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What’s a Monological Belief System?
32 Plays2 years ago
Time for another Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre - this week we're looking at Kurtis Hagen's "Conspiracy Theorists and Monological Belief Systems".
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Epstein-Barr Syndrome & Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
So I've been looking into Epstein-Barr syndrome recently. Mono? I don't know what the guy from U2 has to do with it, but no. Epstein-Barr, you know, the sinister syndrome that says if you believe in a conspiracy theory that involves former US Attorney Bill Barr and noted pedophile philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein, then that causes belief in every other conspiracy theory. I don't think I know about this one.
00:00:22
Speaker
Apparently, belief in the Epstein-Barr conspiracy theory predicts belief in all other conspiracy theories. Once you contract, as the kids say, the Epstein-Barr virus, then you'll end up believing, say, that Diana was killed by MI5, that the moon landings were faked, and that space unicorns caused global heating. Where exactly are you getting this from?
00:00:47
Speaker
Well, I was doing some background reading for today's Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. And I've been looking at what social psychologists have to say about how conspiracy theories are structured as a belief system. And as you know, they claim it as a mononucleosis belief system. I think you mean monological belief system. Monological.
00:01:08
Speaker
Not? Mononucleosis? Monological, as in the sense that Ted Goetzle talked about, one conspiracy belief begets another. OK, so what do Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Barr have to do with this? Very little. Bono, on the other hand. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dent.
Introduction to 'Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy'
00:01:40
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy who sprang fully formed from the head of a, it's like a sort of turtle thing. I didn't get a good look at it anyway. It's Dr. M. R. X. Tenteth. And I am so gory right now.
00:02:00
Speaker
gory. When you spring fully formed from turtle and you don't wash subsequently, you're just covered in viscera. Covered in so much viscera. And let me tell you, Josh, this viscera is beginning to stink.
00:02:15
Speaker
Well, I mean, I didn't say how long ago it was that you spring fully formed. So I mean, presumably, it's quite a while. I spring fully formed every day. Every day, I spring forward from the head of a turtle and begin my day, usually with a small espresso. Well, it makes sense then.
00:02:35
Speaker
Very
Tribute to Dean Bellinger
00:02:36
Speaker
good. Now we have some uncharacteristically sad news to start a podcast with this week. Yes, so long time listeners of this podcast will be aware that back in episode 62, which I think was sometime around the year of our devilish creator 2015 sometime,
00:02:59
Speaker
We interviewed one Dean Bellinger, who's a media studies scholar down in the Waikato, and we had a great conversation about Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley's tour of Aotearoa, New Zealand, UFOs and the like.
00:03:13
Speaker
It is, with great sadness, I have to announce that Dean has died. So earlier this month, Dean passed on, as the kids say, and is no longer with us. And it's all rather sad because Dean and I were about the same age. We did our PhDs at around about the same time. We both looked into conspiracy theory theory, me from an epistemological start, him from the field of media studies.
00:03:40
Speaker
And yeah, Dean is no longer with us. He was suffering from an illness last time I saw him in the Waikato, which is about six months before I went to China. And it seems like that illness has taken him. So no more Dean. And it's all very sad. It really is. So we're going to re-release the interview with him, episode, are we?
00:04:04
Speaker
We are, so I actually spent this morning going through episode 62, tidying things up, adjusting the levels, and also being very much aware that that is the episode where we talk a lot about Groomer and rapist Morgan. So I've removed all references to Morgan from that podcast episode.
00:04:25
Speaker
probably for the best. You put a little intro on the front of it or anything? I did, yes. I do have a little, this is a M Memoriam for Dean episode. All right then, so look for that. It's from many years ago now, so an interesting look back at the past of the podcast and our little way, I guess, of saying farewell to Dean, you will be missed.
Philosophical Perspectives on Conspiracy Theories
00:04:54
Speaker
So, moving on. Moving on with the rest of the episode. Maybe it's appropriate that we're looking at another philosophical paper this week then, if one of your academic colleagues is no longer with us. We're not looking at anything by Dean, though. We're returning to the work of one Curtis Hagan, whose name we know how to pronounce properly now.
00:05:14
Speaker
We do indeed, even though I do really feel that Curtis should change his last name to fit in with our previous pronunciation. That would be a considerate thing, but never mind. He's a grown up, he can live his own life. We're not your mum, Curtis. So should you want to play a chime? And then we'll get on with it. I will indeed. I'm going to play this chime right here. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yes, so this week we are looking at conspiracy theorists and monological belief systems by Curtis Hagen from Argumenta in 2018. Which was a special issue on conspiracy theory theory. So there's a lot of papers in there, which I believe I am one of them.
00:06:07
Speaker
So this is an interesting one. This is kind of Curtis taking on the sociologists a little bit, or the psychologists, the other social scientists anyway. It's sort of a- Yeah, so he's specifically taking on social psychologists and also Ted Goetz all at the same time. So I guess the best way to sum it up is just to read the good old fashioned abstract. And I'm going, I don't even care if it's not my turn anymore. I'm going to read this one because it says,
00:06:36
Speaker
Recent scholarship has claimed to show that conspiracy theorists are prone to simultaneously believe mutually contradictory conspiracy theories as well as believe entirely made-up conspiracy theories. The authors of those studies suggest that this supports the notion that conspiracy theories operate within, quote-unquote, monological belief systems.
00:06:53
Speaker
in which conspiracy theorists find support for conspiratorial beliefs in other conspiratorial beliefs or in related generalisations, rather than an evidence directly relevant to the conspiracy in question. In this article, I argue that all of that is either wrong or at least misleading. The Hiccup is not part of the abstract, fortunately. Although, I mean, it would be interesting if it were. What kind of grammatical mark could we use for Hiccup?
00:07:20
Speaker
I don't know. I haven't. I haven't. It's been a long time since I looked through the international phonetic alphabet, but I'm sure there must be one. They've got one for all the cliques. Wait, so on a related note, so the reading group that I run recently looked at a piece of discourse analysis around when Jerry Brownley engaged in conspiracy theory dog whistling about the government's COVID-19 response. And it turns out that there's quite the sophisticated
00:07:49
Speaker
set of symbols and terms used by discourse analysis people to mark out when people mutter, when people cough, when people talk over the top of other people, which means you could do really, really, really fine-grained transcriptions and point out exactly where people are talking over the top, where a cough interrupts, things like that. So there probably is a standard symbol for the hiccup.
Critique of Conspiracy Theory Studies
00:08:17
Speaker
But we'll never know.
00:08:18
Speaker
So to the paper, it starts in the traditional fashion with an introduction. In this introduction, Curtis points out he's going to look at three papers in particular to argue against the Monological Belief System thesis. He's going to look at a paper by Wood et al, which is dead and alive, beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories.
00:08:44
Speaker
Swami et al, conspiracist ideation in Britain and Austria, evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real world and fictitious conspiracy theories. I really feel that title is far too long. Could do with a trim. And Ted Goetzel's classic paper from 1994, Belief in Conspiracy Theories, which is where the Monological Belief System Hypothesis was first put forward.
00:09:15
Speaker
And so these are all papers in psychology, social psychology, political psychology, the other ones from the British Journal of Psychology. So yeah, so this is a philosopher taking on the psychologists and what he says, in his words he says,
00:09:30
Speaker
going to show the following. One, the often cited claim that conspiracy theorists tend to simultaneously believe contradictory conspiracy theories based on the Wood paper is unfounded. Two, a study that purports to show that conspiracy theorists are more prone than others to believe entirely fictitious conspiracy theories, the Swami paper, is one-sided and misleading. In addition, the authors make an error about belief that's analogous to the one made by Wood and others. Further, there is nothing unusual or problematic about the reasoning process that presumably underlines the phenomenon they document.
00:10:00
Speaker
In 3, both of the above studies claim to provide evidence that conspiracy theorists tend to operate within a monological belief system, an idea first put forward by Ted Goetzel. This label, as described by Goetzel, implies that there is something epistemically problematic about the reasoning of conspiracy theorists.
00:10:16
Speaker
And so what he's going to want to say is that in all of these studies, the evidence that's there, what it shows is actually quite unproblematic. And where they try to say that there are problematic things, those things aren't supported by the evidence, or that they apply specifically to conspiracy theorists. Yeah, so part of this argument here is that
00:10:42
Speaker
Conspiracy theories get blamed for a variety of ills, and yet at best what these papers show is that there are problems in reasoning which sometimes occur when people believe in conspiracy theories.
00:10:59
Speaker
But the papers don't support the contention that these problematic reasoning patterns are only found with respect to belief in conspiracy theories. So one kind of takeaway from this paper is the question, why are you picking on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists rather than go, well, look, these are just problematic patterns of reasoning that occur all around the place.
00:11:40
Speaker
The reason why Curtis is looking at these papers in particular is that they're very well-cited papers in the psychological literature. So when people claim, oh, look, conspiracy theorists believe contradictory things, they point towards a paper that Curtis is going to argue doesn't quite show what it claims to show. Or when people say, look, conspiracy theorists suffer from a monological belief system, they point towards the Goetzal paper.
00:11:50
Speaker
Why pick on the conspiracy theories? Why this particular issue?
00:12:08
Speaker
and Curtis is going to say, well, look.
00:12:11
Speaker
this paper isn't well substantiated. So it's a problem that not only do these papers make bolder claims than they ought to, but they're then cited by other people as evidence that these claims are true. So it's a problem not just of the original conceptualization, but also the fact that people are then kind of willfully citing papers with problematic conceptualization as evidence of a problem that probably doesn't exist. Yes.
00:12:41
Speaker
And so, yes, that leads into Section 2, conspiracy theorists believe contradictory conspiracy theories by saying that, yes, the literature refers to studies which say that conspiracy beliefs are monological, and we'll get into the detail of what that means in a little while, to the extent that people will even believe multiple contradictory conspiracy theories.
00:13:04
Speaker
which is then used to imply, look how irrational these conspiracy theorists are, they even believe things, they even contradict themselves in their own beliefs.
00:13:13
Speaker
And so as examples of this, he gives the Bet Noir of the conspiracy theory theorist set Cass Sunstein also says this has been referred to by the two Joes, Jusinski and Pierre. Did they get called the two Joes? Do they call themselves Joseph and Joseph, like Thompson and Thompson and Tintin or something like that? And if I think of monks,
00:13:35
Speaker
Amongst conspiracy theory, theorists, yes, they get referred to as the two Joes. In fact, actually, there's a nice little joke that Curtis has in the paper where he talks about Joe Conspiracist and Joe Conventualist. So he's really taking the Joe thing to a new and humorous conclusion here. But no, having met the two Joes, they're not really like the Thompson twins. And they're definitely not like the other Thompson twins.
00:14:02
Speaker
Well, that's a bit of a shame, to be honest. But at any rate, so when people talk about this stuff, in particular, a claim that comes up a lot is the idea that there's a study which shows that people believe that Osama bin Laden is still alive and also believe that he was already dead before the raid that supposedly killed him. There are similar claims about Princess Di being both alive and dead or something like that.
00:14:32
Speaker
Now these particular examples come from the Michael Wood paper.
00:14:38
Speaker
from 2012. I've didn't live belief in contradictory conspiracy theories. But as Curtis shows that the two studies cited in this paper don't actually show that they don't it's not like it's here's a list of things. Do you believe in all these things? And they tick the box for Yes, I believe this one. And yes, I believe that one. They gave a bunch of conspiracy theories and asked them to rate their level of agreement with it on a scale from one to seven, I think it was.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, one to seven or one to 11 are the kind of standard like it scales when it comes to strongly agree at one end, strongly disagree at the other, using odd numbers, you've always got a middle kind of ambivalent point, no agreement situation. And then what you tend to do is that then when you're trying to make sense of the results, you'll end up going, well, look,
00:15:33
Speaker
If we have a 7 point scale, we say 7 is strongly disagree, and 1 is strongly agree. Well, 1, 2, and maybe 3 are going to be our agreement points.
00:15:48
Speaker
five, six and seven will be our disagreement points, which means we've then got a middle value in there which is neither agree nor disagree. So you can reduce these things down to a binary, but as Curtis is going to argue, that's a problematic thing to do when you give people these lists of
00:16:09
Speaker
potentially contrary conspiracy theories because saying I strongly agree with one hypothesis but that strongly agree ending up being say a two or a three kind of ends up confusing the analysis if you only make the results a binary rather than what we would take it in philosophy to be credences.
Credence and Belief Systems
00:16:34
Speaker
Yes. The study itself is not talking about belief. It's talking about level of agreement. It's talking about willingness to countenance these things. It doesn't say that they believed all of these things simultaneously. It's they'd be willing to believe this. They might also be willing to believe that if it turned out to be the case. As Curtis suggests, if you're coming from a position of not trusting the authorities, then
00:17:02
Speaker
It is not entirely unreasonable for people to say, well, yeah, I don't believe the official version. Yeah, maybe it turns out he is alive. Maybe it turns out he was dead way, way before that. But either way, I think the official version is fine. That doesn't mean you're saying, I believe he is both alive and dead right now.
00:17:19
Speaker
Indeed, to quote Curtis, as the researchers quite reasonably suggest, what seems to be at work here is a mediating belief that authorities are untrustworthy. Indeed, that is not merely an obvious and plausible idea, it is also supported by their statistical analysis. If a particular individual is less trusting of the government than someone else, regardless of what level of trust is warranted,
00:17:39
Speaker
He or she is more likely to give greater credence to alternative accounts of contested events. There's simply nothing epistemically dubious about, say, rating both the notion that Obama was already dead and that he is still alive. Osamu, not Obama. I knew I was going to do that.
00:17:54
Speaker
that he's still alive as more, quote, plausible convincing worth considering incoherent than someone else with more faith in official stories rated by theories. So yeah, he gives Lee Basham's analogy about losing your- Which I'm sure we've mentioned before. Yeah, but the brief pre-save of this is look, you may discover you don't know where your keys are and you end up going, well, I know the keys aren't on my person. So either they're still in the lock in the front door
00:18:22
Speaker
or I've left them beside the fridge and so you entertain two contradictory hypotheses because if the keys are in the front door they can't be beside the fridge and if they're beside the fridge they can't be in the front door but because you know absolutely the keys aren't on your purse and you end up going well look I think it's it's actually likely they're in one of two locations
00:18:46
Speaker
And I've got a tendency to leave my keys in the front door when I come in. And I've also got a tendency to drop my keys beside the fridge. So I'm entertaining those as both likely hypotheses.
00:18:59
Speaker
But it doesn't mean I'm sincerely believing two contradictory claims. It's more that I go, look, I think it's highly likely they're in one of two places, and now I'm going to work out which of these two places they're actually in. Yes, now you mentioned the term credence. Is that a significant thing in epistemology at least?
00:19:26
Speaker
It has become of recent note, so credences or talking about degrees of belief has become a big hot-button issue in epistemology because the old way of talking about belief, so an agent believes that P or an agent does not believe that P, doesn't really account for situations like the key example where it seems that agents are entertaining
00:19:52
Speaker
belief that P and belief not that P at the same time and so epistemologists go well look obviously obviously it's not just a binary between I believe that P or I don't believe that P
00:20:06
Speaker
there are degrees of strength in my belief that pay and so that often gets talked about as a degree of belief or a credence and a lot of epistemic logic now is centered around how do we work out the credence of a belief and then how do we sort through different credences to work out kind of the valency of belief given particular circumstances.
00:20:32
Speaker
Now, closing out this chapter, Curtis basically makes the case that the authors should have known better than to promote or to stand back and allow others to promote the idea that their studies actually showed individuals believing contradictory things. And yet people did, as we saw at the start. It was something that got quoted by a bunch of people.
00:21:09
Speaker
And I mean, this is getting into a whole issue in the philosophy of the social sciences, the idea that the social sciences are trying to act like hard sciences with respect to measurement of things which are probably actually fuzzy rather than strict. But if you take your seven point Likert scale, which is a degree of belief assessment system, and then you reduce it down to anything from one to three is yes,
00:21:19
Speaker
And once again, I think part of the problem here is the
00:21:38
Speaker
Four is don't know and then five to seven is no. Then you end up generating a binary and that binary then allows you to conclude that actually people are believing contradictory things because you've taken all of the nuance between one to three and four to seven and you've made it, sorry, five to seven and you've made it disappear with mathematics.
00:22:06
Speaker
And the whole point here is they should have recognized in the first place, if you're giving people seven points, then if someone chooses two or three, that is nowhere near the kind of certainty that someone who is choosing one. But if your modeling reduces two to three down to the same category as one, as strong agreement, then you get this false binary out of a degree of belief system.
