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Increasing Over Time? (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
115 Plays1 year ago
Fact, damn it, facts! Give us cold hard facts! Beautiful, comforting numbers to make sense of the world we live in! Wouldn't you know it, the surveys in Joe Uscinski's “Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time?” give us exactly that - let's rifle through them and see what conspiracy theories are believed the most, and which (if any) have seen belief in them rise in recent times.
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Transcript
Introduction and Weather Chat
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dentist. Hello and welcome to the podcast's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison in Zhuhai, China. They are Dr. Em R X Dentist and I did get COVID after all. Hooray! COVID for everyone.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm assuming that your COVID is the reason why China is going through the hottest December of all time because December 11th was the hottest December 11th on record in China. Now it's winter in Zhuhai. Guess what the temperature was in Zhuhai on the 11th of December? 5,000 degrees.
00:00:53
Speaker
quite close, it was 25 degrees Celsius, which is much warmer than Auckland on average in summer. And in fact, Auckland at the moment has been
COVID and Family Anecdotes
00:01:04
Speaker
kind of cold. We've had a bit of a chilly blast sent our way by storm somewhere else or something.
00:01:09
Speaker
Now I'm assuming you're getting China's cold weather. Seems like it, yeah. So I had a brief moment in time where my autumnal clothes came out and they've gone straight back into the wardrobe because it's bloody hot here at the moment. Ah well, you'll get your chance.
00:01:25
Speaker
No, I'm coming back in January, so it'll be summer, summer, summer, summer, summer, and then it'll be spring, which is pretty much like summer in Auckland anyway. So I'm just not going to feel cold this year, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an easy thing. As long as you manage it here, yeah, you'll be fine.
00:01:45
Speaker
But yes, no.
John Carpenter Film Discussion
00:01:48
Speaker
Having said last week, I have these people with COVID in my house, I wonder if I'll be able to avoid it. No, obviously I could. Although that said, one of my kids did, living in the same house as the three of us that got sick. Or are they possibly, possibly asymptomatic?
00:02:04
Speaker
I mean, they've returned negative tests. So it's possible at some point in the middle of all things, they got a really mild case and were asymptomatic, but they never came up positively. Are you sure that is your child? The child has been replaced by a pod person or a midwich cuckoo at some point during the process? Well, I mean, if you're suggesting that they're going to manifest strange otherworldly telekinetic powers, then bring it on.
00:02:33
Speaker
You do realise how the midwich cookers end, right? Ah, all the kids get up to some wacky hijinks and then I assume somebody just sort of, you know, ruffles them on the head and says, ah, yeah, cheeky wee devils, and then they go on with their lives as normal. I mean, that is the way the John Carpenter version of Village of the Damned End is.
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, there we go. It's gonna be fine. Very bad film, that. Very, very bad film. But also part of a chain of very, very bad films by one great director, John Carpenter. Well, good thing these days he just gets high and plays video games, from what I can tell. He did direct a TV series recently, although apparently it wasn't very good.
00:03:15
Speaker
Oh well, at least said the better then.
Introducing Conspiracy Theory Research
00:03:17
Speaker
So, we have a paper to look at. I guess, is this a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre? It's quite recent. It is, yeah. It's the last in our series of delaying getting back to the philosophical work. It's also, when I was thinking about it this morning, I'm fairly sure we've discussed this paper before, but of course, I discussed this paper with its primary author, Joe Ucinski.
00:03:43
Speaker
last year. So we have kind of talked about the content of this paper in that I asked Joe a whole bunch of questions about what do you say to people who claim conspiracy theories are abounding and his response is they're really not. Now we're going to look at the data that Joe has been relying
Cryptic Numbers and Historical Speculation
00:04:03
Speaker
upon. But talking about data, Joshua, have you been thinking about those weird numbers that we received by both text and email?
00:04:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, there were two strings of them. The first one, I don't know, you got two four-digit numbers, two three-digit numbers, and two two-digit numbers could be literally anything. The other was a set of four-digit numbers, which obviously makes you think years. I mean, 1938 is in there. That was the start of something. You got a 1067, that's just missing the Battle of Hastings. 2020,
00:04:38
Speaker
Sorry, but Josh, if you're going missing, I mean, World War II started in 1939, didn't it?
00:04:45
Speaker
Well, I'm assuming that's what you're intimating to. No, it was a bit of a picked-off video. So a year before, a year after. And 1052 would have been the schism between what we now call the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. So 1053 is a year out end date.
00:05:11
Speaker
So that's so which then makes you go 2004. Well, it's a year after the invasion of
00:05:19
Speaker
the UK? Probably after the invention of a bunch of things. But if these are dates and they're a year out then it actually makes no sense of the early dates because 44 BC is the death of Julius Caesar and that's kind of the right time. I think 27 BCE is the, is that when Augustus became Princeps or Emperor of Rome? So
00:05:48
Speaker
I mean, there's a bunch of things that surely happened at any of those years. Well,
Paper Abstract and Key Findings
00:05:53
Speaker
yeah, I mean, and I mean, that's the problem with a string of moments without any particular context. The further back you go in time is pretty much guaranteed to have been a battle or a war or something. Everybody was killing each other all the time. So who knows? Maybe we're just pattern matching. Yeah, I guess the whole low low Mars knots thing, that's the thing which
00:06:14
Speaker
is actually more unique there. But I actually still don't know what that means. No, as well as being an Enneagram of Old Mark Socks. I mean, it's also... It's because I'm about that. Yes. I mean, it's also an Enneagram of Knock Slum. Arse! Which I think...
