The psychology of the CT believers

I think it's pretty obvious in how the vast majority of CTs write, that it is an emotional element, has nothing to do with intelligence in most cases. Although not understanding the science or facts of a matter certainly doesn't help the situation of falling for woo.

You know what, I was going to add the word "emotional" to my post because it absolutely plays a part in the whole CTer mindset
 
i thought the hot from the engine in the cold air made condensation. like on the outside of your refrigerator sometimes in summer.


which is how I know 98% of people have no idea what weatherwar101 is even saying "see that purple blob here? that's a low pressure HAARP induced convector that reacts on the red blob which is aluminum floating in the atmosphere, which causes a convex reaction on the yellow blob 4000 miles away"

^sounds good to me, since I have no idea what im looking at with those radar things or what any of those words mean in weather anyway!
or even that HAARP has nothing to do with weather. But MOST people have no clue what HAARP is/was
 
or even that HAARP has nothing to do with weather. But MOST people have no clue what HAARP is/was

Which raises the issue of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Arguably the HAARP theorists are more educated about ionospheric heaters than average. It's just not "good" education.
 
I think one of the most interesting takes on conspiracy theorists comes from Cass Sunstein. For those unfamiliar with Cass, he is an incredibly prolific legal scholar.

I'm sure Cass Sunstein makes a lot of great points, but the individual work I've had in mind since noticing the modern wave (think post-9/11) of conspiracy theories and their followers is "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer, that notorious 1950's vintage treatise on the psychology of followers and the movements they follow.
While Hoffer dealt with established movements which had gained world-wide recognition, and had affected entire nations and groups of nations, you can find a lot of similarities in his description of movement followers and today's CT.

Three that are worth noting; the interchangeability the CT True Believer when it comes to the subjects of their obsession - typically, a Sandy Hook Truther will also be a Boston Marathon Hoaxer, a 9/11 Truther, and even a Holocaust Denier (the Jade Helm Truther seems to be temporarily added to that list). Of course, this can be explained by the uniting factor that the culprit in most of these is The Evil Government. While Hoffer dealt with the interchangeability of ideology, not the particular details of it, I still bear this in mind when dealing with CT's on social media.

Secondly, the demonization of the "bad guy" is very similar. Whether it be The Evil Government, which has become an extension of the NWO, UN Agenda 21 enforcement, or a willing partner in the worldwide establishment of Sharia Law, there seems to be nothing the CT will put past the government. Or it can be the individual;
In the end, the charge of "shill" is simply a means for dehumanizing someone with whom you disagree.
because anyone denying the overwhelming evidence presented by the CT can only be one of "them", or one of those oblivious sheeple who just can't be woken up to the truth.

Finally, Hoffer dealt with the personality types the True Believer fell into, "Men of words", "fanatics", and "practical men of action". These types were not mutually exclusive, and the individual could move from one type into another in the course of their involvement. Unfortunately, most CT's seem to be stuck on the "fanatic" stage even though they practice being "men of words" on social media.

I repeat myself here, but Hoffer dealt with mass movements that were more effective than individual CT's scorching the pages of social media, so not all of his ruminations on the True Believer will be accurate. Still, for a work that was published 65 years ago, and considering all the advances in psychology since, it is very much still germane to the discussion of the psychology of the CT.

I'm sure there some of you can find points you disagree on, and have some insights of your own on Hoffer's work. Feel free to do so - I assure you, my skin is of a better than average thickness, and my objectivity is not easily clouded.
 
I'm sorry Mick, are you correcting me when you italicize 'people'??

I reckon he was just pointing out that conspiracy theorists aren't special in being uneducated. They are pretty much like everybody else in that regard. Some conspiracy theorists are plenty educated. Gnarly Carly comes to mind. That lady knows her way around the brains of an airplane and even does contract work writing avionics code for government contractors. You'd think she understand contrail formation. But she still believes that cirrus clouds are chemtrails and even that smoke from fires out on the march west of here are ground based chem-generators.

I will say that where many believers are special is in the leap to believing that they have some special insight or knowledge that people educated in some field lack. I see this with the "weather modification/HAARP" believers. None that I have encountered have the slightest idea how weather radar works but they will claim that they can see the radars manipulating the weather by watching for weird returns on various displays over the internet. Most attempts to explain what is causing the peculiar returns are met with derision. Discussing weather with them is like discussing Biology with Duane Gish or Ray Comfort. It can be maddening. However, it is counter productive to dismiss someone as uneducated if you are bothering to have a conversation in which you are trying to change their mind about something.
 
