Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

This is revisiting the same subject as last post, creating a hierarchy. Barkun gives us a pretty bare bones but essential categorization of CTs. His hierarchy lists three different categories: Event, Systemic, and Super. Each category builds off of the previous one. An event CT revolves around a singular event and is roughly encapsulated within that event. If a person thinks that a shooting was really a false flag and ends it there, it's an event CT. A systemic CT is one that links different events, involves a conspirator(s) with an involved plan, and a goal that necessitates the events in question. To link it with our previous example: if that person then continued on by saying that all mass shootings are false flags in some poorly thought out plan to reduce gun ownership we would have a systemic CT. The super CT is global. It involves a group that controls world events, has a dedicated hierarchy and a some kind of plan that would likely be to strengthen its world domination...

The biggest hurdle in dealing with conspiracy theories is how to define them. A later post will deal with the term "Conspiracy Theory" in much greater detail but for now let's just assume the common parlance of the term and discuss what exactly we mean and more importantly how we can divide the various conspiracy theories into their proper categories. In an earlier post I referred to two types of CTs: Academic and Historical. Academic theories, properly understood, are those dealing with specific knowledge that is hidden from the public. These include hidden cures, ancient aliens, secret discoveries, etc. Historical theories deal with the secret behind historical events, e.g. the truth about assassinations, disasters, and the actual workings of governments. Since I made that claim though I realize that this is an insufficient categorization. Which makes this type of analysis all the more tricky since finding a top-level taxonomy can only begin with the proper definit...

I'm reading Barkun's book, "A Culture of Conspiracy," and in it he makes an interesting claim. In short, he argued that because part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they offer the believer an insight into "special knowledge" the pop-culture exposure of conspiracy theories (CTs hereafter) caused, among the believers, a disgruntling effect. As more and more people looked at these two artifacts of pop-culture and became exposed to the ideas the average conspiracist had to rethink their positions. I'm not entirely sold on this idea but it does need some exploring. First off one appeal of CTs is definitely the exposure to secret knowledge. This is argued in two different papers: "I Know Things They Don't Know" (Lantian et. al, "Social Psychology" 2017) and "Too Special to Be Duped" (Imhoff and Lamberty, European Journal of Social Psychology 2017) which made this point pretty explicit. This, to be clear, is not ...

First a little background: I run a skeptical social group in Buffalo, NY called "Drinking Skeptically" we are a part of the Center For Inquiry and are only a few months old. During our second meeting a newcomer was asking about the movie Zeitgeist. He was quickly introduced to me, because conspiracy theories are kind of my thing (obviously), and asked me what I thought of the film. I admitted that I hadn't seen it but that it comes up on my "recommended" list on Netflix. A few attendees (I'm not using names since I don't have their permission) informed that it some parts made sense but overall it was just a conspiracy theory documentary but that I should really check it out. I spent two weeks watching it because my laptop's hard drive crashed (also why I haven't updated in awhile), and I was finally able to finish it with extensive notes on it. What follows is a review of the movie. I must first explain that part 1 of the movie covers the story...

The crisis actor is a particularly vile accusation thrown at the survivor of an event or a relative of a victim of an event. The term is loosed at the individual by a conspiracy theorist who does not believe that the event occurred. It is a relatively new term and is related to the concept of a "false flag" operation. The idea here is simple and we will use the most recent mass shooting in the United States as an example.  On Valentine's day of 2018 an individual pulled a fire alarm at a school in Florida and as the students left their classrooms the individual opened up with an AR-15 style assault rifle killing 17 students. Afterward he fled and was subsequently arrested. This the most basic factual telling of the massacre itself.  This event, because it involved guns, naturally caused it to be under the suspicion of right wing conspiracy theorists who have an automatic response to any event similar to this: that's it is a ploy to remove guns from the averag...

"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of our secret society."--FBI Lawyer Lisa Page. This text revealed earlier this week sent a lot of people into a titter because it apparently confirms the existence of a secret society within the FBI that is apparently in opposition to the president. Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin claimed that he had corroborating information and that the revelation didn't surprise him. This single text along with the revelation that the FBI "lost" about 50,000 texts between Page and FBI agent Peter Strozk (though they are beginning to be recovered) "confirmed" the story that supporters of the president and the president himself has been pushing for what seems to be forever--though it's only been a year. First off let's address the secret society comment in the text. I read the text has sarcastic and missing an eye roll emoji, but o...

I've covered this before , but that was five months ago and I've been really bad at making updates. Don't blame me, well, blame me, but I have a course on this stuff to teach and sometimes just making the lectures work takes far more work than I anticipated. However, I'm beginning a "Plan B'' in pursuit of my PhD and that's forced me to delve into the academic literature surrounding this topic...more than I had to before. One of the problems is that there is scarce literature on the topic. Sure there's enough but the debate is just beginning, and that means going backward to the years before conspiracy theories were not uttered out of the mouth of the president of the United States...at least publicly. The problem lies not necessarily with the scarcity of material but that within that set there is good and bad. So far the standard piece to work with is Brian Keeley's "Of Conspiracy Theories" (99). This work deals with laying out a s...