How to make conspiracy theory research intellectually respectable (and what it might be like if it were)

ABSTRACT

A great deal of conspiracy theory research presupposes a falsehood – that conspiracy theories as such are irrational to believe – and that conspiracy theorists as such suffer from a range of cognitive defects. But since people frequently conspire, many people believe in a wide range of conspiracy theories because they themselves are historically and politically literate. Thus, research questions like ‘Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?’ (with the presupposition that there is something wrong with them if they do) are misconceived, since people believe in conspiracy theories (like many other theories) for a wide range of reasons, some good and some bad. But there are legitimate research questions here such as ‘Why do so many people believe in irrational conspiracy theories?’ But you can’t answer such questions systematically without a robust set of criteria for determining which kinds of conspiracy theories are irrational to believe and which are not. Furthermore, you need to keep the whole question in mind in conducting your research. If this were done, then it might very well turn out that people believe in irrational conspiracy theories for much the same reasons that they believe in irrational theories of other kinds (for example, religious theories).

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy theories
• research
• invisible hands
• Lakatos
• Naomi Klein

1. Introduction

The title of my paper implies a claim that might seem outrageous to some, namely that a great deal of conspiracy theory research – especially by social psychologists – does not come within cooee of intellectual respectability. For much of it presupposes a thesis that it is quite simply false – that conspiracy theories, as such, are somehow suspect or unbelievable, the kinds of things that it is irrational to believe – and (as a corollary) that conspiracy theorists, again as such, suffer from a range of cognitive defects that it is the business of social psychologists and/or other scholars to diagnose and maybe even ‘cure’. In other words, they presuppose what is known in the trade as ‘generalism’, the idea that conspiracy theories, simply because they are conspiracy theories are somehow intellectually suspect.¹ But if we define conspiracy theories as theories that posit a conspiracy – that is a secret plan to influence events by partly secret means – this thesis is patently absurd. For people frequently conspire which means that many conspiracy theories are true, and indeed are often part of the established historical record. Thus, many people believe a wide range of conspiracy theories (a) because they are historically and politically literate and (b) because they take an intelligent interest in history and politics.

Belinda, for example, is not only historically well-informed, but thinks it is her duty as a citizen to stay politically au courant. Consequently, she is not only familiar with such well-attested conspiracies of the past such as the Phoenix Program and the Menu Bombings (of which more later) but is willing to entertain and tentatively accept plausible conspiracy theories about contemporary events. For example, she is inclined to think that the detonation of the Nord Stream pipeline was probably due to a state actor, in which case the USA is the most likely culprit having motive, means and opportunity, plus a demonstrated lack of moral inhibitions when it comes to acts of illegal of violence.

Now historical and political literacy is a phenomenon that can presumably be explained, as is a critical interest in current affairs, but both are prima facie rather different from whatever it is that prompts people to believe irrational conspiracy theories. My belief that I own a Toyota Aqua, is certainly a fact, and a fact to be explained in terms my cognitive capacities (eyes in my head, the capacity to read, an understanding of the relevant concepts, etc.) but if some car-less or Aqua-owning person wrongly supposed that they possessed a Rolls Royce, the explanation would have to be very different. Now, the differences between the mechanisms that explain my belief that I own a Ford Aqua and the mechanisms that explain the fantasist’s belief that he owns a Rolls-Royce are no doubt larger than the differences between the truth-tracking mechanisms that underlie Belinda’s beliefs in plausible conspiracy theories and the perverse mechanisms that underlie Quentin’s beliefs in the fantastic claims of QAnon. Both Belinda and Quentin will be largely reliant on written sources, either printed or on the internet, that is they will both be reliant on testimony, particularly the testimony of books and news sources, whether the news is fake news or not. Thus, the difference between them is likely to be due to the way they sift and process information, to their epistemic strategies and to their background knowledge of history, science and current affairs. It may also be due to Quentin’s higher tolerance of inconsistency and a capacity for compartmentalisation which, according to Altemeyer’s research², is characteristic of the conservative mind-set. Or it may be due to a systematic tendency on the part of irrational conspiracists (among others) to blame bad outcomes on the deliberate doings of bad actors, ignoring the possibility of unintended consequences and Invisible Hand effects. There is more to Belinda’s mostly correct beliefs in genuine conspiracies than the fact that she has eyes in her head, the concept of a conspiracy and the capacity to read. And there is less to Quentin’s belief in QAnon than there would be to the fantasist’s belief that he owns a Rolls Royce, since the fantasist’s beliefs (unlike Quentin’s) are directly contradicted by the evidence of his senses. In Quentin’s case the mechanisms underlying his absurd beliefs are likely to be a lot less florid. Deluded he may be, but he probably does not suffer from actual delusions. Nonetheless, there are likely to be wide differences between Belinda’s truth-tracking intellectual procedures and whatever leads Quentin to succumb to the fantasies of QAnon.

This means that research questions like ‘Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?’ (with the presupposition that there is something wrong with them if they do) are misconceived because people believe in conspiracy theories (like many other theories) for a wide variety of reasons, some sensible and some silly. More specifically some people believe in some conspiracy theories because their cognitive processes are more or less in order (given that truth-tracking is the goal) whereas others believe in others because of a range of epistemic vices, cognitive defects or epistemic misfortunes. Thus the question ‘Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?’ does not have a unified answer (like the question of why it is that people believe in theories in general). ‘Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?’ is on a par with questions like ‘Why Do People Believe in Cosmological Theories?’, ‘Why Do People Believe in Physical Theories?’ or ‘Why Do People Believe in Climate Change Theories (including the theory that there is no such thing)?’ In other words, what is wrong with a great deal of conspiracy theory research is that it presupposes generalism (which is false) as opposed to particularism (which is true); particularism being the idea that since many conspiracy theories are true (or at least plausible), conspiracy theories as such are not suspect or unbelievable, and should not be dismissed en bloc simply because they posit conspiracies, but should be considered on their merits (with the proviso that they can often be dismissed in short order if their intellectual merits prove to be minimal).

