Tag Archives: misinformation

How Do Conspiracy Theories Arise?

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By George A. Boyd ©2021

Q: How do we explain the prevalence of conspiracy theories?

A: We can look at this phenomenon from different perspectives:

  1. Targeted information triggers an innate tendency in the mind – this standpoint believes an “informational stimulus” interfaces with people’s karmic substrate and triggers an unconscious pattern. This position posits a stimulus-response mindset; if the tendency is already in the mind, the information will trigger it.
  2. Intentional influence – In this point of view, influencers manipulate people’s unconscious mind through specific words or images: they prey upon people’s desires, fears, hatred, guilt and shame to evoke emotions and to stir them to take action. You see this used in advertising; those with a political or religious agenda also utilize this strategy.
  3. Awakening negative character traits – This view holds that certain individuals only respond to the message of the conspiracy theory because it stirs innate character traits in them. The message draws out the mental aberrations of people with dark triad personality patterns—paranoia, antisocial, and Machiavellian traits—or borderline personality disorder. This perspective suggests that those who believe in conspiracy theories would have high levels of these associated personality disorders.
  4. Genetic substrate – This position holds that people’s response to a conspiracy theory is an inborn predisposition to process information in a non-linear, irrational way. In this perspective, people who believe in conspiracy theories potentially have different neurological wiring.
  5. Learned beliefs – This perspective holds that conspiracy theories are constructed. What people learn about a conspiracy theory consists of an array of beliefs that conform to their unconscious fears and desires. These irrational beliefs, with skilled intervention, can be deconstructed through psychotherapy or deprogramming.
  6. Splitting – In this stance, conspiracy theories evoke psychological splitting of people’s worldview into black and white, good and evil—and those who hold this mindset cannot reconstruct the whole picture of those they demonize. We see these dualistic mindsets in Zoroastrian, Manichean, Christian, and Islamic sects. These world views demonize those who are labeled alien, or non-believers; those who engage in religiously proscribed behavior; or those who support views different than their own. This same dualistic polarization and demonization of opponents can similarly be found in political ideology.
  7. Immersion in thought streams – In this outlook, conspiracy theories arise from listening to the thought streams of Occult Adepts, the purveyors of nonsense from the Psychic Realm, and those who misinterpret scripture in various religious groups. This same dynamics operate in religious cults, radical political organizations, and terrorist groups. This outlook perceives that people tune into a particular inner channel of information through intuition or outer information through the media—and this message resonates with what they have come to believe is true. This information stream (a) defines what is true, (b) gives people a rationale to believe it, (c) rewards them for believing it, and (d) it urges people to take action on these new beliefs.

People are exposed to the information from proponents of a conspiracy theory. Through whatever internal processing takes place for this information—through whichever explanatory perspective among one to seven—it changes their beliefs, reframes their perspective, and leads to new behavior. We can point to certain mental operations of the unconscious mind as contributing to the adoption of conspiracy theories; the cognitive behavioral approach (perspective five — learned beliefs) gives us hope that people who become enmeshed in these delusional frames can regain their rationality again.

Those who are interested in the dynamics underlying religious influence systems may find our book, Religions, Cults, and Terrorism: What the Heck Are Doing? helpful.

We take on these layers of false beliefs in our Cult Recovery Coaching Program, which is designed for those who have been involved in religious or political cults, and want to find their authentic inner compass again. We have several articles we have written about conspiracy theories in our web log: we invite those are interested in this topic to search for these articles.

When Your Intuition and the Internet Lead You Astray

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By George A. Boyd © 2021

Q: What if your intuition tells you gonzo stuff?

A: What your intuition tells you is information. This information may be true or false. Where this changes you is if:

  1. You believe it
  2. You emotionally react to it
  3. You act on the basis of the belief

If my intuition tells me there is an abominable snowman that lives in the thicket outside my house, I might consider that my intuition is playing with me.

But if I believe this is true, it affects my emotions and my behavior:

  • I might be afraid to go outside because I fear the yeti might kill me and eat me, injure me so I need to go to a hospital, or drag me off to its lair so its children can eat me.
  • I might walk out the back door, so I avoid the thicket where the yeti lives.

At issue, I have not verified the statement is true—that an abominable snowman actually lives in the thicket. If I do an exhaustive search of the thicket, and there is no trace of Mr. Yeti or his offspring, I might conclude my intuition is tripping, and I might laugh at myself for my gullibility.

When people believe something that isn’t true, it engages their emotions, and may also change their behavior.

