Roseanne Barr’s been in the the news if you haven’t heard. After saying racist and anti-semitic shit for the umpteenth time, she also retweeted—as did our white supremacist in chief’s son—a bogus right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theory that George Soros is a secret self-hating Jewish Nazi trying to either control the world for Jews, or in spite of Jews. It’s a stupid stupid theory.
Science Daily reports on new research in psychology by postdoctoral research associate at Lehigh University Joseph A. Vitriol and Jessecae K. Marsh, an associate professor of psychology at Lehigh. The researchers published two studies showing that people afraid of the changing cultural and economic landscape, coupled with an inflated but wrong sense of the facts of an issue, are the most susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories.
For the research Vitriol and Marsh asked participants to rate how well they thought they understood a series of public policies. They then asked those participants to provide as detailed an explanation as they could for how the policies actually worked.
After generating these explanations, participants re-rated their confidence in their understanding of the policies.
Marsh explains that the act of trying to explain a phenomenon reveals to participants how little they actually understand about the policies, resulting in a reduction in self-reported understanding ratings. "Participants who had high levels of confidence in their understanding of public policies after generating an explanation were more likely to endorse political conspiracies, especially if they also lacked accurate knowledge of political phenomena," she adds.
According to that research, the good news is that if people educate themselves, and it is something the study suggests they can do, they have a better chance at not continuing to believe idiotic things. The bad news is everything we seem to read every day. As part of another study the researchers did, they found that individual’s perceptions of our “society's fundamental, defining values” being “under siege due to social change can also predict conspiracy thinking.”
Findings of the study -- which surveys 3,500 adult, U.S. citizens -- also published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, show that people who agreed with statements such as: "In this country, there is a 'real America' distinct from those who don't share the same values" and "America's greatest values are increasingly decaying from within" were more likely to agree with statements such as: "The media is the puppet of those in power" and "Nothing in politics or world affairs happens by accident or coincidence."
Be humble and challenge yourself says the researchers. Another way to say it is Don’t do what Donald would do.