2. A case in point: a tale of two Naomis

Belinda and Quentin are, of course, imaginary, mere pegs to hang a distinction on. But Naomi Klein's (2023) book Doppelganger provides two real-life exemplars of sane and silly conspiracy theorists (in my non-pejorative sense): Klein herself and her literary doppelganger (with whom she is frequently confused), Naomi Wolf. The two Naomis are superficially similar, which partly explains the confusion. They are both Jewish, they are of roughly the same vintage, they are both feminists (though of a rather different stamp), they are both big-time commentators on public affairs, and they both made their (to some people interchangeable) names as critics of commercial culture; Wolf (1990) with The Beauty Myth and Klein (2000) with No Logo. Klein suggests a range of sensible and/or well-proven conspiracy theories in her books The Shock Doctrine (2007) and This Changes Everything (2014), since some of the activities of the neoliberal revolutionaries and climate-change denialists that she discusses were planned and partly executed in secret. Indeed, in her latest book Doppelganger (22), Klein claims that ‘uncovering real conspiracies is the indispensable mission of investigative journalism’. Wolf’s conspiracy theories, by contrast, are bonkers. To take just one particularly loopy example, she thinks that the mooted scheme for vaccine passports was (and was presumably intended be):

‘literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned’. If vaccine passports became a reality ‘there [wouldn’t] be capitalism’. The tech companies [capitalist enterprises oddly opposed to capitalism] and the government were engaging in ‘CCP-type conditioning … conditioning us not to be members of the West’. All Covid responses are at bottom ‘about weakening the West, weakening our society, weakening our children.’ (Quoted in Klein, 2023: 84)

Klein spends a lot of time distinguishing her conspiracy theories (a term she tends to fight shy of) from Wolf’s, and diagnosing the differences between them. Three things stand out. The first (though Klein herself does not make a big deal of this) is that Klein is scientifically literate whereas Wolf, apparently, is not. For example, Wolf thinks or thought that ‘vaccinated people’s urine/faeces should be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways’ apparently on the grounds that vaccinated people are biohazards (Klein 2023: 31). This is not a thought that would occur to anyone with a modest acquaintance with biology or medical science. The second is that Klein, the Toronto drop-out, is a meticulous researcher whereas Wolf, the Rhodes Scholar with a degree from Yale and an Oxford DPhil, is notoriously sloppy. Here is Klein on her research methods:

Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double- and triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognised experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a local lawyer (or in the case of my books, multiple lawyers in different territories). It's a slow and expensive careful process, but it gets as close as we know how to [a] proof that something [is] true. (Klein, 2023: 224)

Wolf, on the other hand, is an accident-prone writer whose first book contained an obvious statistical error (absurdly inflating the death-rate from anorexia) and who had another book, Outrages, pulped because of a historical mistake based on a misreading of court documents. (She thought that some Victorian criminal suspects had been executed for sodomy whereas in fact they had been released.) But the third difference between the two is that Klein can distinguish between the Hidden Hand of conspiracy and the Invisible Hand of the market. Wolf, it seems, cannot. Way back in 1990, when her cultural critiques were still comparatively sane, Wolf developed the thesis that ‘somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they're kept in the self-hating, ever failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring beauties’. As Klein notes,

a basic underlying logic of the advertising industry, especially when targeting women, is that we buy more stuff when we feel insecure. But playing on these insecurities does not constitute a plot to keep us down’. This is ‘capitalism doing its thing’. (Klein, 2023: 229)

The individual decisions of capitalist enterprises endeavouring to sell product to women may have made them more insecure and perhaps less effective in trying to get ahead, but this was an Invisible Hand effect not part of a secret patriarchal plot to subordinate women.³

These three differences between the two Naomis will be important in the sequel (§ 5, 6 and 7).

3. The generalist definition: fallacious inferences, flawed research

My argument depends on two premises one of which is surprisingly controversial and the other of which ought not to be:

(1)	that a conspiracy theory should be defined as a theory that posits a conspiracy (the particularist definition)

and

(2)	that conspiracies are ubiquitous in human history.

Let’s begin with Premise (1). It is sometimes alleged that the particularist’s definition is question-begging, but this is not so. For it is quite compatible with the claim that conspiracy theories as such are always or almost always irrational. If we defined a conspiracy as a theory which posits a conspiracy and conspiracies were in fact extremely rare, then if a theory posited a conspiracy, that would be a strike against it. (‘You are suggesting a kind of theory that is hardly ever true. This gives us a good reason not to believe it!’) It is only when the definition is combined with the factual premise that conspiracies are common (and that many of them are well-attested) that the particularist conclusion follows. So the particularist definition is not question-begging. On the contrary, it is generalists who develop question-begging definitions by building irrationality directly into their definitions (so that rational conspiracy theories don’t count as conspiracy theories). This entails that we can’t tell whether something is a conspiracy theory until we have first determined whether it is rational to believe it. We still have the task of distinguishing between rational and irrational conspiracy theories, only now it has been rechristened as the task of distinguishing between the okay ‘conspiratorial explanations’ and the bad ‘conspiracy theories’. But it is worse than that, since the generalist definition facilitates the fallacious slide from

(a)	‘This is a theory that posits a conspiracy’

via

(b)	‘This is a conspiracy theory’ [which follows from (a) for the particularist but not for the generalist]

to the conclusion that

(c)	‘This is a theory that it is irrational to believe’ [which follows from (b) for the generalist but not for the particularist].