00:06:36
Speaker
I think I think it's possible. I think I think it is important you have to, I mean, even though we don't want to give any credit to at least one of the writers of Father Ted, that way of saying arse is really the only way to say that word. I think you're taught in med school now. So of course you get to the posterior of the human body, which of course is called the arse.
00:07:17
Speaker
Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:07:29
Speaker
So the paper, of course, that we are looking at today is, have beliefs and conspiracy theories increased over time? And we all know how headlines work. Yes, if it ends in a question mark. But let's see. This isn't a headline. This is the title of an academic paper. So maybe the rules don't apply. Titles of academic papers are the headlines of the academic world.
00:07:52
Speaker
OK, well, here we go. Maybe we've spoiled it for you already. We both know that Alex Jones just reads headlines out online and then makes up stories about what's in the articles. Many academics do exactly the same thing. They find a suggestive title of a piece, cite it in a paper and assume that the title of the piece actually tells you everything you need to know about the piece.
00:08:17
Speaker
and then a reviewer like myself will point out, I mean I know the title of the paper suggests that the actual content of the paper actually contradicts it because academic writers don't obey the headline rule, at least not all the time. Well we'll just have to see if this one does or doesn't but what we do know for sure right now is that it was published on July the 20th 2022 and was of course authored by one Joseph Yousitsuki
COVID-19 and Other Conspiracy Theories
00:08:42
Speaker
along with Adam Enders, Casey Clovstad, Michelle Selig, Hugo Drokin, Kamal Pramaratna and Manohar Murti. So what is plus one? Does plus stand for something or is it just a funny sounding word?
00:08:59
Speaker
It's capital P, capital L, lowercase o, capital S, and then one all in caps. I mean, it's an open access interdisciplinary publication website, essentially. So you put stuff up there, it goes through peer review kind of in real time, and then it becomes an open access publication.
00:09:24
Speaker
You don't find much philosophy being done on plus one, although there's no real reason why it shouldn't be. It's just that it's not the most prestigious place to send material to. You do find a lot of social science being done on plus one. And we've read, we've read plus one papers before the David Rook Grimes paper. That takes us back. That was a while ago. Yeah. Anyway.
00:09:49
Speaker
Now, so because I'm recovering from a respiratory illness, I think it would be best if you read the abstract to save my voice. Should I read it in a really breathy way? If whatever works for you.
00:10:01
Speaker
The public is convinced that beliefs in conspiracy theories are... No, sorry, that's just too powerfully erotically charged. I think you need to use... I'm going to keep going. And many scholars, journalists and policymakers agree, given the associations between conspiracy theories and many non-normative tendencies. Lawmakers have called for policies to address these increases.
00:10:23
Speaker
However, little evidence has been provided to demonstrate that beliefs and conspiracy theories have, in fact, increased over time. We address this evidentiary gap. Study 1 investigates change in the proportion of America's believing 46 conspiracy theories. Our observations in some instances span half a century.
00:10:47
Speaker
Study 2 examines change in the proportion of individuals across six European countries, believing six conspiracy theories. Study 3 traces belief about which groups are conspiring against us, while Study 4 tracks generalizable conspiracy thinking in the US from 2012 to 2021.
00:11:11
Speaker
In no instance do we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism, however operationalized. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our findings." Well, that was almost pornographic in its eroticism there, the reading of that. I fully approve. Also, I want to point out
00:11:37
Speaker
You actually put the abstract in the notes, but I was reading it off the PDF, so I was reading off to one side. I could have actually been reading directly into the microphone. That may or may not have changed the cadence to which I read that abstract out. Just added to the effect, I think. So four studies, we've talked many times in the past about the big study that Joe does on a fairly regular basis and has been doing so for quite some time. I'm pretty sure that's study one.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the stuff he's been doing, or at least it's a variation of the stuff he's been doing for Pew Research for quite some time. And the work he's been doing for Pew Research is kind of connected to earlier studies looking at conspiracy beliefs that predate Joe's contribution to Pew Research surveys, but as part of a general trend in surveying conspiracy theory beliefs in America over the last half century or so.
00:12:34
Speaker
So he does at the start of the talk of study one give a bit of a definition saying a conspiracy theory is an explanation of past, present or future events or circumstances that cites as the primary cause a small group of powerful people working in secret for their own benefit against the common good and in a way that undermines bedrock ground rules against the widespread use of force and fraud.
00:12:59
Speaker
the more conspiracy theories have not been judged as likely accurate by the appropriate epistemological bodies using publicly available evidence. A conspiracy theory belief is one's acceptance that a specific conspiracy theory is likely true. So he loads a bit more for the definition than we normally go for. Yeah, so there are two parts here which I think need to be noted. So one, he's using a
00:13:25
Speaker
interesting definition of conspiracy theory that builds in that they are sinister. So surprise parties are not going to count as the subject. There's also this weird clause widespread use of force and fraud. That might be Joe's libertarianism kind of showing itself there, because that's a thing that libertarians are very much against the use of.
00:13:50
Speaker
But furthermore, conspiracy theories have not been judged as likely accurate by the appropriate epistemological bodies using publicly available evidence. That comes out of the fact that Joe is very fond of Neil Levy's work on conspiracy theory, because Levy thinks we have a kind of prima facie suspicion of conspiracy theories derived from the fact that A, they're counter to official theories, and B,
00:14:17
Speaker
official theories are endorsed by appropriate experts. And I've talked to Joe in the past about how there's been quite a lot of philosophical discussion as to why levy is wrong on this particular case. But Joe thinks this is a very useful demarcating factor between conspiracy theories as bad beliefs and conspiracy hypotheses or conspiracy explanations. So he and obviously his co-writers are sticking with levy here.
