From Scientific American
Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience. Some people will believe anything................
“The military-industrial complex killed John F. Kennedy” and “I can prove that there's a private banking cartel setting up a world government because they admit they are” and “No matter how you look at 9/11 there was no Islamic terrorist connection—the hijackers were clearly U.S. government assets who were set up as patsies like Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Such examples, along with others in my years on the conspiracy beat, are emblematic of a trend I have detected that people who believe in one such theory tend to believe in many other equally improbable and often contradictory cabals.
This observation has recently been confirmed empirically by University of Kent psychologists Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this past January.
The authors begin by defining a conspiracy theory as “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal” that is “notoriously resistant to falsification … with new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of non-confirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.”
With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event”.
This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana's death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory … that the moon landing was a hoax … and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.”
The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.
The authors suggest there is a higher-order process at work that they call global coherence that overrules local contradictions: “Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.”
Moreover, “conspiracy advocates' distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contradictions between them.” Thus, they assert, “the more that participants believe that a person at the centre of a death-related conspiracy theory, such as Princess Diana or Osama [bin] Laden, is still alive, the more they also tend to believe that the same person was killed, so long as the alleged manner of death involves deception by officialdom.
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It seems logical that people who believe that TWA 800 was a massive conspiracy/cover up, with literally hundreds of people all agreeing to hide the evidence that TWA 900 was.....................
Was shot down by a missile
Was shot down by two missiles
Was shot down by the US Navy by accident
Was shot down be the US Navy on purpose
Brought down by a bomb
Hit by a missile just before the bomb went off
Destroyed by a "High Intensity Radiation Field"
Destroyed by a cargo door, puropsly left unsealed..................
Is anyone supprised that the same folks who believe this rediculous bullshit would also believe that.........................
Obama is not a US citizen
Obama is a Muslim
Obama is a Communist
Obama grew up in Kenya
Obama wants to destroy America
Obama ordered the Sandy Hook killings so they can take our guns
Obama ordered the Boston Marathon blast so he could order Martial Law...