I am friendly with two CTers, of whom one is very intelligent but lacks a tertiary education, and the other is a medical doctor.

That said, the plural of anecdote is not data (Frank Kotsonis).
 
As has been pointed out time and time again, Conspiracy Types (and even some anti-conspiracy types) tend to be very insular. They dont like going outside their beliefs and will regurgitate anything that fits within their belief system. Nothing new, really, we've all known that for years.. but the nature of social media has only made this insularity more pervasive. Back in February of this year, a group of Italian and American scientists published a paper showing how they conducted several experiments to test this very idea. I'll post it below in a spoiler tag... its actually a really good read. Be warned.. there's a lot of statistics involved, so if you're not into that type of math (cuz Im not), some of its going to bend your mind and make your brain feel like its going to explode, but the information is really interesting none the less.



Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Data Availability: The entire data collection process has been carried out exclusively through the Facebook Graph API which is publicly available.

Funding: Funding for this work was provided by EU FET project MULTIPLEX nr. 317532 and SIMPOL nr. 610704. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1]. Relevance of facts, in particular when related to social relevant issues, mingle with half-truths and untruths to create informational blends [2, 3]. In such a scenario, as pointed out by [4], individuals can be uninformed or misinformed and the role of corrections in the diffusion and formation of biased beliefs are not effective. In particular, in [5] online debunking campaigns have been shown to create a reinforcement effect in usual consumers of conspiracy stories. In this work, we address users consumption patterns of information using very distinct type of contents—i.e., main stream scientific news and conspiracy news. The former diffuse scientific knowledge and the sources are easy to access. The latter aim at diffusing what is neglected by manipulated main stream media. Specifically, conspiracy theses tend to reduce the complexity of reality by explaining significant social or political aspects as plots conceived by powerful individuals or organizations. Since these kinds of arguments can sometimes involve the rejection of science, alternative explanations are invoked to replace the scientific evidence. For instance, people who reject the link between HIV and AIDS generally believe that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government to control the African American population [6]. The spread of misinformation in such a context might be particularly difficult to detect and correct because of the social reinforcement—i.e. people are more likely to trust an information someway consistent with their system of beliefs [717]. The growth of knowledge fostered by an interconnected world together with the unprecedented acceleration of scientific progress has exposed the society to an increasing level of complexity to explain reality and its phenomena. Indeed, a shift of paradigm in the production and consumption of contents has occurred, utterly increasing the volumes as well as the heterogeneity of available to users. Everyone on the Web can produce, access and diffuse contents actively participating in the creation, diffusion and reinforcement of different narratives. Such a large heterogeneity of information fostered the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews and narratives.

1820]. They are able to create a climate of disengagement from mainstream society and from officially recommended practices [21]—e.g. vaccinations, diet, etc. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the collective intelligence [22,23] the role of socio-technical system in enforcing informed debates and their effects on the public opinion still remain unclear. However, the World Economic Forum listed massive digital misinformation as one of the main risks for modern society [24].

8, 10, 25, 26]. The process of acceptance of a claim (whether documented or not) may be altered by normative social influence or by the coherence with the system of beliefs if the individual [27, 28]. A large body of literature addresses the study of social dynamics on socio-technical systems from social contagion up to social reinforcement [1215, 17, 2941].

42, 43] it has been shown that online unsubstantiated rumors—such as the link between vaccines and autism, the global warming induced by chem-trails or the secret alien government—and main stream information—such as scientific news and updates—reverberate in a comparable way. Pervasiveness of unreliable contents might lead to mix up unsubstantiated stories with their satirical counterparts—e.g. the presence of sildenafil-citratum (the active ingredient of Viagra™) [44] in chem-trails or the anti hypnotic effects of lemons (more than 45000 shares on Facebook) [45, 46]. In fact, there are very distinct groups, namelytrolls, building Facebook pages as a caricatural version of conspiracy news. Their activities range from controversial comments and posting satirical contents mimicking conspiracy news sources, to the fabrication of purely fictitious statements, heavily unrealistic and sarcastic. Not rarely, these memes became viral and were used as evidence in online debates from political activists [47].

