Thoughts?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-people-b ... 00996.html
Social scientists are closing in on some answers. The personality traits known as the "Dark Triad" — that's narcissism, psychopathy, and a tendency to see the world in black-or-white terms — play a part. So do political beliefs, particularly populism and a tolerance for political violence. Cognitive biases, like believing only evidence that confirms what you already think, also make people more vulnerable.
But according to new research, it isn't ignorance that makes people most likely to buy into conspiratorial thinking, or social isolation or mental illness. It's a far more prevalent and pesky personality quirk: overconfidence.
The more you think you're right all the time, a new study suggests, the more likely you are to buy conspiracy theories, regardless of the evidence.
It still isn't entirely clear whether more people believe conspiracy theories today. Maybe there are just more theories to believe. But researchers pretty much agree that crackpot ideas are playing a far more significant role in politics and culture, and they have a flurry of hypotheses about what's going on. People who believe in conspiracies tend to be more dogmatic, and unable to handle disagreement well. They also rate higher on those Dark Triad personality traits. They're not stark raving mad, just a tick more antisocial.
Pennycook and his collaborators had been looking at the ways intuition could lead people astray. They hypothesized that conspiratorial thinkers overindex for their own intuitive leaps — that they are, to put it bluntly, lazy. Most don't bother to "do their own research," and those who do believe only things that confirm their original conclusions.
"Open-minded thinking isn't just engaging in effortful thought," Pennycook observes. "It's doing so to evaluate evidence that's directed toward what's true or false — to actually question your intuitions." Pennycook wanted to know why someone wouldn't do that. Maybe it was simple overconfidence in their own judgment.
Sometimes, of course, people are justified in their confidence; after four decades in journalism, for example, I'm right to be confident in my ability to type fast. But then there's what's known as "dispositional" overconfidence — a person's sense that they are just practically perfect in every way. How could Pennycook's team tell the difference?
Their solution was pretty slick. They showed more than 1,000 people a set of six images blurred beyond recognition and then asked the subjects what the pictures were. Baseball player? Chimpanzee? Click the box. The researchers basically forced the subjects to guess. Then they asked them to self-assess how well they did on the test. People who thought they nailed it were the dispositional ones. "Sometimes you're right to be confident," Pennycook says. "In this case, there was no reason for people to be confident."
Sure enough, Pennycook found that overconfidence correlated significantly with belief in conspiracy theories. "This is something that's kind of fundamental," he says. "If you have an actual, underlying, generalized overconfidence, that will impact the way you evaluate things in the world."
The results aren't peer-reviewed yet; the paper is still a preprint. But they sure feel true (confirmation bias aside). From your blowhard cousin to Marjorie Taylor Greene, it seems as if every conspiracist shares one common trait: a supreme smugness in their own infallibility. That's how it sounds every time Donald Trump opens his mouth. And inside accounts of Elon Musk's management at Twitter suggest he may also be suffering from similar delusions.
But what makes Pennycook's finding significant is the way it covers all the different flavors of conspiracists. Maybe some people think their nominal expertise in one domain extends to expertise about everything. Maybe others actually believe the conspiracy theories they spread, or simply can't be bothered to check them out. Maybe they define "truth" legalistically, as anything people can be convinced of, instead of something objectively veridical. Regardless, they trust their intuition, even though they shouldn't. Overconfidence could explain it all.
Pennycook's findings also suggest an explanation for why conspiracy theories have become so widely accepted. Supremely overconfident people are often the ones who get handed piles of money and a microphone. That doesn't just afford them the means to spread their baseless notions about Democrats running an international child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor, or Sandy Hook being a hoax. It also connects them to an audience that shares and admires their overweening arrogance. To many Americans, Pennycook suggests, the overconfidence of a Musk or a Trump isn't a bug. It's a feature.