00:22:34
Speaker
So this takes us into the next one, the next paper we're looking at, chapter three, conspiracy theorists even believe conspiracy theories that are completely made up.
Criticism of Conspiracy Ideation Research
00:22:42
Speaker
So now we're looking at the paper by Viren Swami from 2011, that one with the, let's read it out again, just to find conspiracists, ideation in Britain and Austria, evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real world and fictitious conspiracy theories.
00:22:59
Speaker
from the British Journal of Psychology. Now, again, this is a study in which subjects were asked to rate the extent to which they agreed with various statements about a completely fictitious conspiracy theory, one that would be made up by the people who set the survey. And the fact that people did rate this highly was taken to believe, look, here are these conspiracy theorists, they'll... They'll believe anything. They'll believe anything.
00:23:27
Speaker
I assume that the study showed that people who were known to believe in conspiracy theories did rate this particular, as it turned out fictitious, conspiracy theory higher. And so that was taken to be all of these conspiracy theorists. Then, you know, once you're a conspiracy theorist, then you'll believe any of bollocks. But
00:23:44
Speaker
once again, didn't actually say, do you believe that this is true, for one thing. It's how much, what's the extent to which you agree with it. Effectively, what they're asking is, do you think the story I'm telling you is plausible?
00:24:00
Speaker
And it's not unusual to think that if someone already believes certain conspiracy theories, they might find a similar conspiracy theory to be a plausible hypothesis to entertain. But the fact that you find a hypothesis plausible to entertain doesn't tell you that the person sincerely is committed to that belief being true.
00:24:25
Speaker
So as Curtis puts it, to what extent should someone agree with the statement that they know nothing directly about, have never heard of, and so could not have had any opinion about prior to being asked?
00:24:35
Speaker
It seems they should have responded, I don't know, I have no opinion. For all they know about it, which is nothing, the theories could be true. But I don't know was not an option. They had to pick a number between one completely false and nine completely true. The sensible thing to do, it seems, is to answer according to how likely to be true they judge the statement to be or how plausible it seemed to them. And if they do this, the subjects can be expected to make their judgments based on their views regarding analogous cases about which they do already have opinions, presumably based on something.
00:25:04
Speaker
And so it seems they did. And so then this gets reported as people who believe conspiracy theories are more likely to believe a made up one, making people who believe conspiracy theories look silly and people who don't believe in conspiracy theories, conventionalists is the term that get used here, look more sensible. But as Curtis points out, this is putting a slant on things. This is setting things up, engineering a situation,
00:25:31
Speaker
that makes the conspiracy believers look sillier than the conspiracy non-believers, but it could go the other way.
00:25:39
Speaker
Now, I mean, as he says, but that is an illusion, i.e. the result they get. The conspiracy theorist and the conventionalist, as far as we can tell, are both reasoning the same. If the researchers had picked a true but little known conspiracy theory as the test, the conspiracy theorist would have come out looking better. Indeed, that is not just speculation, such an experiment has now been done.
00:26:03
Speaker
So Michael Wood did a different study in 2016 that basically did that and it showed that people who reject speculative conspiracy theories like do you believe evidence of alien contact is being concealed from the public
00:26:19
Speaker
And then those people were more likely to reject conspiracy theories that have actually been proved true, in particular, how likely is the idea that the government has performed mind control experiments on its own citizens without their consent, which is, they're talking about MKUltra, which is a real thing that's documented and that we know is true. Now, I don't know much about this study. Curtis says that what is, quote, more balanced in his conclusions of this one, but
00:26:48
Speaker
I don't know how trustworthy it is compared to those. So the WOOD 2016, which is basically looking at the believability of the... sorry, the way that the label conspiracy theory affects believability, is a very interesting paper. And I'm choosing my words very carefully here.
00:27:12
Speaker
because I'm doing some work with Martin Orr and Jenna Husting looking at this particular paper and trying to untangle some of the knotty problems in Wood's work. Wood's work is very suggestive but we feel it doesn't quite fit in with the other work on labelling practices around the term conspiracy theory.
00:27:35
Speaker
So whilst I can see why Curtis is going, this is a much more balanced conclusion than that of Swami at all, I think there are problems with the Wood 2016 paper, which are interesting problems, because they point in a very different direction from the kind of problems that the Swami paper has. But at the same time, I wouldn't necessarily take Wood's word here.
00:28:03
Speaker
and Curtis has read a draft of the paper that we've written critiquing wood and I don't think it's out of place for me to say that he thinks our paper is good so I think even so I think
00:28:19
Speaker
Curtis back in 2018 was going, yay, Wood 2016. Curtis in 2022 might be going, hmm, Wood 2016. Interesting conclusions, but there's still more work to be done here. Mm. Surrounding out this section, Curtis says it's important to keep in mind that neither conspiracy theorists nor the conventionists can make an a priori claim that their inference was the better one.
00:28:44
Speaker
Which group is more likely to be right in real cases depends upon how common the conspiratorial behaviours of the types in question really are, and to have a sense of that one has to do an empirical study not of conspiracy theorists, but of the history of conspiracies, both of the officially acknowledged and of the controversial varieties.
00:29:01
Speaker
And also, neither party in either of these cases is reasoning badly. They're just starting from different positions. If you think conspiracy theories are more likely, then a new one that you've never heard of, you're going to be disposed to think it's more likely. If you think they're unlikely, then a new one you've never heard of, you're going to be disposed to think it's unlikely.
00:29:22
Speaker
as we will see in the next section, that's just kind of how reasoning works a lot of the time. I mean, that's context, baby. That's context. So then in the next section, we finally get into this idea of a monological belief system. Section four is called, conspiracy theorists are monological thinkers. They talk only to themselves.