00:14:46
Speaker
even though I think there's good grounds to think that Livy's not the right person to appeal to, in part because there are more modern interpretations of the appeal to authority in the philosophical work, say like that of Keith Harris, which is more sophisticated and actually might be, if you're going to go for an official theory criteria around conspiracy theories in a pejorative way, you multiply use the most recent work,
00:15:12
Speaker
rather than what has been heavily criticized within the philosophical literature. Nevertheless, I mean this is a very, very much an empirical investigation and we'll go through the specific things that they're calling conspiracy theories and studying belief in in just a moment. So he has his big list of conspiracy theories which
00:15:33
Speaker
I assume has only grown over time of things that they ask people if they find them likely or not. But before that, they specifically in this paper split out belief in COVID-19 and QAnon conspiracy theories. And before getting into the rest of the larger list. So they polled two questions about COVID-19, how likely people found the claim
00:16:00
Speaker
Coronavirus was purposely created and released by powerful people as part of a conspiracy. And then also the claim, the threat of coronavirus has been exaggerated by political groups who want to damage President Trump. And so obviously that second sentence is only going to apply over a fairly short time period. But nevertheless, they looked at those. And a bunch of graphs in this paper, again, I don't fully approve, but they do tell a story.
00:16:28
Speaker
And the story that they have here, it only goes across actually two years. What do we have? March, June and October of 2020, and then May of 2021. But going across those four time periods, we see around 30% of the population
00:16:49
Speaker
agreeing with both of those things, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, but not a massive change. No. So there's something really interesting about some of the studies in this paper, because one thing which Joe is really interested in is the
Cultural Variations in Beliefs
00:17:07
Speaker
shelf life of a conspiracy theory. So he was really interested in looking at COVID-19 conspiracy theories and QAnon conspiracy theories.
00:17:16
Speaker
because they were really really big in the media and the media were talking about them as if there was widespread belief in them and he was going is it actually the case that many people believe these things and as was kind of discussed in the conversation with Joe last year you get this really interesting instance where
00:17:39
Speaker
You can poll people to find out, have they heard of a particular conspiracy theory? And you can poll people to find out, do they believe the conspiracy theory? And of course, more people have heard of the conspiracy theory than actually turn out to believe it. But fewer people have heard of the conspiracy theory than maybe many commentators in the media might think.
00:18:02
Speaker
And then continuing their focus on COVID-19 conspiracy theories, they look at the change in opinions from June 2020 to May 2021 regarding a bunch of other COVID conspiracy theories. In particular, the coronavirus is being used to force a dangerous and unnecessary vaccine on Americans. Bill Gates is behind the coronavirus pandemic. The coronavirus is being used to install tracking devices inside our bodies.
00:18:32
Speaker
and then ones related more to misinformation being the number of deaths related to the coronavirus has been exaggerated, hydroxychloroquine can prevent or cure COVID-19, 5G cell phone technology is responsible for the spread of the coronavirus, and putting disinfectant into your body can prevent or cure COVID-19.
00:18:51
Speaker
And it's interesting looking at the differences here between June 2020 and May 2021. So the one which is startling in a that's disturbing is the misinformation question number one, the number of deaths related, sorry, statement number one, the number of deaths related to the coronavirus have been exaggerated. That goes up between 2020 and May of 2021, which may well reflect the really
00:19:21
Speaker
whole arise situation going on in the United States at that time.
00:19:27
Speaker
Luckily, it turns out that between June of 2020 and May of 2021, 12% of people in June of 2020 thought that putting disinfectant into your body can prevent or cure COVID-19. That had dropped down to 6% in May of 2021. I'd like to think that dropped down because people were sensible. That may have dropped down because that particular part of the population put disinfectant into their body. They all tried it. And then self-injury badly.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah, no, it is interesting because that one, the one about the number of deaths being exaggerated is the only one where belief in it increased. And it's also the biggest absolute change went up seven percentage points, whereas a couple of them dropped by by six. And those were the biggest drops. So that one, the one about hydroxychloroquine is the only one that did not change. 18 percent of people believed it in 2020 and 18 percent of people believed in 2021.
00:20:26
Speaker
and the rest of them all dropped by some amount. Sometimes only barely, so the coronavirus is being used to force a dangerous and unnecessary vaccine on Americans, goes from 25% in June of 2020 to 24% in May of 2021.
00:20:46
Speaker
But of course, once again, there's this very polarized discussion about vaccination and vaccines that's going on in the West generally, but seems to be really going on in the United States. And I mean, even looking at the absolute numbers, the highest number is that one with the belief increased by 7%. So 36% of people believed that the number of deaths related to the coronavirus had been exaggerated in May of 2021.
00:21:13
Speaker
The next highest was 24% believed that the coronavirus was being used to force a dangerous and unnecessary vaccine. So it does also show that amongst these conspiracy theories, it's definitely not a majority of the population that holds them and does not appear to be getting any bigger either. So they move along to look at QAnon, asking a bunch of questions about that. So the first question they asked was simply, are you a believer in QAnon?
00:21:53
Speaker
I didn't actually sing that the first time around I only realised that after I sang it I saw your face, I just said I saw your typeface and now I'm a believer.