4850]. A like stands for a positive feedback to the post; a share expresses the will to increase the visibility of a given information; and comment is the way in which online collective debates take form around the topic promoted by posts. Comments may contain negative or positive feedbacks with respect to the post. Our analysis starts with an outline of information consumption patterns and the community structure of pages according to their common users. We label polarized users—users which their like activity (positive feedback) is almost (95%) exclusively on the pages of one category—and find similar interaction patterns on the two communities with respect to preferred contents. According to literature on opinion dynamics [37], in particular the one related to the Bounded confidence model (BCM) [51]—two individuals are able to influence each other only if the distance between their opinion is below a given distance—users consuming different and opposite information tend to aggregate into isolated clusters (polarization). Moreover, we measure their commenting activity on the opposite category finding that polarized users of conspiracy news are more focused on posts of their community and that they are more oriented on the diffusion of their contents—i.e. they are more prone to like and share posts from conspiracy pages. On the other hand, usual consumers of scientific news result to be less committed in the diffusion and more prone to comment on conspiracy pages. Finally, we test the response of polarized users to the exposure to 4709 satirical and demential version of conspiracy stories finding that, out of 3888 users labeled on likes and 3959 on comments, the most of them are usual consumers of conspiracy stories (80.86% of likes and 77.92% of comments). Our findings, coherently with [5254] indicate that the relationship between beliefs in conspiracy theories and the need for cognitive closure—i.e. the attitude of conspiracists to avoid profound scrutiny of evidence to a given matter of fact—is the driving factors for the diffusion of false claims.

Fig. 1 shows the empirical complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) for likes (intended as positive feedbacks to the post), comments (a measure of the activity of online collective debates), and shares (intended as the the will to increase the visibility of a given information) for all posts produced by the different categories of pages. Distributions of likes, comments, and shares on both categories are heavy–tailed.



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Fig 1. Users Activity.
Fig. 2 we show CCDF of the posts lifetime—i.e. the temporal distance between the first and the last comment for each post from the two categories of pages. Very distinct kinds of contents have have a comparable lifetime.



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Fig 2. Post lifetime.
Table 1 we show the Pearson correlation for user couple of actions on posts (likes, comments and shares). As an example, a high correlation coefficient for Comments/Shares indicates that posts more commented are likely to be shared and vice versa.



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Table 1. Users Actions.
5254] which state that conspiracists need for cognitive closure, i.e. they are more likely to interact with conspiracy based theories and have a lower trust in other information sources. Qualitatively different information are consumed in a comparable way. However, zooming in at the combination of actions we find that users of conspiracy pages are more prone to share and like on a post. Such a latter result indicates a higher level of commitment of consumers of conspiracy news. They are more oriented to the diffusion of conspiracy related topics that are—according to their system of beliefs—neglected by main stream media and scientific news and consequently very difficult to verify. Such a pattern oriented to diffusion of conspiracy news opens to interesting about the pervasiveness of unsubstantiated rumors in online social media.

Information-based communities
Methods section for further details and the list of pages). We want to understand if users engagement across very distinct contents shapes different communities around contents. We apply a network based approach aimed at measuring distinctive connectivity patterns of these information-based communities? i.e., users consuming information belonging to the same narrative. In particular, we transform data in order to have a bipartite network of pages and users—i.e., two pages are connected if a user liked a post from both of them. In Fig. 3 we show the membership of pages (orange for conspiracy and azure for science). In the first panel, memberships are given according to our categorization of pages (for further details refer to the Methods section). The second panel shows the page network with membership given by applying the multi-level modularity optimization algorithm [55]. In the third panel, membership is obtained by applying an algorithm that looks for the maximum modularity score [56].



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Fig 3. Page Network.
50]. We consider a user to be polarized in a community when the number of his/her likes with respect to his/her total like activity on one category—scientific or conspiracy news—is higher than 95% (for further details about the algorithm refer to the Methods section). We identify 255,225 polarized users of scientific pages—i.e., resulting t be the 76,79% of users interacted on scientific pages) and 790,899 conspiracy polarized users—i.e., the 91,53% of users interacting with conspiracy pages in terms of liking. Users activity across pages is highly polarized. According to literature on opinion dynamics [37] in particular the one related to the Bounded Confidence Model (BCM) [51]—two nodes are able to influence each other only if the distance between their opinions is below a given distance—users consuming different and opposite information tend to form polarized clusters. The same hold If we look at commenting activity of polarized users inside and outside their community. In particular, those users that are polarized on conspiracy news tend to interact especially in their community both in terms of comments (99,08%) and likes. Users polarized in science tend to comment slightly more outside their community (90,29%). Results are summarized in Table 2.