Definitional generalism would be a lot less objectionable if generalists stuck to their definition consistently, but effectively they often fail to do so. They equivocate, inferring that something is a conspiracy theory in their sense (that is, an irrational theory featuring a conspiracy) from the premise that it is a conspiracy theory in the particularist sense (that is, a theory that simply features a conspiracy), in which case it need not be irrational.⁴ Thus, the generalist definition often greases a fallacious slide from the true to the false.⁵ Sometimes the fallacy takes a more subtle form, especially in social psychology. What is billed as a test for (belief in) an irrational conspiracy theory is actually a test for (belief in) a conspiracy theory in the non-pejorative sense. Thus, the instrument fails to test what it is supposed to test for.

You define a ‘conspiracy theory’ as a theory featuring a conspiracy that it is irrational to believe and a conspiracy theorist as somebody with tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, that is, theories which (given the generalist definition) are false, mostly false, or rationally unbelievable. Thus, you build irrationality into your definitions of both conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist; conspiracy theorists being defined as people with a tendency to believe the rationally unbelievable. This converts the thesis that conspiracy theorists are irrational from a falsifiable thesis into an analytic truth, a minor crime against Popperian scientific method. You don’t have to argue, demonstrate or provide evidence for the claim that conspiracy theorists are irrational or cognitively deficient. They are simply defined as such. The only empirical question is ‘What is it about conspiracy theorists that makes them so prone to falsehood and folly?’ But converting an empirical falsehood – that conspiracy theorists are always or almost always irrational – into a tautology – in effect, that people with a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories that it is irrational to believe are thus far irrational – is a strategy that comes at a price (though a price that many conspiracy theory theorists resolutely refuse to pay). It means that you cannot determine whether somebody is a conspiracy theorist (in the pejorative sense) until you have first determined whether the theories that they accept (or are willing to entertain) are rationally unbelievable, which many conspiracy theories (construed as theories featuring a conspiracy) most emphatically are not. Consequently, when testing for whether somebody is a conspiracy theorist (or is prone to irrational ‘conspiracy thinking’) you must test for whether they believe in irrational conspiracy theories, not for whether they believe in conspiracy theories in the neutral or non-pejorative sense.

Brotherton, French and Pickering’s (2013) Generic Conspiracy Beliefs Scale is a research instrument that conspicuously fails this test. Following Aaronovitch (2009), they define a conspiracy theory as ‘the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable’ from which it follows that conspiracy theorists, in so far as they are conspiracy theorists are ipso facto (and in this department of their lives) irrational, since they subscribe to theories that it is irrational to believe. But many of the questions that Brotherton, French and Pickering ask don’t test for irrational conspiracy belief – they test for conspiracy belief tout court. Subjects are asked whether they subscribe to a range of propositions, many of which would be perfectly rational to believe depending on where and when you were taking the test and which government or governments you had in mind. Here is a sample from their question-set, interspersed with critical comments.

The government has employed people in secret to assassinate others.

The US government is well known to have done this; ditto the Israeli government (‘Rise Up and Strike’⁶) and the government of Putin’s Russia.

Government agencies have been secretly involved in the assassination of their own citizens.

Putin’s government and the US government of President Obama, one such victim being Anwar Al-Aulaqi.⁷ Of course, after he was taken out by a drone there was no longer a reason to keep the operation secret.

The deaths of certain high-profile public figures have been the result of covert, government-sanctioned operations.

For example, Osama Bin-Laden (the USA), Qasem Soleimani (Ditto), Yevgeney Prigozhin (Putin’s Russia), Jamal Khashoggi (Bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia) – the last two cases being widely accepted, though officially denied.

For strategic reasons, the government permits certain terrorist activities to occur which could otherwise be prevented.

US governments have not only turned a blind eye to terrorist organisations but have actively supported them, the Nicaraguan Contras being a conspicuous example. The Northern Alliance, a key ally in the Afghan war, was also widely accused of terrorist atrocities.

Some acts of terrorism, which have resulted in the deaths of many civilians, have been secretly directed by government operatives.

See below on the Phoenix Program which was sanctioned and directed by the CIA.

Government agencies secretly keep certain outspoken celebrities and citizens under constant surveillance.

For example, Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein, both extensively spied on by the FBI.⁸ Perhaps the FBI does not do that sort of thing anymore, but since American government agencies are perfectly capable of assassinating American citizens, kidnapping suspected terrorists and taking them to foreign parts where they can be subjected to ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, we can’t be too sure.

The government keeps many important secrets from the public.

There are a great many countries in which this is a rational thing to think!

There are ongoing, hidden efforts to marginalize, control, or destroy certain groups of people through the use of political policies.

From the Guardian (2020): In the UK there has been a ‘very long line of undercover police [operations] which routinely infiltrated political groups, mostly on the left, since as far back as 1968’. ‘These were not […] designed to acquire evidence that [could] be used in criminal prosecutions. Rather, these police spies were tasked with gathering intelligence that could be used to disrupt and monitor political groups, Officers [lived] alongside political campaigners, forming deep bonds of friendship, or romantic liaisons, with their targets.’⁹

Now I don’t want to deny that there is such a thing as excessive conspiratorial thinking, meaning by this a tendency to accept, fabricate or entertain conspiracy theories that it is not rational to believe. Naomi Wolf provides a case in point. But I do want to claim that a research instrument which spectacularly fails to distinguish between the conspiracy theories that it is rational to believe and the conspiracy theories that it is not (not to mention the people who subscribe to them), is not a good tool for assessing this tendency.