00:22:00
Speaker
It makes almost perfect sense. It doesn't make any sense at all. That's why it's only almost perfect. But no, so interestingly, in the surveys they have done in 2019, in August of 2019, 5% of respondents claimed to be believers in QAnon. By 2021, that had risen to 6%. Which is a 1% difference, but 5% of your population believing in QAnon
00:22:29
Speaker
doesn't seem to resemble the way the media talks about QAnon at all, which is Joe's bugbear. The media talks about QAnon like it's this pervasive belief in a conspiracy theory threatening the very bedrock of the American Constitution.
00:22:50
Speaker
And it turns out you poll people on do you actually believe in QAnon? It turns out actually a very, very, very tiny part of the American population actually believes in this. More people have heard about QAnon. Not many people actually believe in QAnon. However,
00:23:07
Speaker
The next three questions deal with issues that could possibly be called QAnon adjacent or things that you might expect QAnon believers to believe in. And they did all score a lot more highly. So the second statement, Paul, is there is a deep state embedded in the government that operates in secret and without oversight. And on first glance, that does seem very QAnon adjacent.
00:23:33
Speaker
And in 2020 that's 43% of the population. In 2021 that's 44% of the population.
00:23:42
Speaker
But as a lot of social scientists will point out, if you are a politically literate person who believes in this thing called the civil service, an unelected part of governmental arrangements in at least most Western, if not actually most Eastern countries, then you actually might agree with the claim there's a deep state without having any QAnon adjacent or conspiratorial views.
00:24:11
Speaker
Because if you know that there's an unelected part of the governing apparatus, and you happen to have watched yes minister or yes prime minister as a child, there are parts of the government that operate largely behind closed doors without notes and no particular oversight because they are the oversight themselves.
00:24:33
Speaker
So there's a question here as to, yeah, this belief is high, but this doesn't actually tell us anything particularly meaningful about a QAnon related belief. Well, the next one though, is elites from government and Hollywood are engaged in a massive child sex trafficking racket. Now this is high, 35%. 35% down to 34% a year later. So you know, give it another
00:25:01
Speaker
33 years to be filed have just disappeared in this trend. But yes, again, not a majority of the population, certainly, but a lot larger than people who explicitly say they believe in QAnon. This is the one which I wish I'd like more historical polling on this, because I've talked about this question with other academic study and conspiracy theories. And they'll go, well, I mean,
00:25:28
Speaker
If you're paying any attention to the British media and Operation Yutri and the Jimmy Savla fear, I mean, there are child sex trafficking rings and other stuff going on amongst liberty circles in some parts of the world. As you do have to wonder whether revelations like Savile, revelations like Epstein have actually
00:25:56
Speaker
made these beliefs go up because there's actually been evidence of them. And maybe people are then inferring there are more of these groups that actually do exist, although it may turn out there are more of those groups we actually do think exist. But this one would be great to have more historical data on because there actually might be evidence that's driving this belief.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, a lot of these things that people are pulled on are things where they are things that have happened in the past. Yes, they have definitely been child sex trafficking things and and elites have been involved in them at times in the same way that there have been assassinations, as we'll get to in a second, or, you know, coups and any other sort of nefarious activity you might want to mention.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder if there's a question with how with that jump from this thing does happen to this thing happens a lot or this thing is a massive problem or something like that. But yes, it does bring us into question four. Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire accused of running an elite sex trafficking ring was murdered to cover up the activities of his criminal network. And this is the highest scoring one of the lot of them. 50 percent of respondents agreed with that in 2020.
00:27:15
Speaker
and that it had only dropped down to 48% in 2021. Which yeah, I don't know, that I guess speaks to a fair amount of cynicism. Well, I mean, but also, no matter what you think about Jeffrey Epstein's demise, the official story
00:27:32
Speaker
Is theory very strange? Oh, the cameras were operating in his room. The guards weren't visiting the room at the appropriate intervals. He had stuff on his person which allowed him to hang himself. He shouldn't have had on his person.
00:27:49
Speaker
There's a lot of feeling, I think, in America that no matter what you think about the official theory, it's suspicious enough that people are going, I'm at least entertaining the idea that there's something slightly fishy about the story.
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah, it certainly falls under the, you know, I don't have evidence for it, but I could believe it. It seems like the sort of thing they do kind of a thing. And if only the last QAnon one was they have a feeling thermometer, they asked people to rate the QAnon movement.
00:28:22
Speaker
on a feeling thought, ranging from zero, very cold, negative feelings to 100, very warm, positive feelings. And QAnon was rated 21. So again, 5% of people said they were specifically believers in QAnon, but 21% of people... Well, actually, that's not quite how it works, is it?
00:28:42
Speaker
But it's colder. I suppose, yeah, that's 5% coverage at 100 here. But on average, it was 81. Which is actually fairly cold. And it had dropped down to 60. Yeah. So a year and a bit later, people are even colder on QAnon.
Survey Findings on Conspiracy Beliefs
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, so the idea that QAnon is this massive thing is perhaps not born out. Now, Josh, did you use a feeling thermometer when you had COVID recently? Not a strict feeling one. I felt my own forehead and noticed that I was very hot, but that's as close as I came, unfortunately. Ironically, if you were to ask me to rate COVID-19 on a feeling thermometer, I would be very cold on the topic.
00:29:32
Speaker
Not a fan. Not a fan. Really? COVID is going to be so disappointed. It always needs to try again. Yeah. Maybe next time you'll enjoy it more.