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Table 2. Activity of polarized users.
Fig. 4 shows the CCDF for likes and comments of polarized users. Despite the very profound different nature of contents, consumption patterns are nearly the same both in terms of likes and comments. This finding indicates that very engaged users of different and clustered communities formed around different kind of narratives consume their preferred information in a similar way.



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Fig 4. Consumption patterns of polarized users.
Fig. 5, polarized users of scientific news made 13,603 comments on post published by conspiracy news (9.71% of their total commenting activity), whereas polarized users of conspiracy news commented on scientific posts only 5,954 times (0.92% of their total commenting activity, i.e. roughly ten times less than polarized users of scientific news).



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Fig 5. Activity and communities.
57, 58] law proposing to fund policy makers with 134 billion of euros (10% of the Italian GDP) in case of defeat in the political competition. This was an intentional joke with an explicit mention to its satirical nature. The case of Senator Cirenga became popular within online political activists and used as an argumentation in political debates [47].

Fig. 6 shows how polarized users of both categories interact with troll posts in terms of comments and likes. We find that polarized users of conspiracy pages are more active in liking and commenting on intentionally false claims.



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Fig 6. Polarized users on false information.
42, 43] has been shown that unsubstantiated claims reverberate for a timespan comparable to the one of more verified information and that usual consumers of conspiracy theories are more prone to interact with them. Conspiracy theories find on the internet a natural medium for their diffusion and, not rarely, trigger collective counter-conspirational actions [59,60]. Narratives grounded on conspiracy theories tend to reduce the complexity of reality and are able to contain the uncertainty they generate [1820]. In this work we studied how users interact with information related to different (opposite) narratives on Facebook. Through a thresholding algorithm we label polarized users on the two categories of pages identifying well shaped communities. In particular, we measure commenting activity of polarized users on the opposite category, finding that polarized users of conspiracy news are more focused on posts of their community and their attention is more oriented to diffuse conspiracy contents. On the other hand, polarized users of scientific news are less committed in the diffusion and more prone to comment on conspiracy pages. A possible explanation for such a behavior is that the former want to diffuse what is neglected by main stream thinking, whereas the latter aims at inhibiting the diffusion of conspiracy news and proliferation of narratives based on unsubstantiated claims. Finally, we test how polarized users of both categories responded to the inoculation of 4,709 false claims produced by a parodistic page, finding polarized users of conspiracy pages to be the most active.

5254] indicating the existence of a relationship between beliefs in conspiracy theories and the need for cognitive closure. Those who use a more heuristic approach when evaluating evidences to form their opinions are more likely to end up with an account more consistent with their existing system of beliefs. However, anti-conspiracy theorists may not only reject evidence that points toward a conspiracy theory account, but also spend cognitive resources for seeking out evidences to debunk conspiracy theories even when these are satirical imitation of false claims. These results open to new possibilities to understand popularity of information in online social media beyond simple structural metrics. Furthermore, we show that where unsubstantiated rumors are pervasive, false rumors might easy proliferate. Next envisioned steps for our research is to look at reactions of users to different kind of information according to a more detailed classification on contents.

61], which is publicly available, and for the analysis (according to the specification settings of the API) we used only public available data (users with privacy restrictions are not included in the dataset). The pages from which we download data are public Facebook entities (can be accessed by anyone). User content contributing to such pages is also public unless the user’s privacy settings specify otherwise and in that case it is not available to us.

Data collection
Table 3. The first category includes all pages diffusing conspiracy information—pages which disseminate controversial information, most often lacking supporting evidence and sometimes contradictory of the official news (i.e. conspiracy theories). The second category is that of scientific dissemination including scientific institutions and scientific press having the main mission to diffuse scientific knowledge.



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Table 3. Breakdown of Facebook dataset.
55, 56]. The former algorithm is based on multi-level modularity optimization. Initially, each vertex is assigned to a community on its own. In every step, vertices are re-assigned to communities in a local, greedy way. Nodes are moved to the community in which they achieve the highest modularity. Differently, the latter algorithm looks for the maximum modularity score by considering all possible community structures in the network. We apply both algorithms to the bipartite projection on pages.

Fig. 7 we show the number of polarized users as a function of θ. Both curves decrease with a comparable rate.



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Fig 7. Polarized users and activity.
Table 4 the list of scientific news and on Table 5 the list of conspiracy pages.



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Table 4. Scientific news sources.


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Table 5. Conspiracy news sources.
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Content from External Source
 
BBC Radio 4's "All in the mind" program yesterday had a brief but interesting discussion with Chris French (Prof. of psychology and ex-editor of Skeptic magazine) regarding the psychology of conspiracy theorists.

I did like his definition of conspiracy theory as "scepticism without the critical thinking".

It's available to listen to on iPlayer Radio, those in the colonies may need to take measures to access :)

Ray Von
 
BBC Radio 4's "All in the mind" program yesterday had a brief but interesting discussion with Chris French (Prof. of psychology and ex-editor of Skeptic magazine) regarding the psychology of conspiracy theorists.

I did like his definition of conspiracy theory as "scepticism without the critical thinking".

It's available to listen to on iPlayer Radio, those in the colonies may need to take measures to access :)

Ray Von

Damned colonials... :p
 
I am friendly with two CTers, of whom one is very intelligent but lacks a tertiary education, and the other is a medical doctor.

That said, the plural of anecdote is not data (Frank Kotsonis).


I agree with the thrust of your post and hate to comment on a tangent but I have to say, that the Kotsonis quote is exactly backwards. The plural of anecdote is data. It's just very rare that people have enough anecdotes to make statistically significant inferences from such data.
 
I agree with the thrust of your post and hate to comment on a tangent but I have to say, that the Kotsonis quote is exactly backwards. The plural of anecdote is data. It's just very rare that people have enough anecdotes to make statistically significant inferences from such data.
Flawed data, perhaps. Anecdotes form a limited, selected, and highly biased pool of information and any personal analysis would lack controls and properly applied statistical methodology.

But I appreciate your point.
 
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I agree with the thrust of your post and hate to comment on a tangent but I have to say, that the Kotsonis quote is exactly backwards. The plural of anecdote is data. It's just very rare that people have enough anecdotes to make statistically significant inferences from such data.

Santa hit the nail on the head ben.. if you take anecdotal evidence of infowars and look it over.. its still just as bullshit as if one person alone were saying it. Thats not to say that you cant use anecdotes as a starting point to ferret out actual evidence.. history's full of examples of that very thing.. most myths have SOME basis in reality, and myths are basically anecdotes... someone's interpretation of an event that they try to describe to people who werent there. As far as the person telling the story is concerned, its an accurate account of what happened.. but eyewitnesses are generally terrible at recounting events accurately, so from a scientific or data collection/analysis perspective, its almost worthless unless you use it as a starting point and then follow the evidence you collect during your investigation.
 
Santa hit the nail on the head ben.. if you take anecdotal evidence of infowars and look it over.. its still just as bullshit as if one person alone were saying it. Thats not to say that you cant use anecdotes as a starting point to ferret out actual evidence.. history's full of examples of that very thing.. most myths have SOME basis in reality, and myths are basically anecdotes... someone's interpretation of an event that they try to describe to people who werent there. As far as the person telling the story is concerned, its an accurate account of what happened.. but eyewitnesses are generally terrible at recounting events accurately, so from a scientific or data collection/analysis perspective, its almost worthless unless you use it as a starting point and then follow the evidence you collect during your investigation.

I'm not saying people should rely upon one or even a handful of anecdotes to inform their opinion. That, for a variety of reasons (biased sample, sample size, etc.), is a poor basis upon which to form an opinion. My objection to the quote is not based on the thrust of how it is being employed in this context (i.e., that a few anecdotes are a poor data set); rather, it is based on the fact that quote itself makes little sense if you think about it broadly. In fact, if you've ever done graduate level research in the social sciences, you quickly realize that the quote is, in fact, exactly wrong, as I stated. All data sets are is a compilation of anecdotes. Some compilations are bigger and contain a more diverse sample or are more reliably related/recorded, but they are still just sets of anecdotes of some kind. Again, nothing against the thrust of the use of that quote in this context, but I like to take the opportunity to point out the fundamental incorrectness of the quote whenever I see it rear its head.
 
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I agree with the thrust of your post and hate to comment on a tangent but I have to say, that the Kotsonis quote is exactly backwards. The plural of anecdote is data. It's just very rare that people have enough anecdotes to make statistically significant inferences from such data.
Bravo! I don't know why I came over here to read this, but I'm glad I did. You are the only other person I've heard say this. I think people need to pierce the veil on the glamour of science; an anecdote related to someone in a white lab coat is still an anecdote.
 
Delicious irony alert:

Science has shown that CT's will believe pretty much anything you tell them!
or you can link it here - Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation
A couple of quick points:

1) The paper was published in PO - hardly the most reputable journal (my understanding is it lacks a sound peer-review process); and

2) The study explores the proportion of 'likes' accrued by legitimate articles as opposed to those accrued by parodic-CT articles (ie articles from sources that parody CTs) from Italian CT believers on Facebook. It is incorrect to extrapolate from this that 'CTs believe everything said by fellow CTs' or 'CTs believe everything you tell them' - these are gross overstatements (and that's an understatement).
 
A couple of quick points:

1) The paper was published in PO - hardly the most reputable journal (my understanding is it lacks a sound peer-review process); and

Evidence?? :)

ETA: PLOS on wiki

2) The study explores the proportion of 'likes' accrued by legitimate articles as opposed to those accrued by parodic-CT articles (ie articles from sources that parody CTs) from Italian CT believers on Facebook. It is incorrect to extrapolate from this that 'CTs believe everything said by fellow CTs' or 'CTs believe everything you tell them' - these are gross overstatements (and that's an understatement).

Of course - but it's fun :)
 
my term for this is "anti-knowledge"

to a CTer the more actual knowledge you have on the subject is inversely proportionate to the weight/trust they give to that knowledge

Unless the knowledgable person agrees with them. Like mainstream media: It's always wrong unless they can twist something into a "chemtrail admission".
 
(my understanding is it [PLOS ONE] lacks a sound peer-review process)
Content from External Source
Evidence?? :)

ETA: PLOS on wiki
The Wiki article on PO actually just makes it sound worse than I thought:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_ONE
The PLOS ONE online platform employs a "publish first, judge later" methodology....

"Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees." (Quote from the PO website.)
Content from External Source
To be fair, the article later mentions that 'each paper is reviewed by an average of 2.9 experts'.

As for its reputability, Wiki gives its JIF as 3.53. Need more be said?
 
I don't get it
you know perfectly well that the follower CTs basically believe anything the leaders tell them.

Like all the fake and wrong information about contrails they spew. Like how Sandy Hook was a false flag because they were having a 'boots on the ground' drill that day a few miles away, which is not at all true. Like how the pharmaceutical companies want you to stay sick to make more money and they dont care if vaccines cause autism.

But considering this is a thread in the "Chemtrail" forum, it is even more true than alot of other conspiracies. High by-pass turbo engines dont produce water vapour with combustion. I mean, seriously? They believe it because the leaders tell them it is true and they believe whatever the leaders say.
 
That study did seem pretty useless. As the woman in the video said, the troll posts weren't REALLY stupid, and just checking likes and shares doesn't really prove anything about whether they believe or not. you should see some of the crap I share sometimes cos I think it's funny.
 
the troll posts weren't REALLY stupid
no. she said they werent REALLY [ridiculous] to conspiracy theorists. The government spraying viagra on the population is pretty ridiculous, even for CTs in my opinion.

is it even possible to come up with something more far fetched than Lizard people ruling the world? <although i hope most CTs dont believe that one! But in my experience the vast majority of CT followers will believe basically ANYTHING [ridiculous] said about the conspiracies they do believe in.

Just like religion in most cases. The difference is, religion admits they believe anything Christ or Mohammad or whoever tells them. That's the whole point. Faith.

Thats why i dont understand why CTs are so sensitive about such statements.

Some friends actually did that. We made up ridiculous bunk to see if they would fall for it. and easily 90% of them did. (probably more like 98% but i'm estimating low so i dont have to show my math). Of course it backfired on us because now it is part of the "meme". :/

And what's that 'satire' chemtrail site again on FB? That so many think is true?
 
I have heard the Chemtrail theory described as a "hoax"

can someone explain why that is so - a "hoax" implies that the originator(s) knew it was all a load of tosh - from its inception

and then it just snowballed, and has taken a life of it's own

is/was this the case?

it would seem to set it apart from the whole 911 counter culture - although I have heard it said that Loose Change was initially produced because Dylan Avery was simply a budding/aspiring film maker and wanted an easy subject to make a film about
 
can someone explain why that is so - a "hoax" implies that the originator(s) knew it was all a load of tosh - from its inception

and then it just snowballed, and has taken a life of it's own
luckily this is page 8 since i have no idea if we are at all on topic anymore :)

it seems so, that it was a hoax that snowballed. https://www.metabunk.org/operation-clarity-the-history-of-chemtrails.t1567/#post-42751


i dont know anything really about the 9/11 CT, but now adays unfortunately i'm not sure 'hoaxes' and 'new conspiracies' can really be seperated -as with the currrent internet culture... we have 'CT' type sites posting 'claims of hoaxes' the very day tragedies are happening. so to me, they obviously know they are 'faking it for ratings' because they are spreading bunk before ANY news is even really available.

Although some might have legitimate questions or concerns with that days news footage they are watching, there are always going to be others who are just doing what Main stream media does and trying to get 'hits' on a hot new story first. Makes it hard to really determine if 'new conspiracies' have started as hoaxes or not because i think they all start as both simultaneously.
 
thanks, Deidre

Interesting links,

it seems to have both "persisted and spread" from an initial concern about pollution (isn't everyone) to encompass a much wider (subject) area

ironically, much like contrails
 
I think describing things as a "hoax" does actually mislead a little. A lot of the people involved in spreading these theories actually believe 100% in them. Unless someone admits to having made something up, then calling it a hoax seems perhaps a little off.
 
I think describing things as a "hoax" does actually mislead a little. A lot of the people involved in spreading these theories actually believe 100% in them. Unless someone admits to having made something up, then calling it a hoax seems perhaps a little off.

I agree, it is a little off... but when you see the continual willful ignoring of evidence placed right in the faces of people like Dane Wigington and the fact that he and others intentionally block all dissenting opinion from their videos and web sites, it sure LOOKS like a hoax. In the end it becomes impossible to tell much difference between the attitudes and actions of someone who is intentionally lying and someone who truly believes. I think that at least 25% of those who push the chemtrail notion on the internet are just doing it for the LOLS and to jerk people's chains.
 
A lot of the people involved in spreading these theories actually believe 100% in them. Unless someone admits to having made something up, then calling it a hoax seems perhaps a little off.
yea but if you believe a hoax, that doesnt magically make it not a hoax. It makes YOU not a hoaxer if you spread it. But you are still spreading a hoax if it started out as a hoax.

For instance, alot of what Wolfgang Halbig came up with- he was out and out lying and he knew he was lying (although i honestly believe he forgets himself that he lied originally). So those lies are a hoax and anyone who spreads them, even though they may not know it's a hoax, are still spreading a hoax. A lie.

That's why there are Truthers and there are Hoaxers within the same conspiracy topic.
 
Online articles that reference Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation have been making the rounds on social media (as discussed above), I've noticed. In response, I've seen an article posted that claims that "conspiracy theorists are more sane," or something to that effect, as determined by a scientific study. Here's the Natural News version of it. If you care to look up the study on PubMed, you'll notice a comment from the study's author, Michael Wood:


As the first author of this study, I'd like to address a misleading headline that's been making the rounds lately: the idea that this study says that people who believe 9/11 conspiracy theories are better-adjusted than those who do not. This grossly misinterprets our results: this study says nothing about mental health, and its results do not justify any conclusions about one group of people being more or less "sane" than another.

The main basis for this misinterpretation appears to be the observed difference in hostility between conspiracist (pro-conspiracy-theory) and conventionalist (anti-conspiracy-theory) comments. On average, conventionalist comments tended to be somewhat more hostile. In the paper, we interpret this difference as the product of a fairly specific social situation in which the two rival opinion-based groups use different strategies of social influence according to their relative popularity, rather than as an inherent psychological difference. In fact, previous research by Marina Abalakina-Paap and colleagues has shown that dispositional hostility is positively, not negatively, correlated with beliefs in conspiracy theories - in other words, people who believe more conspiracy theories tend to be more hostile. However, that finding doesn't necessarily justify the conclusion that conventionalists are better-adjusted than conspiracists. Either of these conclusions relies on the unstated premise that hostility is never good or justified, and that less hostility is always better. This is at least an arguable assumption, and there's certainly no evidence for it here.

In general, I would urge anyone who found this paper via the "sanity" article to please think critically about headlines in the future. It is tempting to believe without question self-serving headlines that validate your prejudices and beliefs, but that's precisely when critical thinking is most important.

Content from External Source
Below the abstract there is a link to the full study, should anyone be interested.
 
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