4. A possible response and a vision of history

‘Well’, a social psychologist might reply,

‘what you say may be correct. The belief-forming processes of the rational conspiracy theorist may be very different from the belief-forming processes of the irrational conspiracy theorist. But rational conspiracy theorists are so few and far between that we can afford to dismiss them for research purposes. Most conspiracy theorists are irrational since most conspiracy theories are false’.

This relates to a point made by Patrick Stokes (2023):

Deep down, I’d suggest, the generalist-particularist debate tracks not one disagreement, but two. The first thing it tracks is a declared disagreement between a revisionary philosophical definition of conspiracy theory and a vague but widespread popular use of the term. The second thing it tracks is a largely undeclared conflict over the essentially undecidable question of how conspired the world really is. (536)

Now I could answer this point (as I have done in the past) by enumerating a sample of the vast number of true conspiracy theories which are part and parcel of the politically literate person’s intellectual toolkit.¹⁰ And I am going to mention several that go virtually unnoticed by conspiracy theory theorists. But I thought it might be more interesting to elaborate on my overall vision of history.

I start with a quotation from Adam Smith (1999):

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. (Smith, 1999, The Wealth of Nations: 32)

This is a classic expression of the Eighteenth-Century concept of an ‘Invisible Hand’ mechanism, a social set up in which the individual choices of many agents collectively produce a stable and persistent outcome which they do not intend. This is an idea that was gradually developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly by Scottish philosophers, and economists such as David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) (though as we shall see they had Dutch and English predecessors). For Smith, the Invisible Hand is usually benign in its effects. Entrepreneurs, intending only their own gain, pursue private profit which ends up promoting general prosperity. David Hume develops an account of how institutions of justice can arise out of the interactions of individuals who don’t care very much about anything beyond their private interests. For Mandeville, (1670-1733) the Invisible Hand mechanisms of a commercial society produce public benefits from private vices. It is also worth stressing that the Invisible Hand mechanisms in question do not, or need not, presuppose the hidden hand of a Divine Creator. Smith makes occasional references to Providence, and may have been an attenuated believer, but his friend Hume was a noted infidel and it is hard to take the professions of piety on the part of Bernard Mandeville at all seriously. Invisible Hand mechanisms often produce social outcomes that look as if they are designed, but if so, they are designs that do not require either the Mighty Hand or the Hidden Hand of a designer.

But the Invisible Hand is not necessarily benign. Hobbes (1588–1779) was perhaps the first in the field with a well-developed account of an Invisible Hand mechanism, but his Invisible Hand generates conflict in the state of nature. Here the Invisible Hand is smacking us down, not lifting us up. As a result of decisions that are individually rational (or at least moderately rational) we arrive at a collective outcome – the war of all against all – which is worse for everyone, than if we had been forced to cooperate by the Mighty Hand of a sovereign.¹¹

Invisible Hand mechanisms can be contrasted with Clasped Hands, Mighty Hand and Hidden Hand mechanisms. In a Clasped Hands mechanism a collective outcome occurs because people have agreed to bring it about. Thus, if you explain some outcome as due to an open and explicit agreement between the interested parties to make it happen, that is a Clasped Hands explanation. A Mighty Hand mechanism is one in which some social agent or agency, endowed with sufficient power, brings about a phenomenon by rewarding the compliant and/or punishing the non-compliant. Thus, we drive on the left in New Zealand partly because it is prudent but largely because the Mighty Hand of the state forces us to do so. A Hidden Hand mechanism is one in which some social outcome is generated by the covert actions of a (usually) powerful agent or agents operating behind the scenes. Providential explanations of social events are usually Hidden Hand explanations, except in those cases where God is alleged to have declared his purposes openly and demanded obedience (as he frequently does in the Old Testament) in which case they are not just Mighty Hand explanations, but Almighty Hand explanations. However, if we discount such exotic possibilities, Hidden Hand explanations are usually conspiracy theories in that events are explained by the behind-the scenes machinations of human agents trying to influence affairs by covert means.

THESIS: All these mechanisms (and, no doubt, others) cooperate to generate effects in human societies. Sometimes what goes down is due to an Invisible Hand mechanism, sometimes it is due to a Clasped Hands arrangement, sometimes it is due to the overt influence of a Mighty Hand and sometimes – and indeed quite often – socially significant consequences are due to Hidden Hands, specifically, conspiracies. Moreover, historical events and processes are often due to a combination of some or all of these distinctive mechanisms. When it comes to historical explanation it is usually not a matter of either/or but a matter of both/and.

Invisible Hand mechanisms are widely acknowledged, at least by those with tincture of economics. Less so the influence of Hidden Hands. But Hidden Hands are everywhere in history. The Holocaust, to use a particularly gruesome example, was planned and largely executed in secret. The movie dramatising the Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution was organised and sanctioned is appropriately titled Conspiracy.

Or what about the Phoenix Program? I quote from Wikipedia:

The Phoenix Program […] was designed and initially coordinated by the CIA during the Vietnam War […]. The program, which lasted from 1967 to 1972, was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong via infiltration, assassination, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, and interrogation […]. Phoenix ‘neutralised’ 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed, and the rest surrendered or were captured. Of those killed 87% were attributed to conventional military operations by South Vietnamese and American forces, while the remaining 13% were attributed to Phoenix Program operatives.¹²

It was of course planned and partly implemented in secret and was abandoned partly because its depredations became increasingly public.