00:29:44
Speaker
We'll see, we will see. So now we come to the big list. The big list of another 37 conspiracy theories which they polled people's belief in. And I feel like last time when you talked about this, I remember going through this list. I'm not sure if it was the last time you talked about it or it might have even been a time before that when we'd looked at one of Joe's earlier surveys. But there's some interesting stuff there.
00:30:11
Speaker
But for what it shows and for what it doesn't show, I guess, if you had to pick out one highlight, what would it be for you? So, I mean, if you look at the 13, certain US government officials planned the attacks on September 11, 2001, because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.
00:30:31
Speaker
19% of people believe that back in 2011. 19% of people believe that in 2021. So you've got over 10 years, around about 20% of the population think that the 9-11 attacks are suspicious. That's an interesting constant there, and it's an interesting constant because
00:31:00
Speaker
What we do know about conspiracy theory polling in the United States is that the one conspiracy theory which remains incredibly popular is the idea that JFK was assassinated by people within the American government and not just a lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. So it kind of points to American disgruntlement towards their governing institutions where you can have
00:31:29
Speaker
almost 20% of the population over 10 years ago. Yep, don't really believe the official theory of 9-11.
00:31:37
Speaker
Yes, and we'll be looking at what people think of the government later as well. But yes, for me, I was mostly just impressed by the big numbers, to be honest. As you say, the assassination of the President Kennedy seems to be the most consistently high numbers. So we should say this survey, it's looking at the difference in belief in these things from one time to another. But time one and time two for each question
00:32:06
Speaker
are not necessarily the same. Obviously, recent ones, you couldn't look at them a long time ago. And then long standing ones, they have pollen that goes all the way back. So we have, what's the earliest?
00:32:21
Speaker
1971. Actually, it's the President Kennedy one again. They have polling going back to 1966, at which time 50% off. Actually, the wording of the question here is, do you think one man was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy? Or do you think there were others involved, which is really kind of
00:32:43
Speaker
It's almost sort of doing it backwards. It's really asking, do you believe the official theory or not? But phrasing it that way. Yeah, so if you look at the note on that one, explicit don't know or no opinion option provided. Other ways respondents could opt out of answering or select neither agree nor disagree. So a certain section of the population is kind of carved out of that result.
00:33:06
Speaker
But nevertheless, 50% 1966, 56% 2021. And this was another interesting thing because it comes up, this is one of the things they talk about when discussing the results. There's one idea is you might expect to see belief in conspiracy theories dropping off over time, especially because it's an old, because it's a historical issue, because, and this is something we talked about before, the idea that, yeah, I mean, it happened 50 years ago now.
00:33:36
Speaker
Who even cares? It happened more than 50 years ago now. 60 years ago now. I'm getting my 70s and 60s mixed up. You'd be wearing fliers at the wrong point in time if you do that.
00:33:55
Speaker
And maybe not that such a bad thing. I don't know. But but but so they look at the very last question in the list. Question 37 is, do you think that the Reagan campaign made a deal with the Iranians to hold the American hostages in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election?
00:34:10
Speaker
It's too late for an October surprise. It's the end of December, well, middle of December. Yeah, so it's the October surprise thing. So that went from 43% in 1991, right down to 12% in 2021. I think, yes, that is the biggest, the biggest drop.
00:34:28
Speaker
of any of the conspiracy theory beliefs. You look at that and think, okay, well, I guess that makes sense, an old thing. Over time, people just aren't interested anymore, more than happy to go along with it. And yet then you go back to the President Kennedy one, something even older, and that's only grown over time.
00:34:46
Speaker
So the thing about the assassination of a president is people talk about it all the time. The already suspicious theory that Reagan negotiated with a foreign power to delay a hostage release to win an election campaign.
00:35:03
Speaker
It's something that doesn't get discussed anywhere near as much. And that's not actually weighing in on the plausibility of that particular clap. It's just that people talk about the assassination of presidents a lot more than they do about suspected political scandals involved in election campaigns, in some cases before people were born. So that one, I think it's understandable why it dropped because it's moved out of the historical consciousness. But Kennedy's death is going to be with the Americans for a long time to come.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you could, you could run that the other way and expect. Well, yes. So, yeah, sure, maybe they did whatever, you know, makes no difference now. Another point to that is question 35. Do you feel the assassination of Martin Luther King was an act of one individual or part of a larger conspiracy? 59% of the people believe that in 1981.
00:35:58
Speaker
as opposed to only a third of the population in 2021. And that is an example that is still discussed a lot. It's on par with the death of Kennedy is the death of a civil rights leader like Dr Martin Luther King. So that one actually goes against my hypothesis there.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's hard to find any commonalities. But other interesting points. So the questions actually are ordered from highest change or highest positive change down to highest negative change. So as you said, the last one had a drop of 31%. The one at the top of the list, question number one, humans have made contact with aliens and this fact has been deliberately hidden from the public.
00:36:45
Speaker
Now this is a real 3 million question. 23% in 2019 and it's jumped up to 33% basically less than a year later because the polling is July of 2019. The next poll is March of 2020 and it's jumped by 10%.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a big change over a small amount of time. I don't know what to, you know, maybe that's an outline. There's been a lot more discussion of UFO disclosures at that particular point at the end of the last decade, beginning of the next.
00:37:22
Speaker
Hmm interesting to see number three with a seven percent jump now that over a longer period though it should have sounded like it was some kind of sports worker and coming up at number three with a seven seven point jump it's George Soros George Soros was a hidden plot to destabilize the American government up from 19 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2021 where is this George Soros gonna go next?
