing is true with like with some people like your contractor or people who have like sort of gone more you know, more all-in of sort of all the conspiracies, right? yeah At the end, the reverse is also true. Like, people don't have never gotten reason to mistrust authority, right? Or the government, or whatever you want to... Like, they're not going to find conspiracy theories lightly at all. Well, yeah, in fact, like, I think this is like, this is kind of what I was trying to ask, and the first talk, right, yesterday, it's just like,
00:48:23
Speaker
It's no surprise to me that like the people who are doing well, when they hear about conspiracy theories, they're just like, oh, well, why would I believe that? sir Things are going great for me. you know i have no I have no reason to doubt that the state is like operating in my interest and that things work more or less the way they we think they do. Whereas there's plenty of people, like people like your contractor, people who are from you know various kinds of places. I think another example is like people in Nigeria ah reacting to COVID and then started to believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories. like In Nigeria, there's been a history of Western you know influence and abuse of citizens without their knowledge in with vaccines.
00:49:14
Speaker
So you know their like their point of view is just very different. like there are And I can know all of that without it having the same kind of impact on me believing things about vaccines even in Africa today. right yeah i think For them, it's way more central. Yeah. I think what's surprising to me is that but for whatever reason, like Researchers like us we see this more like so Nigerians believe a bunch of conspiracy theories about stuff and like there's a there's a great Cambridge you go Like who believes what conspiracy theories where kind of deal and like every every single one Nigeria just not it's It's like Nigeria Turkey places with super corrupt governments and like really bad living situation like
00:50:04
Speaker
The places you would think people are just like, oh yeah, probably that's true too, are just those places.
Cross-cultural Research Advocacy
00:50:10
Speaker
So it's it's funny to me that there there are researchers who see who see these things. know Okay, why would people in Nigeria, say, believe these sort of medical conspiracy theories? And then you think about it for like one second, and you're like, oh, well, because they had a lot of trouble with the medical establishment. So probably they ought to believe these things. But then a whole other swath of researchers, it's just like, I couldn't possibly understand why they would believe this.
00:50:38
Speaker
Or because likes no, then we'll just not call it conspiracy theories. That's why the definition aspect is so important. It's also why I was so happy with your talk. It is important because if you're going to and you know talk about non-weird countries, right not the West, not not all of that, then the definition is so much more important than it's now and often realized. And one of the social psychologists also made this point that we should be way more conceptionary in Europe also keeping in mind that we should be testing outside of yeah Europe and the US and China.
Collaborative Academic Efforts
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah. We should be looking at all the nations of the earth, not just the ones that we find easiest to work at. Yeah. I mean, that was the cool thing about that Yuga of Cambridge. Well, I don't know if you've seen this call. It's like from a few years ago. Yeah. I remember coming out. I mean, they they had like,
00:51:36
Speaker
It was cool in that it was like, you know, Western countries, you know, like the weird places, US, Denmark, Scandinavia, whatever, not Canadian countries. And then, but also like Turkey and Nigeria and Mexico and places that you don't normally see these kind of survey results from. And is yeah, that was that was fascinating. power
00:52:01
Speaker
So one final question. What was it like actually making a poster? What was that process like? So, I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. That was kind of bad. So, so he chooses for reference. I have to make a website for my academic, like, job market soon. And every time I open up Squarespace, I'm on Squarespace for one second. On the website Revunge, it's our thing. Yes, yes. We're sponsors. Or or whatever whatever, Wix or whatever. whatever I can drop in a sponsor.
00:52:37
Speaker
But I open it up and i I know it's easy, I know I can do it, but like one second and I'm just like, I could just jump off a building. yeah That's what I can do right now. That's that's how I feel about filling out a form. If I have to get money back, you know, it requires me to submit a form. I go, I have just rather spend my own money than to fill out a form. I hate forms. I will pay my money to people to fill out the form. So with that said, when we were to do a poster. I was like, look, I'm glad to help. I'm not great at it. And I don't like, but. But we are also writing this other piece. Yeah. Right. So it made sense. Like, okay, you know, these couple of weeks I had to teach a lot. You focus on this other thing and I'll, I'll do the poster. I'm not scared of no poster. It was really, it was, I think you did a great job. She sent me one sort of draft and I was like, that looks great. And then two hours later she sent me, she was like, this is what the final was.
00:53:34
Speaker
It was even better. Yeah, but it was helpful. We already had like the long abstracts and I just like made bullet points out of them. That's basically what I did and then add some like graphics. It was like pictures blown away. I think the process the process for me was just being like, ah ah and then julia being like mother good so it was great well That's a good working relationship. Yeah. And also it was nice like for once to not have to give a real presentation. I don't know. I felt like, and we get a good excuse. We were the only philosophers who got in through an abstract submission. Yeah. And it weren't like invited. And so it was like, um I'm glad to be in like, in what whichever format, like I don't mind. like Yeah. And I think, I think because it was a poster.
00:54:28
Speaker
It was, it was less stressful because it was just like people might, people are going to really ask you questions about your poster and say some stuff, but it wasn't like, okay, we have to go give a 20 minute talk. And also because it was like maybe not the most congruent with the ideas of most social psychologists, right? It was nice that, yeah, a lot of people asked me like when I was standing next to the poster and I could just like explain our story to them personally and that gave a way less, I guess, vibe of, we think all this stuff and it actually means you're wrong or something,
Conclusion and Wrap-up
00:55:07
Speaker
right? It was way more personal and way more like, yeah, there was a lot more engagement with the people and it was, I liked it. Yeah. that
00:55:16
Speaker
was it and Ronnie gave a talk to this Robbie's son. There's another is it Ronnie? Is that the other? Ricky. Ricky. Yes, we agree. We talked to Ricky about it. Yeah. That was great. Yeah. And everybody we talked to, I mean, I don't have such a few people, but everybody seemed on board. But if you give like a soft, like they're like, it's easier to distance. Yeah. This was a nice performance. Yeah. Yeah. So the, yeah, it was a fun, It was different than what I thought. I thought it was going to be like, you didn't do like an expo, you did a convention center. I thought it was going to be like that. So we had a board and we had to sit at a table and be like, this is the shit we think. But it was not like that at all. a trade show, it's like that. There's a, here's our post-award, and then there's a bored person sitting there. Invest now! Yeah, sitting on their phone being like, yeah, altcoins, you should get into it. Don't do it. This is not financial advice.
00:56:23
Speaker
Well, we probably should start thinking about getting ready to go to dinner, which is free, so we should make the most of that. So thank you very much for a very entertaining conversation. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. We'll see what happens next in our future. Maybe we'll never be invited back, so far from classic colleges. That'll be embarrassing for me, because I'm advising on this print project. But who knows? Who knows? I really liked it. It's like, overall, good experience. I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. I got to see some sights. We laughed. We lived. We cried. I did cry at the church. We drank.
00:57:00
Speaker
I said we didn't drink. I did tear up the shirts though. I'm not like a religious person. and You want this to be outside? But there's just something about those faces. They're just like so overwhelming. I really like, I mean those architects really do. And with that, we shall bring this to a close.
00:57:56
Speaker
you