Now, the interesting thing about the Phoenix program is that most conspiracy theory theorists seem to be totally unaware of it. It is customary amongst generalists to include a few concessive references to Watergate and Iran-Contra in their books and papers. (‘Of course, some conspiracy theories occasionally turn out to be true, for instance … ’) But they seem to have no idea of the enormous scale and impact of the conspiratorial schemes of the US government and its associated agencies in the Post-War Period.¹³ I used Google Scholar to check this out by entering ‘conspiracy’ and ‘the Phoenix Program’. There were plenty of references to the Phoenix program by conspiracy theorists (since you can hardly discuss the issue competently without being one) but only a handful from conspiracy theory theorists, chiefly myself and Kurtis Hagen.¹⁴ Of course, it may be that these conspiracy theory theorists were aware of the Phoenix Program and chose not to mention it, but what I really suspect is that many generalists, including many social psychologists, don’t choose to mention the Phoenix program because they have never heard of it. Much the same thing applies to Operation Menu aka the Menu Bombings. This was a secret (and illegal) plan, on the part of the Nixon administration, to interdict the operations of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong by bombing bases and supply lines in neighbouring Cambodia. This was a conspiracy of world-historical significance since, apart from the carnage involved (B-52s flew 352 sorties and dropped 108,823 tons of bombs), it facilitated the rise of the Khmer Rouge which led to millions of deaths. But again, Google Scholar suggests that although this conspiracy has been widely discussed, and although it has generated a significant body of scholarly literature, most conspiracy theory theorists (as opposed to theorists of this and other conspiracies) are totally unaware of it, with only a handful of mentions by people such as Kurtis Hagen and myself.

The ignorance or neglect of the Phoenix Program and the Menu Bombings on the part of conspiracy theory theorists is, to my mind, remarkable. It is as if the many researchers, whose work implicitly presupposes that conspiracies are either few and far between or lacking in social impact, have blundered through the late 20th and early 21st Centuries without attending to the news or opening a history book. More excusable is the failure to notice that one of the most important historical developments of my life-time, the rise and catastrophic triumph of neoliberalism, was partly due to secret or semi-secret plans (such as the 1971 confidential Powell Memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce) and to covert or semi-covert actions (such as secretly financing Think Tanks, scholars and pliable politicians with ‘dark money’ or suppressing inconvenient text-books by threatening to withdraw donations to universities and colleges which took the ideal of academic freedom a little too seriously). Not knowing about or neglecting this history is perhaps forgivable since the facts have only come to light as the result of relatively recent historical scholarship and investigative journalism. See Klein (2007); Phillips-Fein (2009); Oreskes & Conway (2010, 2023) and MacLean (2017) whose title (amply justified by the text) is particularly telling – Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Also important is the impact on world history of espionage, counterespionage and political surveillance, as documented in Christopher Andrew’s (2019) The Secret World. Spying and counter-spying are almost necessarily conspiratorial affairs, ditto targeted assassinations and terrorist operations generally, whether by state or non-state actors.

Going back to Stokes, it is not, as he claims, an ‘essentially undecidable question […] how conspired the world really is’. To every historically literate person it is obvious that the world – including the Western world – is indeed deeply ‘conspired’, a point that becomes more obvious with almost every history book that you read. Since many conspiracy theory theorists appear to think otherwise, we have a whole scholarly industry apparently founded on historical ignorance. If you aspire to be a social scientist then you really need to understand how human societies work, and one of the mechanisms generating significant social outcomes is conspiracy, a fact that is downplayed or implicitly denied in a great deal of conspiracy theory research.

5. How to make conspiracy theory research intellectually respectable –

Now, it has always been part of the particularist position that many conspiracy theories are irrational, and that there is something wrong with the thought processes of many of the people who believe in them.¹⁵ So there are legitimate research questions here – especially for social psychologists – such as ‘Why do so many people believe in irrational conspiracy theories?’ or ‘Why do so many people believe in irrational conspiracy theories given that the evidence is against them?’ But you can’t answer these questions without a reasonable set of criteria for determining which kinds of conspiracy theories are irrational to believe and which are not. Determining these criteria is not the business of social psychologists qua social psychologists, but of historians, political scientists and historically informed philosophers. (Of course, I am not suggesting that historically and politically literate social psychologists cannot have a go – this is not an exercise in academic boundary-policing or turf-protection – but if they do, they will be doing it in their capacities as historically literate scholars and not in their specific capacities as social psychologists. There are plenty of polymaths about the place, but devising adequate tests for irrational conspiracy theorising involves polying more than one math.) Social science research (a) that does not acknowledge that it is often perfectly rational to believe in, entertain or investigate, conspiracy theories and (b) that is not conducted with a reasonably clear set of criteria for distinguishing between rational and irrational conspiracy theories (or between conspiracy theories in general and a specific subset of usually irrational conspiracy theories) simply isn’t intellectually respectable, and the grant applications involved amount to obtaining public money under false pretences. But I don’t think social scientists should despair. I think that it is possible to develop a set of criteria marking out a range of conspiracy theories that it would be irrational to believe. Here are my suggestions.

1. It is generally irrational to believe a conspiracy theory that calls into question well-established scientific laws or findings unless it includes a plausible debunking explanation as to how the defective scientific consensus has been arrived at. This criterion does not apply to the more dodgy social sciences nor does it apply retrospectively to the science of the past which was often not up to much.

2. It is generally irrational to believe a conspiracy theory involving a highly defectible conspiracy from which there have been no defections, especially if the conspiracy is supposed to have lasted for some considerable time.¹⁶

3. It is generally irrational to believe in a conspiracy theory that ascribes magic powers to the alleged conspirators.

4. It is generally irrational to believe in a conspiracy theory that ascribes superhuman competence to the alleged conspirators.

5. It is generally irrational to subscribe to a Hidden Hand explanation of some fact or trend when an obvious Invisible Hand explanation is available.

