Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? | Michio Kaku, Bill Nye & more | Big Think

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

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From secret societies to faked moon landings, one thing that humanity seems to have an endless supply of is conspiracy theories. In this compilation, physicist Michio Kaku, science communicator Bill Nye, psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh, skeptic Michael Shermer, and actor and playwright John Cameron Mitchell consider the nature of truth and why some groups believe the things they do.

"I think there's a gene for superstition, a gene for hearsay, a gene for magic, a gene for magical thinking," argues Kaku. The theoretical physicist says that science goes against "natural thinking," and that the superstition gene persists because, one out of ten times, it actually worked and saved us.

Other theories shared include the idea of cognitive dissonance, the dangerous power of fear to inhibit critical thinking, and Hollywood's romanticization of conspiracies. Because conspiracy theories are so diverse and multifaceted, combating them has not been an easy task for science.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BILL NYE: How do I recommend reasoning with a conspiracy theorist?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, first of all I think there's a gene. I think there's a gene for superstition, a gene for hearsay, a gene for magic, a gene for magical thinking. And I think that when we were in the forest that gene actually helped us because nine times out of ten that gene was wrong. Superstition didn't work. But one time out of ten it saved your butt. That's why the gene is still here. The gene for superstition and magic. Now there's no gene for science. Science is based on things that are reproducible, testable. It's a long process the scientific method. It's not part of our natural thinking.

BILL NYE: I'm right now the last couple of months I've been messing around with this idea of cognitive dissonance. This is to say you have a world view. You're presented with evidence that conflicts with the world view so you either have to change your world view, which is hard because you've lived your whole life with it, or you just dismiss the evidence and dismiss the authorities that may have provided the evidence. The authority could be a person or it could be a book or, excuse me, an article on the electric internet computer machine. So you dismiss the evidence so that you don't have this discomfort, this conflict in your mind, this dissonance.

SARAH ROSE CAVANAGH: But we can also see it in conspiracy thinking where these fringe groups or at least they used to be fringe groups on kind of the outskirts of thinking about what could be real or what is happening, paranoid thinking for instance. Thinking about reptoids controlling our government. There have always been people who believed these sort of strange things but what social media and the internet in general has allowed to happen is for people with these beliefs to find each other and then when they're hearing back those same sorts of facts, those same sorts of theories then their beliefs strengthen.

MICHAEL SHERMER: What the skeptical movement has developed is a set of tools like the baloney detection kit. A set of tools to deal with particular claims that are on the margins of science like creationism, intelligent design theory, the anti-vaccinations, the holocaust revisionists. All these conspiracy theories and so on and all these alternative medicines. There's hundreds and hundreds of these claims that are all connected to different sciences. But the scientists in those particular fields are too busy working in their research to bother with what these claims are because the claims really aren't about those fields. They're just hooked to them. They're about something else.

CAVANAGH: I think that fear is an incredibly dangerous emotion. I think that it causes us to narrow our thinking. I think it causes us to shutdown options and there are a lot of threats in the world but I think what we need to face those threats are open, creative, playful thinking. And when we think as a hive mind, when we think collectively and we do so in a fearful sense then that shuts down a lot of our thinking.

KAKU: It's a struggle. It's a struggle that's eternal because it's part of our genetic makeup, okay. And there's even a name for some of this superstition. It's called pareidolia. What is pareidolia? It's the idea that when you look in the sky you see things that are not there. Let's do an experiment. Look at the clouds and try not to see something there. It's very difficult. You look at the clouds, you can't help it. You see Donald Duck. You see Mickey Mouse...

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