00:29:41
Speaker
So it says, the idea that so-called conspiracy ideation is indicative of a monological belief system was first suggested by political scientist Ted Gertzel, 1994, and now enjoys experimental support, supposedly, from the works of various psychologists, including Michael Wood and Viren Swamy. So a monological belief system is defined as one in which conspiratorial idea serves as evidence for other conspiracist ideation.
00:30:08
Speaker
Yeah, so basically, if you believe one conspiracy theory, then you're probably going to end up believing another conspiracy theory and another conspiracy theory and another conspiracy theory. And so you're just going to end up believing conspiracy theories and only conspiracy theories.
00:30:26
Speaker
But Curtis doesn't really think this is a problem. He says, but is there really anything here that applies uniquely to conspiracy ideation, or that in any case is epistemically problematic or noteworthy? I do not think so. What Swami Atel described is a characteristic of all sensible people, including believers in conventional interpretations of events.
00:30:45
Speaker
Now, Josh, a quick question. Ideation or ideation? I always say ideation. You're saying ideation. What's going on here? I don't know. It's just the way I could look. Do you want me to look it up? Should I look it up right now? Because I'm wondering whether it's a US-UK divide or how I used to say a whole bunch of other words incorrectly. I now can't think of a single.
00:31:15
Speaker
example but used to say I say all sorts of other words incorrectly and maybe have just been saying ideation or ideation inconsistently or incontestantly. This is a sample of one but dictionary.com says ideation so there you go maybe I should change my tune.
00:31:33
Speaker
Maybe you should. And also change your last name to Hagen. You are now Josh Hagen, and you say ideation. No, no. We're trying to get curses to change his name to Hagen. So you're going to be Josh Hagen, who says, no, I better say ideation. Ideation. Ideation? Ideation, yes, good.
00:31:56
Speaker
So, at any rate, to illustrate the point that he's making, he takes a section from Swami's text about how conspiracists have these tendencies and therefore believe in all this stuff, and basically reverses it to instead talk about conventionalists, where you can say, oh, these conspiracists, the more they believe it, the more cynical they become, and the more
00:32:23
Speaker
strongly they'll believe in these things. Well, the conventionalist becomes more trusting or naive of official sources and shows weaker support for certain things. And so you can reverse it quite easily to show that this is just a strategy, a way people reason towards things. And it's not
00:32:45
Speaker
particular to conspiracy theorists and it's not particularly bad when conspiracy theorists do it. He says there's something strange about pointing out this fact for the reasoning it describes as both ubiquitous and epistemically unproblematic. Of course one belief
00:33:05
Speaker
serves as evidence for another, and so it should. There's hardly an alternative. But then it develops this further, and people say, okay, things are used as evidence for the likelihood of similar things. And then, yes, that's normal. And regardless of the context, that's the thing people do.
00:33:22
Speaker
According to some of these studies, though, they say conspiracy theorists will use conspiracy theories as evidence for other completely unrelated conspiracy theories. Of course, it's fine to believe things about a certain topic, and you're likely to believe similar things about the same topic. But these conspiracy theorists, just because they believe about one conspiracy theory about aliens, then they'll believe this other conspiracy theory about Osama bin Laden or whatever.
00:33:50
Speaker
yeah so it's the argument look if you start to believe that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed by the navy seals in Afghanistan then five days later you'll believe the earth is hollow and actually radio waves are emanating from Saturn aka Satan being echoed down to earth by the moon so you believe one conspiracy theory and very soon you're going to believe a lot of other weird and unrelated things and as Curtis points out
00:34:17
Speaker
That's kind of ignoring the context under which conspiracy theorising occurs. It's not that these things are unrelated. At base, there probably is commonality, such as say distrust in authority or distrusting certain types of experts or sources of expertise.
00:34:39
Speaker
So, monological belief systems, it seems they're okay in the respect of beliefs in one thing making you more likely to believe in similar things. Curtis does say there is an epistemic problem with a monological belief system. He says,
00:34:57
Speaker
Still, there is something about monological belief systems that is epistemically problematic. Goetzel describes it this way. Belief systems can be characterized as dialogical or monological. Dialogical belief systems engage in a dialogue with their context, while monological systems speak only to themselves, ignoring their context in all but the shallowest respects.
00:35:17
Speaker
or other people will talk about a closed epistemology. And so the accusation becomes that conspiracy theorists, first of all, are indifferent to evidence and rely only on their existing beliefs and also explain events in terms of general just patterns about the world rather than, quote, the unique proximal conditions that may have brought it about.
00:35:41
Speaker
Now, the problem with that, as Curtis says, is that, yes, that's a problematic part about monological belief systems, but the studies don't show that. They don't show that conspiracy theorists suffer from these problems. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but the actual studies that are appealed to don't show that way. They show that
00:36:04
Speaker
People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to believe in other conspiracy theories. And as we've said, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. They don't show evidence of conspiracy theorists living in a closed off world and being more likely to ignore evidence. And indeed, Curtis kind of thinks the opposite may be true. Given the way conspiracy theorists have been known to sift through the finest details and demand the release of various official documentation and so on and so forth.
Engagement with Different Viewpoints
00:36:33
Speaker
And also, he says it's not true that conspiracy theorists don't engage with contrary viewpoints. He says this idea is false, at least as it applies to a large segment of conspiracy theorists who clearly do engage with conventionalists and often seek out opportunities for debate. I don't know.
00:36:50
Speaker
A lot of the debates I've seen are not really undertaken in good faith, but nevertheless, it's true that they're not living in a closed off world. They are very much interested in what their opponents have to say. Basically all curses needs to show.