00:37:49
Speaker
Pretty much, pretty much. Yeah, so the George Soros ones went from 19% of the public believed it in 2011 up to 26% of them in 2021. Now, this one, I'm sure, I'm sure we talked about this last time. I remember asking you this question and I do not remember the answer to that question. And that concerns number 36.
00:38:13
Speaker
So the second highest negative, second highest fall, I guess, second biggest drop, which is, do you think there is or is not a national conspiracy to kill police? And this one dates back to 1970. In the 1970s,
00:38:31
Speaker
44% of people believed there was a national conspiracy to kill police, whereas in 2021 only 16% of people did. The second number doesn't surprise me. Why in the 70s did people think there was a big conspiracy against the police? Because there was high trust in police in the 1970s and the police were telling people that there was targeted crime against them.
00:38:54
Speaker
So people were even stupid in the 70s. They're still naive and stupid now, but they're not naively believing the police. They were back there, basically. Yes. Well, so it's just it's it's it's a copaganda, I believe is the first term. And this is one we're actually seeing the intervals to see how that drop worked would be interesting because I, and this is entirely speculation on my part,
Conclusion and Listener Invitation
00:39:24
Speaker
But I actually imagine it probably stays 44, 40% into the 80s and 90s and then starts to drop precipitously in the late 90s, 2010s as more and more evidence from body camera footage and people having cell phones actually makes it fairly obvious. No, the killers are the police. It's not people killing the police. The police are the actual killers in the room.
00:39:51
Speaker
So any other high or interesting points? I guess we talked about the big numbers. The smallest number that I can see is question 28. Do you believe that Osama bin Laden is dead or do you think he's still alive? Another one of those strange questions you have to understand how the polling works. Otherwise, if it turns out 11% of people think he's both dead and alive at the same time, that would be very bizarre.
00:40:17
Speaker
Yeah, so that one also offered a don't know or a no opinion. But yeah, we went from 11% of people thinking Osama bin Laden was alive in 2011 down to far only 5% were willing to believe in that theory in 2021. So that seems to be the least popular conspiracy theory. And I think we've already looked at the biggest ones. Assassination of President Kennedy is the
00:40:40
Speaker
I think the, oh no, the assassination of President Kennedy and the claim that the 1% of richest people in the US control the government and the economy for their own benefit. I think those two things are the only ones that top 50% in the, oh no, sorry, one more, one more exactly on 50% and it's another UFO one. Do you think the government is keeping information from the public that shows UFOs are real or that aliens have visited the earth? Also believed in by 50% of respondents in 2021.
00:41:10
Speaker
So, yeah, out of 37 questions, only three of them are currently believed by a majority of respondents in the current time, which, yeah, again, doesn't speak to a huge pervasiveness of conspiratorial thinking in society.
00:41:29
Speaker
And then again, of course, as we say, conspiracies do exist, right? You would hope, you would want there to be some amount of belief in conspiracy theories, because some conspiracy theories are true, some conspiracy. Yeah, and that brings us back to the previous discussion we had about the civil service. Statement 14, regardless of who's officially in charge of governments and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.
00:41:58
Speaker
Once again, if you've got a belief in a civil service, then that's going to be a kind of deep state belief. And there are going to be people who go, look, the civil servant or the people who survive success of government, of course, they're meeting in closed rooms to discuss how they're going to advise the minister or the secretary in a particular way to ensure this continuity, despite the fact there's been a change in government.
00:42:26
Speaker
And this one's interesting because in 2020, 35% of the population believed it. And later that year, I mean, this is only a seven month gap here. Later that year, it's still stable on 35%. No change. Although admittedly, I do think polling within one year
00:42:47
Speaker
Probably not the best idea. Difficult to show, no. But we've been talking about study one for a long time, and we do have three others. We should probably glance over, although none of them are as big as that one. Interesting, truth be told.
00:43:03
Speaker
Study two is conspiracy theory beliefs across cultures. So in this one, they studied people, they surveyed people in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Sweden. Yep, and then there's all of the cultures, every single culture, that's very, very white apart from Italy. Well, it is. I think the point was simply non-American and culturally, at the moment, the people of Great Britain are completely different from the Americans.
00:43:31
Speaker
Well, there are some significant difference. Anyway, we'll see. We'll have a look. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are essentially the same person these days. They polled their belief in six different propositions that humans have made contact with aliens, and this fact has been deliberately hidden from the public. The AIDS virus was created and spread around the world on purpose by a secret group organized
00:43:57
Speaker
organization, regardless of who's officially in charge of governments and other organizations, there's a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together. Number four, Holocaust denial, basically number five, global warming is a hoax. Number six, the government is deliberately hiding the truth about how many immigrants really live in this country. And they, it's quite a, quite a cheery looking little graph. You've got a table of what is it? That's six by six, 36 little
00:44:25
Speaker
So actually 35, they didn't seem to poll. I wondered why the gap was and then I looked at it was they didn't poll people on Holocaust denial in Germany, where Holocaust denial is illegal.
00:44:36
Speaker
So that's probably understandable. But so you've got a six by six grid with the countries on one axis and the questions on the other. And then within each one, you have a little, they only stated over two time periods between 2016 and 2018. So you have a whole lot of two points with a line in between them, which look a lot like the face of the Baymax robot and big hero. I was thinking either it's the
00:45:03
Speaker
I'm years and years and years ago is going through a trunk of the belonging of someone who went from America to Aotearoa in the early part of the 20th century. And when he was in America, he tried to get acting work on silent films. And as was the style of the time, you'd go to a photographer and you'd get a series of photos taken of all the different facial expressions you can do to show your acting range.