6. It is generally irrational to believe in a conspiracy theory that ascribes comic-book-villain wickedness to the alleged conspirators. This does not mean that it is wrong to develop a theory in which the conspirators are callous, cruel, vengeful, greedy, murderous or even genocidal, but that the wickedness involved should be within the very liberal boundaries of humanly intelligible evil and should not be surreal. [However, we have to be careful here. Many people doubted the Trotskyist second-order conspiracy that Stalin had conspired to frame hundreds of thousands of people for participating in non-existent conspiracies because they could not believe that he was so insanely wicked.¹⁷ They were wrong. I suspect that something similar happened with respect to the Holocaust. So, this is a criterion that should be applied with extreme caution.] There really are some historical actors whose evil borders on the surreal. [For a further discussion of second order conspiracy theories, see Stamatiadis-Bréhier (in press)]

7. It is generally irrational to believe a conspiracy theory that constitutes the core of a seriously degenerate research programme (in Lakatos’s sense).¹⁸

8. It is generally irrational to believe a conspiracy theory that constitutes an auxiliary hypothesis in a seriously degenerate research programme. (Example: the conspiratorial components in Flat Earth Theories; the hard core of these research programmes being a cosmological thesis. In order to explain away all the evidence that the earth is a sphere, flat-earthers need to develop extremely elaborate, florid and far-reaching conspiracy theories.)

Theories which meet one or more of these criteria are irrational in the sense that (generally speaking) a sensible person should not believe them, and that there is something wrong with anybody who does. At best, they will be thinking rationally in the context of an informationally deprived environment or because they defer to the wrong authorities, and, at worst, they will be suffering from epistemic vices or intellectual defects. But there need be nothing wrong either with theories that don’t meet these criteria, or with the theorists who believe them.

However, a reasonable set of criteria is not enough. Nor is it enough to confine yourself to research instruments that test for irrational conspiracy theorising rather than conspiracy theorising tout court. If your research question is ‘Why Do People Believe in Irrational Conspiracy Theories?’ you need to keep the whole question in mind both in conducting your research and in and in writing it up. Don’t slip into talking about ‘conspiracy theories’ when you mean ‘irrational conspiracy theories; don’t slip into talking about ‘conspiracy theorists’ when you mean irrational conspiracy theorists. If this were done, then it might very well turn out that people believe in irrational conspiracy theories for much the same reasons that they believe in irrational theories of other kinds.

6. And what it might be like if it were

Consider the following theory (which according to Christian Miller counts as a conspiracy theory though it is not generally accounted as such¹⁹):

The earth was created about seven thousand years ago by an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God who nevertheless divided mankind into different language groups because they were getting too uppity and later drowned most of the human race. [There is no evidence for such a world-wide flood.] He saved representatives of all the land-animals by getting pairs of them into a ship even though the evidence suggests the ship would have been far too small to contain them all. He sent plagues to Egypt so as to encourage the Egyptians to let his favoured people go, whilst simultaneously hardening the heart of Pharaoh so that he would not let them go until all the first-born children of the Egyptians had been killed. Even though he is wholly loving, he is selectively in favour of ethnic cleansing and genocide (though the evidence suggests that one of the genocides he supposedly sanctioned never happened). Although he loves us like a Father and could end all suffering in an eyeblink, he allows it to continue and indeed (in some versions) he facilitates it (since supposedly nothing happens without his active participation), etc etc.

This is at least as whacky, if not more so, than Naomi Wolf’s claim that the proposal for Covid passports is a wicked plot to subordinate the population, undermine democracy and destroy capitalism. Austin and Bock’s (2023) QAnon Chaos and the Cross is a collection of essays, mostly by evangelical Christians, who subscribe to something like the above theory but are otherwise sane and humane. They are appalled by the way so many of their co-religionists have fallen for bizarre conspiracy theories, (notably QAnon) and suggest a range of (mostly charitable) argumentative strategies for bringing these lost souls back to the non-conspiratorial light. But with one or two exceptions, they ignore the obvious question – is there some cause in evangelical nature that makes these conspiracy-credulous hearts? If you believe in something as bizarre as fundamentalism, believing in the fantasies of QAnon isn’t much of a stretch! So, I am going to suggest a hypothesis that explains the link between some religious beliefs and an undue fondness for irrational conspiracy theories.

Let’s start with a reprise of Lakatos’s Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes which can be regarded as a theory not just of scientific rationality but of rationality in general.

In Lakatos’s conception of science […] we have a sequence of falsifiable theories characterized by a hard core of central theses that are deemed irrefutable – or, at least, refutation-resistant. This sequence of theories constitutes a research programme […]. When refutation strikes […] the scientist constructs a new theory, the next in the sequence, with the same hard core but a modified set of auxiliary hypotheses […]. [Each research programme] has a positive heuristic [consisting of] partially articulated […] suggestions or hints on how to develop the ‘refutable variants’ of the research programme. Lakatos’s basic idea [is that] a research programme ‘is progressive if it is both theoretically and empirically progressive, and degenerating if it is not’. Thus a research programme is degenerating if the successive theories do not deliver novel predictions or if the novel predictions that they deliver turn out to be false.²⁰