If someone is lying to them, they may carry out what the person who is sowing this false narrative wants them to do. We see people manipulated through this means through government propaganda; misleading advertising; the speeches and writing of demagogues, cult leaders, and leaders of hate and terrorist groups. This dissemination of misinformation is rampant on the internet: one “thought leader” can introduce these falsehoods and compromise hundreds—even thousands of people—with a tweet or social media post.

Finding Out What Is True

There are four positions I can take regarding a statement is true, whether I receive it internally from my intuition, or externally through others’ communication:

  1. The statement is true – I have verified its veracity. I conclude the information is reliable.
  2. The statement is false – I have analyzed its message and I have found logical errors, or attempts to deceive me. I conclude the information is not reliable.
  3. The statements truth is unknown – I cannot verify the truth of the statement as the evidence I need to verify it is not available to me. The information may be based on the statements, opinions, testimonials, or beliefs of others, but I cannot independently verify their claims. I conclude the information is not verifiable, and withhold my belief.
  4. The statement is non-sensible and clearly false – The information appears to be the product of fantasy, delusion, or irrationality. I conclude this information is not reliable, and I reject it outright.

Let’s review these four conditions:

In condition A, I am able to prove the statement is true. If I suspect that I have termites in my house, and I find an insect that looks like a termite, I can verify that I do have termites.

In condition B, I am able to prove the statement is false. If a politician tells me that he had the largest crowd size “ever recorded” for his inauguration, and historical records and actual photos of the crowd show that it wasn’t the largest crowd, I reject his statement.

In condition C, there is not enough verifiable information to prove the statement, so I hold it as an unverifiable hypothesis. If someone tells me that there are extraterrestrial bodies in a freezer locker in a secret air force base in the Nevada desert, I have no way of verifying this is true. Maybe this is possible, but I have no way to prove it.

I rather doubt if I ask the guard at the gate of the facility is going to let me in to view them if they were there. For example, if I showed up at the west gate of the base, and told the security officer, who is armed with a high-powered, deadly-accurate automatic weapon, “Oh hi! Hey, I’ve heard that you’ve got ETs in the freezer in here? Mind if I have a look? I promise I won’t take any souvenirs!”

In condition D, the statement is so clearly a statement of fantasy that I can reject it outright. For example, if I told you, “I am Spiderman and I’m actually from the planet Venus,” you would know that I sho’ be trippin’—and you wouldn’t believe me.

Sowing of the Seed

To set up misinformation, the one seeking to disseminate it must make you believe that condition B, a false statement, is actually condition A, a true statement—that something false is true.

This commonly occurs through giving you false proof based on spurious or distorted facts—what one of the press secretaries of the Trump administration famously referred to as “alternative facts.”

Sometimes in my leisure time, I watch UFO conspiracy shows on Netflix. I listen to these reports, and I conclude, “I cannot verify this hypothesis and I suspend my belief that it is true. This is condition C.

However, if the scout ship with the grey aliens—the ones with the large heads and prominent black eyes—lands on my lawn… Three aliens come out of their vessel… they come towards me and one of them gives me a high five—or in their case, a high four, as they only have four fingers—my belief that there are space aliens has been validated. I then can say, “yes, there are space aliens: they are parked on my lawn.” This is condition A.

When people get seduced by conspiracy theories; entrapped in cults, hate and terrorist groups; or deceived by propaganda—they believe something that is false is true—and this conditions their emotions and behavior. They believe the false statement, which should be recognized as false—condition B—is actually A, verified as true.

To bring people back from this alternate reality, these false beliefs that appear to them to be true must be shown to be false. The challenge of this is that they tenaciously defend these false beliefs as “the truth.”

The “Aha Moment”

The sudden insight or realization—the “aha moment”—that makes someone realize that something they believe is false and reject it, is the catalyst that enables someone to escape their alternate reality. For them to change, they must have this realization.

For a person who is committed to a false belief:

  • You cannot argue with them. They will not listen.
  • You cannot convince them through showing them other information. They will not believe what you show them.

They must discover that it is false. Then they emerge, and awaken from the dream.

To the degree that you can catalyze this realization, you can assist them to break the spell. Our best psychotherapists and coaches can do this, once in a while.

Going back to your original question, you must verify what intuition tells you, the same way you might check out something another person tells you, or something you view on social media.

If you can’t verify it, it’s conditional—an unverified hypothesis. Perhaps if people could learn to hold more things as an unverified hypothesis, instead of wildly believing them, we would have fewer people getting lost in conspiracy theories and cults.

Those interested in learning more about the dynamics that underlie religious and political cults, you may enjoy reading our book, Religions, Cults, and Terrorism: What the Heck Are We Doing?