00:45:32
Speaker
in silent films and this looks like a series of photos of a smiley face, now I'm going to do sad, now I'm going to do slightly rhyme, now I'm going to do happy, rising to one side, rising to the other side, yeah. Yeah, now in terms of the actual numbers though,
00:45:47
Speaker
So the scales only go as high as 50% and nothing seems to top that before or after. Most of them, most of them look to be below 20% and there are very, I can't see any market rises. I can see a few small rises from one time to another.
00:46:09
Speaker
The drops though, what drops there are seem to be the things that fallen more than they have risen. The one that sticks out straight away is the anti-immigrant one, basically. That's in pretty much every country is the highest one, except Portugal. In Portugal, all the belief in all of them is pretty low, except for the one about the idea that there's a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.
00:46:37
Speaker
I don't know if that's the secret antisemitism question or what, but again, that's high in Portugal and Italy and kind of high in Poland as well, comparatively. Yeah, and what's interesting is that Sweden has some disturbingly high hiding emigrants sentiment there, which is dipping, which is good. Well, so it turns out Great Britain also
00:47:04
Speaker
Disturbingly high but dipping a lot more hmm. Yeah, actually, yeah, Britain and Sweden look quite similar quite quite low beliefs in the other five questions and Relatively much higher for the immigrants one, but they can easily is showing an increase in Holocaust denial in Italy. It's a small jump in Sweden. It's a slightly higher jump and
00:47:30
Speaker
Yeah. But again, if you look at the whole thing overall, again, it's hard to say that it shows even in Europe that there's a significant rise in conspiracism. So moving on to study three, this is now looking at the groups that people believe are conspiring against them. So they asked them, they gave people nine different groups
00:47:56
Speaker
and basically said, how likely do you think it is that these groups are conspiring against us? Those groups are corporations and the rich, Republicans or other conservative groups, Democrats or other liberal groups, communists and socialists, the government, foreign countries, international organizations, by which they meant United Nations International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the like.
00:48:19
Speaker
the Freemasons or other fraternal some other fraternal group and labor unions and This one's interesting. So this goes from 2012 up to 2020 with a gap for 2014 for some reason and This one's a little bit more You can see you can see more change going on And yet mostly it's changed trending downwards. I think the only
00:48:46
Speaker
The only ones I can see where over the entire span it started higher than it ended was belief that communists are conspiring against us and belief that Democrats are conspiring against us. The communists is hovering around 40 and the Democrats is around 30, whereas the Republicans are about the same really. That was a slight, slight rise from what it was as well.
00:49:12
Speaker
The belief that unions are conspiring against us is quite steadily down. Foreign governments is absolutely the highest of any of them, except maybe corporations. No, I think foreign governments are still top of the list, but even that trended down just in the last one. Corporations, people believe fairly strongly that they're conspiring against them, but then they've had a bigger drop.
00:49:36
Speaker
from 2018 to 2020. I don't know if people started trusting corporations significantly more then. But I thought the government, the one about the government tells an interesting story. The idea that the government set out to get us was around sort of mid 20s in 2012. It's around getting close to 30 for 2018 and 2020. Big spike up to 40% in 2016.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah. That tells a story. But yeah, again, looking at the overall picture, it's not like they're all trending up. It's not like they're all particularly high. Some have gone up a bit, some have gone down a bit, some have changed, have gone up and down over time. What's the word? Oscillated? Something like that. Yeah, oscillate's a good word.
00:50:27
Speaker
Again, this, I don't see, oh no, no, no, it's hard to tell without the lines, but in 2020, I don't see anything believed by higher than 50% of the population. A couple of surveys back, the foreign governments one and the corporations one looked like it was believed by over 50% of people, but otherwise that was it. And now, before we run out of time, we better look at study number four, which is conspiracy thinking.
00:50:56
Speaker
So this is a sort of a more general looking at the idea, have people become more conspiracy minded in general over time, as they put it? And we've got we've got four statements here. One, which is what I keep coming back to. Even though we live in a democracy, a few people always run things anyway to the people who really run the country and not known to the voters. Three,
00:51:24
Speaker
Big events like wars, the recent recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us. And four, much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places. So these are meant to be eliciting conspiracy thinking.
00:51:43
Speaker
Yes, I think like I wasn't 100% with you on the civil servant thing in the earlier ones with you explicitly referencing a deep state, which I think carries some more, more connotations, perhaps, but definitely in this one. I put that is when I talk to other academics studying conspiracy theories, they say they would they would vacillate on those questions as to how they would how they would answer them.
00:52:11
Speaker
So if the people who write on conspiracy theories are going, I think that question is slightly vague because even I would go, how would I answer that? I think that indicates that if there's a general populace, they're going to be answering it in consistent ways.
00:52:28
Speaker
Yes, but regardless of those ones, you know, this one definitely is very, very generally worded. One and two are things. So even though we live in a democracy, a few people always run things anyway, the civil service. The people who really run the country are not known to the voters. Once again, the civil service.