00:37:05
Speaker
is that conspiracy theorists in that pejorative sense are not monological believers in the Goetzel sense. So he's correct to say, look, actually, monological belief systems are fairly common. One belief does beget another. What makes a monological belief system pathological is that Goetzel builds in, ah, but these people not only believe one thing after the other,
00:37:31
Speaker
but they also don't interact with other sources of information or other people. And all Curtis needs to do is point out, well, that's not a fair characterization. I mean, you might worry about the sincerity of some conspiracy theorists wanting to have debates, but we can show that they are interacting with evidence outside of their community. So obviously it's not a monological belief system in the sense that Goetzel wants to talk about.
00:37:59
Speaker
So, it's not looking great for the social scientists at this point, but we move to section five, Sutton and Douglas to the rescue, sort of. So this refers to the paper by RM Sutton and Kate Douglas, Kim Douglas, I think. Karen Douglas. Karen, there we go. I mean, given that I'm an advisor on her research project at the University of Kent,
00:38:24
Speaker
There is no Kim Douglass. It's very definitely Karen Douglass. Professor Karen Douglass. I had it lower down in the notes, but not right where I was looking at. So there we go. That's what I get for making assumptions.
00:38:34
Speaker
It's because you saw k.m and you went... That's almost certainly what it is, yes. Anyway, their paper is called Examining the Monological Nature of Conspiracy Theories from 2014. And the paper suggests that there is no empirical evidence for key tenets of the Monological Position and then then could us quote some motley duo by the names of Basham and Dentith?
00:38:55
Speaker
sounds to me like like sort of the victorian grave robbers some sort of basham and dentith not just victorian grave robbers but the names indicate exactly what their roles are because they weren't just grave robbers they were the people you know they were the body snatchers who killed their victims so basham hits them over the head and dentith extracts the teeth gold gold teeth gold gold teeth
00:39:22
Speaker
But anyway, this unsavory Basham and Dentith duo also said similar things to point out that this idea that conspiracy theorists have a closed epistemology is not really actually that true at all. And so it goes through their paper, although says they're not entirely even-handed about it.
00:39:43
Speaker
So finishing out, Curtis says, but their attempt at even-handedness is spotty. In addition to continuing to maintain that conspiracy theorists tend to simultaneously believe contradictory theories, they also seem to accept some baseless stereotypes such as the view that conspiracy theorists base their ideas on limited information. They also state the majority of conspiracy theories lack evidential support
Stereotypes and Monological Belief Systems
00:40:04
Speaker
and are resistant to falsification.
00:40:06
Speaker
They cite a 2002 article by Steve Clark. Hey, we've covered that paper. Although Clark does not exactly assert, much less prove, that conspiracy theories lack evidential support. In fact, though Clark does seem to take a dim view of conspiracy theories, it's not because they simply lack evidential support. Indeed, Clark writes, conspiracy theorists are typically quite dedicated in their search for evidence relevant to their favorite conspiracy theory and are usually able to overwhelm you with the deluge of evidence in favor of that theory.
00:40:35
Speaker
So as it turns out, not only does the claim that the majority of conspiracy theorists like evidential support itself like evidential support, it's fault to see is admitted by critics of conspiracy. Would you still call Steve Clark a critic of conspiracy theories? I don't know what his views are at these days.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, I take it that he's, in the words of Patrick Stokes, a bit of a reluctant particularist in that I don't think he likes a lot of the conspiracy theories we see in public discourse.
00:41:05
Speaker
But at the same time, he's also of the opinion that, you know, conspiracy theories can be warranted, actually often are warranted in a particular context, and there's no prima facie case against conspiracy theorizing, even if it turns out you don't like the conspiracy theorists who live in your community. And frankly, that's a fairly common view amongst a large number of particular. So go look.
00:41:32
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with conspiracy theories, but God's sake, there are some really annoying conspiracy theorists out there who make our job all the more difficult. So that leads us into section six, some final considerations, which is sort of a few, I guess, points didn't fit somewhere else. I don't know from a, from what I'm learning from looking at papers, is this a, is this a shutting up the reviewers section? Is it a, oh, and one other thing that I didn't have room for section, is it a bit of both?
00:42:00
Speaker
What's going on in the slides? I think it's kind of a bit of both in that it's both a combination of here are some points that don't quite fit into the delightful structure of the first two thirds of the article. But the things I feel need to be said. So those are the final considerations.
00:42:20
Speaker
and also it's a chance to respond to the reviewers. We're going, look, what about x or y? Fine, I'll write about x or y. I'll put it in this section here because trying to fit it into the rest of the narrative really ruins my flow. So here it is. I've fulfilled your requirement. Please just let me publish the paper now.
00:42:38
Speaker
Which is a perfectly fine thing to do in the academic game of publication. So there are a few sort of other points and studies that get brought up. He says, let us look at the issue once again, this time framed by Sutton and Douglas.
00:42:54
Speaker
Quote, one of the predictions of the monological position is that adherents versus skeptics of conspiracy theories will invoke fewer concrete facts and more general patterns when explaining major events. Even if they did, so what? This is not really a problem so long as there is at least some attention to facts of the case in question.
00:43:12
Speaker
After all, if we're only talking about a difference in degree, not about abandoning all consideration of proximate data altogether, would it be better to rely more on proximate evidence or more on analogy to other cases and other general considerations, i.e. prior probability considerations? We cannot render a general verdict. It depends on all sorts of factors. What can be generally said is that to some degree, both background considerations relevant to prior probability and direct evidence pertinent to the particular case should be considered.
