The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

"It covers some of the same ground as the other books but Shermer also looks at belief in conspiracies. A lot of the factors that are involved in conspiracy thinking overlap with belief in the paranormal and other kinds of magical thinking. There are some differences, but they have an awful lot in common. There are certain kinds of cognitive biases that underlie paranormal belief and Shermer is very good on those. He talks about what he calls ‘patternicity.’ It’s the tendency that we all have to spot patterns and meaning and significance in what’s going on in the world around us. Generally, that’s a good thing. That’s why we’re successful as a species. But sometimes we overplay it. That’s relevant to conspiracy theories as much as it is to paranormal-type beliefs. For example, if you have a dream, and then something happens in real life that seems to bear a correspondence to it. If you believe in the paranormal, you may think it was a precognitive dream and that you actually did see into the future. The alternative is that it was just a coincidence. Typically, people don’t like that explanation, but when you sit back and think it through, you realize people are bound to have dreams that sometimes correspond to future events. There are over eight billion of us on the planet, and we all dream every night. What would be really spooky is if it never happened. It’s about making connections, sometimes, when maybe they aren’t really there. Another example would be somebody listening to a psychic reading. If I was doing a psychic reading for you, I could throw out all kinds of information. Typically, it may well be you that’s making the connections between things in your life, and the rather vague utterances that I’m coming out with. I’m getting…I’m getting something about a black dog…What could that be? If you have a black dog, you think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ If you didn’t, you probably know someone who has. I thought you had. I could sense it… Again, it’s amazing how effective these techniques are. As I say, it really isn’t too difficult to do a halfway decent psychic reading, just by reading up a little on cold reading. That’s something that most of these books cover one way or another. One feature of conspiracy theories in general is that by their very nature, they are non-falsifiable. A friend of mine, a philosopher called Stephen Law , coined the phrase ‘intellectual black holes.’ Basically, once you believe the conspiracies, then any evidence that seems to count against them is just misinformation and disinformation that’s been planted by the conspirators. So any evidence that doesn’t fit the conspiracy narrative, you can dismiss. Any evidence that appears to support the conspiracy, you accept. That’s the way it often is. I was involved in a debate last night with somebody who thinks he’s been abducted by aliens. We kept it very friendly and civilized. He’s a nice guy, he clearly is convinced that this is happening and involves a massive cover-up—not just by the American government but all governments of the world. When you stop and think about how impractical that would be, it just beggars belief. But people do sincerely believe it. They’re convinced that these conspiracies are going on. It’s the same when it comes to politics. These days, thanks to a certain American president, conspiracy-type claims have become much more part of the mainstream. It’s not necessarily that more people believe in them. I know some of my fellow skeptics are convinced that there is a higher level of belief in conspiracies these days than there used to be. But a friend of mine, a political scientist who has been tracking this from year to year, says that’s not the case. There has not been a massive percentage increase in conspiracies. They were there before, they just didn’t feature in the media. Now you have QAnon and so on. Yes, sometimes you can be too skeptical. I’ve made that mistake myself. How our personal information is being used without our knowledge—I would have possibly dismissed that as being too conspiratorial for me, that it’s not really happening. We now know that this was happening and probably is still happening to some extent. So you do have to be careful. I did a talk a few nights ago on the psychology of coincidences. Most of the talk was focused on when we think we’ve seen a connection but it’s not really there. But, of course, sometimes, there is a connection. And that’s really important. It’s rational to spot the coincidence and we only label it as a coincidence when we have tried to think of an explanation that could explain the connection and failed. That helped us, certainly in terms of our evolutionary history, when there were real threats around. We’ve evolved brains that are more likely to make the error of thinking there is something there. If the potential threat isn’t there, that’s not that costly. But if you make the error of missing a threat that really is there, then that is costly, and you won’t pass your genes on to the next generation. I think a lot of these biases do result from our evolutionary history as a species. Particularly in the context of conspiracy-type beliefs, if your next-door neighbor doesn’t believe we really landed on the moon it doesn’t make much difference to your day-to-day life. But it’s a gateway to ‘What else is the government lying to us about?’ and opens the door to more dangerous conspiracies. Look at the anti-vaccination movement and HIV/Aids denialism, for example. This is very serious stuff. In the case of QAnon-type claims, we get Satanic panics and people being harassed. Or the denial that school shootings were real and that it was all actors. That ends up with the parents of the children who were killed being harassed. So it can have very serious consequences. In the health area, there are alternate and complementary medicines, which have either not been proven to work or have been proven not to work. If people buy into that stuff, then sometimes they’re not going to get something treated that was potentially treatable in the early stages, until it’s too late. So there are a lot of examples. I don’t want to exaggerate the dangers. We should also acknowledge that some of these paranormal beliefs actually have psychological benefits for people. People can take great comfort from their religion and their belief in life after death. I wouldn’t really want to take that away from people. But with my scientist’s hat on, I want to know how things really are—not just how I’d like them to be. The universe is a very big place and if I had to bet, I’d probably say yes, there is intelligent life out there. None of us know—not yet, anyway. But that’s very different to saying that E.T. is already here. The evidence for the latter is shaky at best."