Now here is my idea: Unlike respectable scientific research programmes in which developing auxiliary hypotheses is an intellectually demanding affair, both QAnon and the fundamentalist hypothesis can be represented as research programmes with an easy-to-apply positive heuristic. When refutation strikes (in the form of counter-evidence) it is simplicity itself to construct an auxiliary hypothesis that saves the phenomenon. In the religious case we can simply say that God Moves in a Mysterious Way. If you are worried about the Problem of Evil and none of the available solution seems satisfactory, Sceptical Theism provides a wonderful way out. It may be that we can't see what greater good is achieved by some horrendous evil. But that is because our finite minds cannot be expected to comprehend the valuable ends that God is promoting by permitting the evil.²¹ Once you have learned the trick the positive heuristic means that you can deal with every evil. We can simply suppose that there is some greater good that he is promoting (and that if we were capable of understanding it, we would be really impressed). Indeed, you don’t really need to develop a new auxiliary hypothesis – you can just deploy the same one over and over again. In the QAnon case (as with other irrational conspiracies) it is also very easy to postulate new auxiliary hypotheses. You just add another wrinkle to the conspiracy theory, a task which is not unduly intellectually taxing. (Contrast the case of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics. If you want to explain the precession of Mercury – the fact that its perihelion moves around the sun in an odd way – consistently with Newton, it takes real brains to work out where Vulcan – the inner planet that was supposed to be distorting Mercury’s orbit – would have to be.) Furthermore, the proponents of these theories are (for whatever reason) deeply relaxed about what Lakatos calls degeneracy. They don’t care if their successive theories are neither theoretically nor empirically progressive – so long as they can explain away the counter-evidence, that’s enough for them. Moreover, since many religious people are right-wing authoritarians in Altemeyer’s sense, they are not even that much bothered by inconsistency.²² They are much better at compartmentalised thinking and tolerating cognitive dissonance than other people. They would be ideal citizens of Orwell’s Oceania in 1984. For them, doublethink is not a problem.

Furthermore, it might be the case that people are attracted to irrational conspiracy theories because they are attracted to theories which emphasise deliberate agency in the explanation of events, the reason being that they suffer from a Hyper-Active Agency Detection Device (HADD). The idea is that the human intellect evolved in a context where it paid (in evolutionary terms) to detect mental agency when it was real but where there wasn’t much of a downside to mis-detecting it when it wasn’t. (The costs of being on your guard if nobody is out to get you are, on the whole, lower than the costs of not being on your guard if somebody is out to get you.) Hence our highly useful Agency Detection Device has a tendency to overdo it, detecting agency where it does not really exist. This, in a nutshell, is the theory of Justin Barrett and Pascal Boyer who use it to explain our shared human propensity for religious belief. (Hume (1957) in The Natural History Religion develops a similar hypothesis, minus the evolutionary psychology.) So, what I am suggesting is that people believe in irrational conspiracy theories for much the same reason that they believe in irrational religions (that is all religions).²³

But I suspect that there is a more specific intellectual mechanism at work – a sort of dispositional analogue of Popper’s conspiracy theory of society²⁴, which leads people to discount or ignore Invisible Hand explanations in favour of explanations that involve deliberate or semi-deliberate wrong-doing. A lot of people – and quite sophisticated people too – are strongly inclined to think that if something bad is going down, bad people deliberately doing bad things must be at the bottom of it. (It is okay, of course, to think that if something bad is going down, bad people deliberately doing bad things might be at the bottom of it – it’s just that like the things that you’re liable to reading the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.) They dislike Back-of-the-Invisible-Hand explanations that suggest that nobody really intended (and perhaps nobody is really to blame for) the bad thing that results from individually rational actions. Thus, if (as Naomi Wolf used to think) women are seduced by the beauty myth into going slow with their ambitious attempts to get ahead in capitalist society, this can’t be because individual advertisers, with nothing in mind but profit, are preying on their insecurities in order to make a fast buck, but because ‘somebody, somewhere has figured out’ that this is a good way to keep women down. Although Invisible Hand explanations do involve agency (large numbers of people pursuing their private ends) they do not involve the kinds of agency that our Agency Detection Devices were evolved to detect (agents deliberately trying to bring about something that might be good or bad for us). Invisible Hand explanations also tend to go against another deeply ingrained human tendency – the desire to hold somebody accountable for the evils of this world. This tendency, too, may have an evolutionary explanation, based upon the selective pressure to have a down on cheaters who free-ride on the everyday altruism characteristic of small human groups. But however that may be, I want to suggest that one of the marks of bad conspiracy theorising is an irrational aversion to Invisible Hand explanations and a preference for explanations that attribute bad outcomes to bad intentions. Naomi Wolf’s thesis in The Beauty Myth provides a case in point. The ill effects of the supposed beauty myth are attributed to a patriarchal conspiracy rather than the individual decisions of business executives and advertising agencies whose primary motive is profit. A Hidden Hand explanation is preferred to the Invisible Hand explanation that stares you in the face.

But this tendency to prefer Deliberate Agency explanations to Invisible Hand explanations is not confined to errant conspiracy theorists. Here too, people believe in irrational conspiracy theories for much the same reasons that they subscribe to defective theories of other kinds, namely that they prefer explanations that put down bad outcomes to deliberate or semi-deliberate bad behaviour.

A striking example of this (where the true explanation is a Back-of-the-Invisible-Hand explanation though the Invisible Hand is operating within ghastly historical constraints) is the idea put about by leaders of Black opinion in America such as President Obama and Bill Cosby (before his disgrace) that the reason so many Black American women are single-parent mothers is that they have an unfortunate propensity ‘to lie down with any fool’. [Quoted in Flynn 2008.] Solution: they should be more selective in their sexual partners (though the point is often expressed in more moralistic terms). In other words, it is a bad outcome based upon bad moral choices. In a brilliant analysis, my late colleague James R Flynn (the discoverer of the Flynn effect and a veteran of the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s) explains this outcome as largely due to the following factors (a) that most women who have any choice in the matter want to have children at some point in their lives (he estimates this at about 80%); (b) that though most of them would probably prefer to raise their kids in tandem with a decent and respectable man, suitable Black men are in very short supply and (c) the White men are generally unwilling to form long-term relationships with Black women. Thus, Black women are fairly rational actors operating within a ‘marriage’ market where there just aren’t enough suitable men to go around. (Flynn estimates that of the total cohort of Black men born in 1957, by 2002, 19% were dead, 8% were missing – that is invisible to the state – and 5% were in prison, adding up to a total deficit of 32%. The corresponding total for White males was 11.5%.)²⁵

A similar kind of defective thinking underlies the recurrent delusion among conservative politicians that you can solve the problem of unemployment by transforming the unemployed into go-getters. They rightly believe that even under conditions of unemployment, the people most likely to get jobs are the go-getters (where ‘go-getters’ is a shorthand for those on the look-out for jobs who seek qualifications and have managed to maintain a positive attitude). So, they conclude that the way to deal with unemployment is to bully or cajole the unemployed (and perhaps other beneficiaries) into becoming go-getters. Since go-getters get jobs, if everyone were a go-getter everyone would have a job. The fallacy here should be evident to every economically literate person. Go-getters get jobs because (from the employer’s point of view) they are better than other people, because they stand out. Does this imply that if unemployed people generally became go-getters, they would all get jobs? No. Because if everyone were a go-getter, go-getters would not stand out. Thus (even if it were possible to bully or cajole the unemployed into becoming go-getters), the qualities of go-getting would be subject to inflationary effects. Once they became common, they would cease to be valued. Employers, anxious to pick the best employee, would spurn the ordinary go-getters (who by now would be ten-a-penny) and hang out for the super-go-getters. Unemployment could be just as bad as before. Here again, the kind of ‘look for the bad actors’ thinking that underlies a lot of irrational conspiracy theorising generates defective diagnoses of social problems along with cruel and unworkable solutions.

7. Conclusion

So, can conspiracy theory research be made intellectually respectable? Yes, by developing a clear set of criteria for distinguishing between the conspiracy theories that it is rational to believe and those that it is not; such criteria to be embodied in the relevant research instruments. What would it be like if it were? Probably – and my answer has to be speculative – it would display irrational conspiracy theorising as due to the same propensities that underlie defective thinking in other departments, such as an irrational fondness for religion and a tendency to disfavour Invisible Hand explanations in favour of explanations that put down bad outcomes to the bad intentions of bad agents. Would intellectually respectable conspiracy theory research attract as much funding? Perhaps not, because it would not enable conspiratorial politicians to dismiss their critics as irrational, and because it would portray the thought processes of religious believers and some conservative politicians as akin to those of those crazy conspiracy theorists. But for seekers after the social truth, it is still worth making the effort.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a discussion of generalism and its rival, particularism, see Dentith (2014).

2 See Altemeyer (2006) The Authoritarians, for a popular summary of his very extensive research.

3 For more on this see not only Klein (2023) but Rebecca Onion (2021) A Modern Feminist Classic Changed My Life. Was It Actually Garbage?

4 As Nera & Schöpfer (2023) argue, many psychologists ostensibly use a non-pejorative definition of 'conspiracy theory' but nonetheless produce work predicated on the idea that conspiracy theories are mad, bad, or dangerous. As Dentith (2024) notes, the kind of examples psychologists use to motivate their work, no matter the definition, are typically examples of suspicious and irrational conspiracy theories.

5 I develop this theme in more detail in Pigden (2023).

6 See Andrews (2019), 732–4. Israel is estimated to have carried out about 2700 ‘targeted killings’.

7 See the ACLU’s 2010 press release ‘Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority To Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones’ https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-claims-unchecked-authority-kill-Americans-outside-combat-zones.

8 For King, see Fried (1990): 177 and 191. For Einstein see Jerome (2003).

9 Lewis and Evans (2020) ’Secrets and Lies in the Spy Cops Scandal’ The Guardian, 28/10/2020, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/28/secrets-and-lies-untangling-the-uk-spy-cops-scandal.

10 See Pigden (1995), (2006), (2016), and (2022).

11 Key texts in the development of Invisible Hand Theory are Hobbes’s Leviathan (originally published 1651) Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (in various editions, 1714–1725) and Hume’s Treatise (1740) as well as Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Modern editions are listed in the References.

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program.

13 It is only very recently that they have started citing Olmsted (2018). But she does not mention Phoenix or Menu.

14 Kurtis Hagen’s many insightful papers are condensed in his excellent book Hagen (2022) Conspiracy Theories and the Failure of Intellectual Critique.

15 Dentith summarises the various particularist views on which kinds of conspiracy theories even particularists find suspicious in Dentith (2022).

16 I develop the notion of defectibility in Pigden (2018).

17 See Conquest (1992), 463–476. Conquest has a lot of illuminating things to say about why so many people found the correct second-order conspiracy theory – that the Great Terror was conducted on the basis of a series of ridiculous conspiratorial frame-ups – utterly unbelievable.

18 For more on the Lakatosian defects of some conspiracy theories, see Steve Clark (2002).

19 See Miller (2023).

20 See Musgrave and Pigden (2023) See also Lakatos (1970).

21 See Perrine (2023) for a good sketch of Sceptical Theism.

22 That right-wing authoritarians are relatively comfortable with inconsistency is one of the most striking findings of Altemeyer’s research. See Altemeyer (2006).

23 See Barrett (2004) and Boyer (2001). Hume develops a similar explanation for religious belief in The Natural History of Religion. For a critical discussion, see Pigden (2013).

24 See Popper (1962, 1972). See also my Pigden (1995). Where Popper goes wrong, I now think, is in mistaking an intellectual tendency for a theory.

25 See Flynn (2008) chapter 2, ‘The Lost Boys’.