Chinese Whispers

An analysis of the techniques conspiracy theorists use to build a case

"whisper" by ElizaC3 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I was a child growing up in the UK, we used to play a party game called Chinese whispers. The rules are very simple. The first player would get a written message from a parent. He or she would then whisper it in the ear of the next player, who would do the same to the next person in the circle. The message would get whispered from ear to ear in a full circle until the final player would shout out what he or she thought the message was. The first player would then read out the original message and everyone would laugh.

When you take a deep look at most conspiracy theories, you will often find some version of Chinese whispers at play. Often you will see the speculative narrative is based on a second-hand report that misquotes its original source. The narrative usually protects a fringe view or is a first guess at explaining a complex situation. Dogmatic conspiracy theorists often react with cognitive dissonance to any further probing and defend their speculative conclusions with a sense of utter certainty.

The methodology I am trying to promote in Sharpen Your Axe is different. While I think it is great that people do their own research about current affairs, I am defending a probabilistic approach, where we hold our views lightly and constantly re-evaluate them based on the evidence. Looking beyond second-hand reports and digging a little deeper is an important part of this research methodology.

Chapter Seven of Sharpen Your Axe takes a deep look at Chinese whispers and the other techniques conspiracy theorists use, including my favourite of all: Fact-fiction reversals. Not only do conspiracy theorists borrow the plots of films and novels to develop their stories, they also say that the news is fiction. If you missed the beginning of the book, here are the links to Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five and Chapter Six.

Regular readers will know that I decided to make Sharpen Your Axe freely available in order to remove the brakes and let the information spread as widely as possible. I would like to thank everybody who has shared previous entries on social media. It would be greatly appreciated if you could share this post too. If you haven’t subscribed, please do so to get regular updates in your inbox. The next edition will come in a week’s time and will look at the role of science in developing a probabilistic view of the world. 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.