This is the most coherent and concise explanation of why people are attracted to conspiracy theory I've found. And I've always wondered why a more than expected percentage of people lean this direction. Well here you go...
Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.
Full article - Scientific American, Sept. '09
1 comment:
I love Scientific American.
There. I just dropped a nerd bomb of my own.
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