00:43:39
Speaker
showing that conspiracy theorists tend to rely more on prior probability than forensic evidence, due to their propositioners, would imply nothing interesting about the psychology or the quality of the reasoning of those conspiracy theorists. And he says a bit later about the fact that conspiracy theorists are often coming from a different position. This comes up, I think, perhaps more when he talks about
00:44:06
Speaker
wooden Douglas's paper from 2013. What about Building 7, a social psychological study of online discussion of 9-11 conspiracy theories, which is a paper we first mentioned long before we started looking, started doing the conspiracy theory masterpiece section. We looked at it back in episode 66 when we were talking about Building 7, which is what this paper concerns. Which is four episodes after our interview with Dane. Sure is.
00:44:32
Speaker
And so this paper, basically the gist of it is that conspiracy theorists, they were using conspiracy theories around World Trade Center Building 7 and its destruction. The claim was that conspiracy theorists spend all their time bagging the official theory and very little time actually putting forward theories of their own.
00:44:57
Speaker
Curtis basically says that's just an argumentative tactic, that's just a strategy and gives the analogy of a defence attorney might talk entirely about their client's character and bring up lots of witnesses saying how great a person they are rather than other evidence about the case, what have you, and that's just a particular strategy.
00:45:24
Speaker
I don't know that I bought that 100%, but certainly it's not necessarily a bad thing.
00:45:34
Speaker
if you're only going, if you spend more of your time attacking the official theory, especially as he points out, the official theory, it's the official theory. You've got the authority, the governments and the people in power are putting out all this information about their theory. That's the majority of the information that's going out there.
00:45:58
Speaker
So it's not unsurprising, perhaps, that people would devote more of their time to attacking the evidence that actually exists than stuff for conspiracy theories, which might be a little more scarce.
00:46:12
Speaker
Well, the other thing to note here is that both philosophers and psychologists have a kind of high standard for what they take to be interaction in a debate. So, you know, epistemologists go, where's your argument? What are your premises? Are you arguing in a non-flescious way? And psychologists will want to know, are they only using preferences or dispositions? Are they arguing along belief structures? Most people
00:46:42
Speaker
when they argue aren't arguing to the standards of what an academic thinks a good argument is. So it's kind of unfair to ping anyone in a debate, particularly conspiracy theorists, for not arguing in the ideal academic way that we want them to. Most people engage in fallacious reasoning and homonyms and the like and they think that they are arguing in a legitimate way and in a
00:47:10
Speaker
cultural context they kind of are because that's how most debates occur in real life and online. Those of us in our ivory tales go oh that's that's a bad standard of debate ad hominem you should never use an ad hominem but at the same time most common people are looking up at us now ivory tales going i can't hear you i can't hear you you bastard yeah i mean i sort of
00:47:37
Speaker
I think of the sorts of arguments I've seen and this idea of people being keen to engage in debate and just simply using as a
00:47:55
Speaker
sort of tactical argumentation, the casting doubts on the official theory more, and so on. It sounds all very sort of sensible and so on. And then I think of your discussion with Jazz Coleman, and it's sort of like, I mean, it can be like that. It can also be like that, though. But I mean, it doesn't have to be, as you say, reasoned ivory tower debate in all cases. The fact is that it's
00:48:19
Speaker
I think that happens. It's not entirely unexcusable. And even if this is all true, that people are just banging on the official theory and not giving any thought to putting forward one of their own, it doesn't actually say anything about the truth or falsity of any particular theory.
Bias in Social Science Approaches
00:48:39
Speaker
And I think that's something that again comes out in the rest of this
00:48:43
Speaker
section. So much of what's being said here isn't particular to conspiracy theories and you could just as easily turn it around and make the same arguments against people who are unlikely to believe in conspiracy theories.
00:48:58
Speaker
As Curtis writes, in alliance with other social scientists, it seems that psychologists have invented a problem so as to posit a psychological explanation for it, and do so in a way that seems to affect poorly on conspiracy theories.
00:49:14
Speaker
But there is nothing here that needs any kind of special explanation, or should be understood as problematic. The most straightforward view is that different people come to different conclusions about conspiracy theories for the same kind of reasons that they come to different conclusions about other matters.
00:49:30
Speaker
They weigh up the evidence they are aware of, factoring in some sense of prior probability. Neither the psychological research by Wood and Swami, nor the argument of Goetzel, indicate that the explanation for conspiracy theorising resides in anything more interesting than that.
00:49:47
Speaker
And there's a little more in that line that you could do this the other way around. You could ask, why were people so unwilling to believe things that, or rather, why were people so willing to believe?
00:50:01
Speaker
sort of propaganda conspiracies put forward that we now know are untrue. The baby's getting kicked out of incubators in Iraq and Saddam Hussein being in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and all that sort of stuff. And basically the general point is that, yeah, whether any of these things are problematic or not, they're not for certain particular to conspiracy theories.
00:50:24
Speaker
And that takes us into section 7, the conclusion, which reads, this article has shown in a narrow sense that several social science papers focusing on conspiracy theories have published very flawed findings and that these flawed findings were accepted uncritically and repeated by other scholars and more broadly as well. Indeed, these findings were used to disparage conspiracy theorists unfairly, making them appear intellectually unhinged while it was these scholars themselves, ironically, who are failing to reason clearly.
00:50:50
Speaker
Further, this article has suggested that the flaws in question ought to have been noticed, though exactly how obvious these flaws are as a matter of subjective interpretation. One implication is that scholars and social scientists in particular ought to be much more careful in their treatment of conspiracy theorists. Unfairly disparaging a large class of people is no small matter.
00:51:06
Speaker
I will end with a more general worry. Many philosophers, including David Cody and Steve Clark, have commented that academics have a low opinion of conspiracy theorists from Cody 2006, or that conspiracy theorists are unpopular amongst intellectuals from Clark's 2002.
00:51:21
Speaker
Indeed, it hardly takes a philosopher to notice that, but it is troubling to consider this in connection with the lopsided and unfair treatment of conspiracy theorists in the social science literature for it suggests that these are not just innocent mistakes that could have gone either way. Rather, one must worry that bias against conspiracy theories is influencing the results of social science scholarship with one biased finding building upon another.
00:51:43
Speaker
And while this article has been narrowly focused on the treatment of conspiracy theories in particular, it raises the question of the degree to which the social science literature more generally may be influenced by other widely shared biases. If you have the dun dun dun queued up, play the dun dun dun. That's more like it. Sure. Yes, a good paper, one which I basically agree with.
00:52:11
Speaker
So do I, although I have been somewhat distracted through a large chunk of this conversation, having pointed out the thing about ideation versus ideation, going, what was the word that you corrected me on back in second year that I was mispronouncing with what I can only call gay abandon? And that word was hyperbole, because I used to say hyperbole. And one that you pointed out to me, and you went, why do you say hyperbole? And I was going,
00:52:41
Speaker
That's how it's pronounced. I think you'll find it's hyperbole and that day changed my life in a very, very minor way, not in a way which has had any material significance, but it did change my life. Yes. I don't recall that exact conversation, but yes, I imagine why are you pronouncing it that way that the answer would be because that's how any sensible person has only seen it written downward pronounce it. Damn Greeks, I assume that's a Greek word. They always stick their E's on the end and then pronounce them like.
00:53:11
Speaker
I've actually found a list of the 13 most commonly mispronounced words in American English and the right way to say them. The first word is anyway. What do people say anyways or something? Yeah, so they're pointing out people are pluralizing it. I don't really see that problem. I don't care. It's just a thing. Tenant. Instead of tenet.
00:53:33
Speaker
Yep, comptroller, which is apparent. Oh, because they point out it's not comptroller, it's controller. It's pronounced controller despite the fact that it's spelt differently. And it means controller. It's the most bizarre word to end up in the English language. I don't understand. I think it's one of those ones where it sort of came into the language from French and from Latin or something, or from French and then from French at a later time after they'd started pronouncing it differently. I can't remember.
00:54:00
Speaker
It's a thoroughly... coup de gras? Coup de gras is another one. Although I won't put it out. Coup de gras. Yup. Coup de gras. Electoral. So, electoral. I think I say electoral. I'm halfway in between both.
00:54:17
Speaker
E-lectoral, yeah, so apparently that's how they want it to be pronounced in American English. Of course, our good old friend, Hyperbole. Hyperbole. Mischievous. Oh, mischievous. Oh, I see. It doesn't actually have an IOUS, does it? Light, light. Yeah. Yeah, mischievous is kind of weird because you kind of assume the CHI is giving you the evious and actually it's not. Ophthalmologist, apparently people have difficulty with that one. That's a tricky one.
00:54:47
Speaker
prestigious prestigious prestigious prestigious actually but it is about prestige i guess yeah prestigious uh prostate so prostate prostate versus prostrate yep key which which one the q u a y one
00:55:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Segue. I've always pronounced it right. I've spelled it wrong my whole life until I actually saw it written down. I think because of the scooter. The final one is renumeration.
00:55:23
Speaker
Ah yes, remuneration. Yeah, remuneration. It's to renumerate is to count something again, but it does seem, yeah. Anyway. So there you go, 13 words which even I don't pronounce consistently in any way, shape or form. No. And frankly I also don't care.
00:55:42
Speaker
So anyway, paper, good, I liked it. Didn't read all the footnotes, I have to say. There were quite a few. I didn't spot... Nobody reads all the footnotes. Footnotes is where good ideas go to die. And I say that as someone who puts good ideas in footnotes, realizing that no one's ever going to read them.
00:55:59
Speaker
I couldn't find the one about Joe Conspiratist and Joe. Oh, there it is. There we go. Joe Conventionist and Joe Conspiratist, yes. I did. I thought I did. I couldn't help but notice he couldn't resist bringing up when he mentions Cass Sunstein. Oh, and Sunstein, he's the one who said that those frames from the Pentagon proved irrefutably that
00:56:23
Speaker
the 9-11 attacks were real when they did nothing of the sort, which is true, but not relevant to this paper. Look, Hissing Cass Sunstein metaphorically on the head for a stupid paper is the right of any philosopher. Well, yes, that's fair.
00:56:41
Speaker
That is this episode, I think, and pretty much bang on time. So, of course, we have a bonus episode to report after this for exclusively for our beloved patrons. What are we going to talk about this week?
00:56:54
Speaker
We're going to talk about a neo-Nazi running as a counselor for Upper Hut. Just one. We're going to talk about how a former proud boy faked his own arrest so he could go on holiday, how Trump has got a special master, and that's really pissing people off, and a story we probably should have covered last week and somehow forgot to, the arrest of two media hosts in Aotearoa, New Zealand for showing objectionable material.
00:57:22
Speaker
So if you're interested in hearing about that, then you'd best become a patron post-haste. And if you're a patron, well, then you're sorted. You patrons already know that anybody can go to portrayon.com and search for the podcasters guide to the conspiracy and sign themselves up for as little as one dollar a week. Week, month, dollar a month, yes. I don't know. It handles the money side of things. If you want to give us a dollar a week even,
00:57:49
Speaker
Anything better, yes. No, I don't worry, my pretty little head with money matters. I just assume that M will keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed. So, I think we're at the end of an episode. We are indeed. So, once again, farewell, Dean, you will be missed. And to the rest of you, farewell as well, I guess, but not in the same way. Valet, Dean. Valet.
00:58:15
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, 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,
00:58:42
Speaker
Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. But conditions apply.