On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories

The blog post today is by Patrick Brooks (Rutgers University) on his recent paper, "On the origin of conspiracy theories" (Philosophical Studies, 2023).

Patrick Brooks

In the last, say, 20 years or so, a lot has been written about conspiracy theories. Much of this has focused on what conspiracy theories are, why people believe them, and so on. Very little has been said, however, about why people might posit a conspiracy theory in the first place. My recent paper, “On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories” (2023) attempts to do this for a significant subset of conspiracy theories—namely, those conspiracy theories that run counter to an official or standard account of some event of phenomenon. Here’s a very brief sketch of the argument.

People in open, broadly democratic societies have a somewhat naïve view of how their societies and the institutions within them work. These are the kinds of things we learned about, e.g., the scientific method or governmental processes, in primary and secondary school. Many people think of science, for example, as a highly collaborative process in which loads of very smart people engage in a good faith pursuit of the truth. Having this sort of understanding of something like science generates certain normative expectations on scientists. Indeed, if we think that scientists are engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth, we expect them to be responsive to evidence, willing to engage with critics, etc., because these sorts of behaviors are conducive to figuring out how the world is.

So, suppose that some theory becomes the standard view—i.e., the one that is widely held and endorsed by relevant epistemic authorities—for some event or phenomena. Further suppose that there are some anomalies that are not captured by the theory. Finally, imagine that someone either points out these anomalies as a problem for the theory or else comes up with some rival hypothesis. How should proponents of the official view respond, given the assumption that they’re engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth? Clearly, they ought to respond by taking the evidence seriously, by looking carefully at the rival theory, and so on. Unfortunately, however, this is not always how scientists or other epistemic authorities respond to this sort of thing. Too often, they dismiss people out of hand, resort to name-calling, and so on. That is, they act in ways that are inconsistent with the norms generated by being engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth. Sometimes, people attempt to resolve such tensions by positing a conspiracy theory (or so I claim!). 

Here's an example from the paper. In 1947, something crash landed on Mac Brazel's ranch in Roswell, NM. The Roswell Army Air Field initially said that they had recovered a “flying disc” at the site of the crash. This is the story that ran in the Roswell Daily Record. Over the next several decades, the U.S. Gov’t changed their story a half-dozen times. Whenever someone inevitably pointed out a flaw with whatever story was the “official” one at the time, the response from various officials and epistemic authorities was to dismiss that person as a kook or crank obsessed with “little green men.” These people then come up with their own (often conspiratorial) explanations for why the epistemic authorities are behaving in the way that they are rather than like people who are engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth.