Why so many people fall so hard for the outlandish blandishments of the QAnon Conspiracy is a hot topic these days. I find some explanations at least partially convincing. But not others—especially coming from social scientists.
In our age of Covid and climate crisis denial, “trust the science” has become our mantra. But not all purported science is good science, or meaningfully applied. That includes a whole lot of so-called social science that is done primarily by thinking up questions, asking them of a relatively small group of people and then making conclusions based on their answers, which usually involves statistics. The statistics make it look like science.
But the problems are often multiple: bad questions, asked of the wrong people (or not a diverse group of people), and making universal conclusions, not even justified by the “data.” The usual culprits are psychologists and political scientists.
So when Thomas Edsall in his piece published in the New York Times dutifully went to social scientists, he got science that was inadequate or just plain bad.
The study conducted by the psychologists he consulted concluded that “the type of extremity that undergirds such support has less to do with traditional, left/right political concerns and more to do with extreme, antisocial psychological orientations and behavioral patterns.” This conclusion falls between the obvious (not traditional politics duh) and the unenlightening. Extreme beliefs are believed by extreme people is not much of a contribution, but then it neatly puts the question in the realm of psychology rather than politics. More work for them!
Beyond that, the conclusions give more comfort to the self-satisfied than information on the phenomenon. It also sounds like what such types used to say about civil rights and antiwar activists.
Then there are the political scientists who reportedly asked these questions:
“Events like wars, the recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us”; “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places”; “Even though we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway”; “The people who really ‘run’ the country, are not known to the voters.”
If you agreed, presumably that made you an antisocial believer in conspiracy theories. The problem is that many people with a quite sophisticated knowledge of the world would also answer yes, at least partially, to these questions.
I mean, “The people who really ‘run’ the country, are not known to the voters.” Did these political scientists never hear of lobbyists? The highly paid professionals, whose effectiveness depends on their invisibility to voters, with regular access to legislators and others in power, and who have been known to actually write the laws? And that's just one example of many: bureaucrats, contractors, etc. even before getting to various power brokers.
“Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.” Maybe these polysci folks knew about it, but I doubt many of us were aware of the initial plans to start Facebook, etc. Or were privvy to the meeting in 2017 in which Mitch McConnell and Republicans plotted to thwart the Obama administration’s every move. And so on.
Sophisticated conspiracy theories probably start with a grain of truth. “Events like wars, the recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us,” is not only the premise of fiction from Thomas Pynchon to your average streaming thriller, it is a widely held description of the role of the small if undefined group of the rich and powerful known as “the Establishment” in the 20th century. And there’s your Military Industrial Complex, and other “conspiracies” of huge faceless corporations.
These “scientists” do make some interesting observations, though without much in the way of explanation: the QAnon types will believe mutually contradictory conspiracy theories (Osama bin Laden was already dead when the Navy Seals found him, and he is also still alive, etc.) One of the psychologists wrote: “people are attracted to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs are not being met.” She identified three such needs: “the need for knowledge and certainty”; the “existential need” to “to feel safe and secure” when “powerless and scared”; and, among those high in narcissism, the “need to feel unique compared to others.”
None of these seem particularly abnormal needs, so maybe it’s worth figuring out why they are not met. And why the “need for knowledge and certainty” is not met by factual information and informed sources, and the usual checks on this information of consistency and real world evidence, etc.
I return to the newness of the Internet and social media, which I flagged in a previous piece, and which is getting its attention (for instance, in a thoughtful interview in the Times with, of all people, Hillary Clinton, one of the major targets and perhaps inspirers of the QAnon conspiracy, and another Times interview with Michael Goldhaber, whose analysis of Internet potential that led to the boomlet for “the Attention Economy” some years ago is gaining new, well, attention.)
I think it possible that, because they are new media, and because of their nature in providing instant access and communication to anyone and everyone, Internet media are exposing people to information without experience and skills in evaluating that information. Add to that what Clinton called the addictive quality of algorhythms, which I think even those of us who have gone no further than clicking on one YouTube music video after another can sense is probably very powerful.
I want to add one more factor here, that I’m surprised I have not seen elsewhere. To me, the most incomprehensible feature of the QAnon conspiracy tales is their extreme outlandishness. Thousands if not millions of people believe that certain high profile people are secretly engaged in organized child kidnappings and abuse, to the point of eating kidnapped children. Or that well-known and powerful people are really lizard beings from outer space in disguise.
Where does this imagery come from but the horror movies, science fiction and violent fantasies that drench the entertainment media as never before in anyone's lifetime? Not only would these conspiracies be incomprehensible to most Americans in the 1950s, for instance, but these stories were way outside the mainstream, if they existed at all.
Today a 1940s and 50s superhero like Superman, or the Marvel heroes developed since the 60s, don’t bother fighting human criminals, or rescuing babies from burning buildings. They battle incredibly powerful beings from space or other dimensions or whatever, whose powers and evil natures are extreme. Super-villains may use mind control and other invisible powers.
More directly, the zombie mythologies of the past decade, now firmly part of American childhood in games as well as television and movie sagas, have boosted the degree and prevalence of creepy violence that makes cannibalizing children imaginable. (The top photo is from such a movie.)
And the lizard people reflect several generations of Star Trek and other science fiction prosthetic beings. This conspiracy in fact enacts a 2006 episode of Doctor Who, in which the Prime Minister of the UK and his cabinet are big green space beings uncomfortably encased in human skin suits.
Belief in such creatures has roots in history, just as the journey to QAnon in terms of culture and media has been documented over the past decades. Belief in conspiracies is fed as well by actual exposure of real secrets, from the Pentagon Papers to more recent and notorious document dumps. The search for hidden meanings and ciphers is familiar from popular fiction like The Da Vinci Code. And that also is where this kind of social science fails—it is basically ahistoric. And that doesn’t explain much.