00:52:48
Speaker
Who's the Secretary of Agriculture, America? I don't know, and I assume maybe it's us. Surely it's John Deere. Isn't John Deere the Secretary of Agriculture? He's in our hearts, yes. So those four questions, the way the survey worked was people were given those four questions and then asked to rank them one to five, one being strongly disagree, five being strongly agree. And amongst those then to determine
00:53:15
Speaker
So averaging is all out what from one to five, how conspiratorial is people's thinking, assuming that you agree that these are good, good measures of conspiratorial thinking.
00:53:30
Speaker
From 2012, when they first started asking these questions up to 2021, when they most recently did at the time this paper was written, they graphed the results and you're almost looking at a straight line, a flat level line. The trend line, when they draw it through these points, goes down very, very slightly. Yeah, so it might go from about 3.3 to 3.15.
00:54:00
Speaker
maybe something like that, definitely. And we're saying three here because it's from strongly disagree to strongly agree on a five-point Likert scale. So it does seem to be trending down to the neither agree nor disagree with time. At the moment, it's slightly agree, but it's trending away from slightly agree.
00:54:30
Speaker
So yeah, that's where it comes to. They have a bunch of conclusions at the end. In particular, one thing
00:54:40
Speaker
I'm not sure if they mention it themselves. They do say at the start, numerous cross-sectional polls show that large numbers of people believe conspiracy theories and online conspiracy theory content is plentiful. Perhaps because of this many scholars, journalists and policymakers are concerned that conspiracism is increasing. However, little systematic evidence demonstrates such increases, demonstrating such increases has been produced.
00:55:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because they're looking at things about conspiracism in general, but yeah, the idea that a person can believe in one conspiracy theory, but doesn't necessarily mean they believe in lots of others. Although again, we've seen some work that does kind of make that assumption sometimes. So to go from individual conspiracy theories to a general amount of conspiratorial thinking,
00:55:31
Speaker
interesting. So I mean they say it hasn't increased or indeed looks like it if anything it's gone down a bit. I don't know if that's the same as saying they're not concerned because it does seem that that seems kind of like a different question when you get down to it. Yeah so there's a question here about how many conspiracy beliefs there are.
00:55:54
Speaker
and how salient or pertinent they are to political debate. And this is the point I make when I'm teaching or talking about these things. It actually may not matter what the base rate of conspiracy thinking is in a given society. It might matter who is expressing those conspiracy theories and discourse.
00:56:14
Speaker
because no matter what we think about how many people believe conspiracy theories, one thing which seems notable, and I'm putting seems here in quotes because there's a big debate as to whether we're just noticing something's been around for a while or whether it is a genuinely new development, but conspiracy rhetoric by politicians seems to be on the uptick, even if conspiracy beliefs are on a downward trend.
00:56:40
Speaker
And so if it turns out that the change in who is expressing their conspiracy theories in a society has changed, then that might be the thing we're concerned with. Okay, not many people believe conspiracy theories.
00:56:54
Speaker
But if it turns out that people who do believe unwarranted and suspicious conspiracy theories hold the reins of power, that is something we might be concerned with. Because even if it turns out there aren't many conspiracy theorists, if they're the ones in charge, that's probably disturbing.
00:57:14
Speaker
above and beyond that then there's the people who act on their conspiracy theories. And I mean, 9-11 aside, the biggest terrorist attack, well, certainly the biggest domestic terrorist attack in the United States was the Oklahoma City bombing, which was back in the 90s. So it's certainly not new that people have been
00:57:33
Speaker
carrying out attacks and causing tremendous harm while motivated by conspiracy theories. But it does, again, seem, a very qualified seem like we're seeing more and more attacks motivated by the sort of your far right great replacement type conspiracy theories.
00:57:54
Speaker
are certainly obviously in New Zealand. We had a particularly bad one in recent times. So the story that's being told might not be the right story, but there is possibly a story that is concerning nevertheless. Yeah, and that's why more work needs to be done.
00:58:13
Speaker
Joe and co are not going to deny that this is the start of a research project. Their concern is simply to get down to, look, if there is a claim that conspiracy theory beliefs are increasing, we can interrogate that.
00:58:29
Speaker
doesn't seem that it is. That doesn't mean that we should be concerned about belief in suspicious and unwarranted conspiracy theories. It just means that when we talk about them, maybe we don't overstate the problem that doesn't exist and focus on the problems that do exist instead.
00:58:47
Speaker
Hmm, a good idea all round, I would say. And yet, and this is the point which Joe makes and I've made with several journalists, you give journalists this information and they go, yeah, but my gut feel tells me there's more conspiracy beliefs now than there have been in the past.
00:59:04
Speaker
And that's the frustrating part of this research. It's not that the research is bad. It's that the people who should be affected by the research are going, no, no, but my gut tells me a different story. I'm going to trust my gut instead.
00:59:18
Speaker
Yeah, that is the depressing side of it. And on that depressing note, I think it's time to call things to a close. Unless, of course, you're one of our patrons when you get a bonus episode to listen to after this, where we'll talk a bit about things that start with A. Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Acorn.
00:59:35
Speaker
tangentially, sort of. So if you want to hear about what interesting and wacky things we've been up to this week, I probably won't talk about having COVID much, but I make no promises. But go listen to our bonus content for which you'll need to be a patron. And if you want to be a patron, you just need to go to portrayon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. You'll find us with ease and be able to sign yourself up.
00:59:57
Speaker
Or not, once again. You listen to an hour-long podcast episode about an academic paper, so bless you for that nonetheless. So, any closing thoughts? No. No, I'm pretty sure we've said all we need to say, except of course for... Goodbye. No. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself.
01:00:27
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.