Buying into Conspiracy Theories Can Be Bad for Your Health

The people who spin speculative narratives about the world will also encourage you to take bad decisions

"Danger: Atlantic City Beach" by drpavloff is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Many of the anti-globalists who stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC in January seemed blissfully unaware of the risks. Few of them wore masks; some mugged for selfies; and many even posted videos on social media. Of course, the insurrection failed and now hundreds of them face long prison sentences. Finding out their identities hasn’t exactly been a difficult challenge for law enforcement officials. Why did these conspiracy theorists get the risks so wrong?

Regular readers of this newsletter won’t be surprised that many of them will have been attracted by the utter certainty of former President Donald Trump and his surrogates. He told them not to trust the mainstream media and so many of them stopped consuming it. If they had read several news sources, they might have stumbled on information warning them of the risks of breaking into government buildings and chanting that you want to hang politicians.

The siege of the Capitol might be an extreme example, but as a general rule people who sell you speculative narratives about the world don’t have your best interests at heart. They are often promoters of fringe views. They want you to distrust the media, scientists and doctors so they can get you to buy unproven quack health products or support extremist political causes.

Conspiracy theories can be attractive to us because they bypass the brain and go straight for our emotions. We have seen that these theories often grow out of our sense of cognitive dissonance when our core beliefs and first guesses are challenged. The methodology behind them might be weak, but the urge to work backwards from an event to its supposed cause seems to be deeply wired in our brains.

The Sharpen Your Axe project proposes a harder path. It is based on skepticism and a probabilistic approach. You should be prepared to test your opinions to see if they stand up in the real world. A Trump supporter who followed this template in January would have at least called a lawyer before doing anything rash. This would have yielded better results than just doing what Trump suggested without thinking about the risks in a skeptical way.

I explore the risks of conspiracy theories in much further depth in Chapter 15 of Sharpen Your Axe, my free book on thinking critically about the news and current affairs. If you missed the beginning, here are the links to Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13 and Chapter 14. I also summarize each chapter in my newsletter. You can find the posts embedded in the text above. See you next week!

Update (25 April 2021)

The full beta version is available here

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.