We are a naturally cautious species. Our caution has kept us collectively alive for millenia so far. Our far ancestors were cautious about predators, diseases, natural hazards, the weather, and the motivations of others in their group. In our world we have less reason to be worried about natural hazards, the risk of death from animal attacks, and the threat of disease has been vastly reduced. But while the immediate danger has been reduced the worldwide danger has become far higher; nuclear weapons, climate change, global financial crises - these are the stuff of conspiracies and where our caution and suspicion is now directed.
Conspiracies happen all of the time in business and politics, and, suspicious, we look for the warning signs of the next one; groups of powerful men engaged in secret meetings behind closed doors; bodyguards and police escorts keeping them protected; leaked memos and dossiers with secret information blanked out. The warning signs are all there that something deeply suspicious is going on. All too frequently it turns out that our suspicions are correct. For example in recent history the holder of US presidency has attempted to cover up illegal wiretapping of political rivals (Nixon), authorised covert arms trading for hostages (Reagan), and engaged in an extra-marital affair with an office intern (Clinton)- and each explicity denied doing so before being forced to reveal the truth.
So when, for example, the president is shot dead by a high powered rifle while riding in motorcade; or when a ragtag bunch of box-cutter wielding fanatics pull off a spectacular multiple hijacking; or when a transatlantic airliner mysteriously explodes after takeoff: We begin asking questions; how can our leaders have allowed this to happen, unless they were somehow part of it? And if they were part of it, would they not pretend that they were not, issuing denials and writing official reports absolving themselves of any blame? That, after all is what they did before when they were discovered to lying.
Yet not every event can be the result of conspiracy and shadowy background dealings. A trawl through the history books will reveal that for every event that was proven to be a conspiracy there will be many more that were proven to be down to pure chance with no credible evidence that anything other than pure happenstance was at work. So why do so many people refuse to accept that there is nothing 'hidden' to find and insist on a conspiracy? Why are tiny anomalies and minor inconsistencies so often able to overpower the vast amounts of contrary evidence, never mind sheer rationality and common sense and mushroom into monsters with millions of supporters, who seem to have surrounded themselves to stubborn, almost wilful irrationality?
---Bad Science
The popular imagination casts conspiracy theorist as delusional fanatics, yet most most conspiracists are intelligent, rational, and knowledgeable people. Most conspiracists clearly know their stuff and have worked hard to amass their evidence and build their theories. The problem is that at it's heart a conspiracy theory is a created by a reversal of the usual scientific method. The truly skeptical researcher starts with a completely null hypothesis and examines all the evidence without preconceived notions or agendas. Most historians, scientists, researchers, inventors and engineers base their theories and ideas around things they can know, their theories will allow for new information, and they will revise their theories if new evidence comes to light to fill in the blanks.
The conspiracy theory begins with a supposition and then sets out to find evidence to support it. As enough potential evidence exists to virtually guarantee an anomaly somewhere there will always be something that somebody looking for a conspiracy will be able to latch onto and tout as 'proof'. Visit the average conspiracist website or read any conspiracist book and the reader will inevitably be swamped by an enormous mass of information, data, quotes, witness statements etc. Yet stacking all of these little pieces together does not collectively make them stronger, they are still merely anomalies rather than concrete evidence.
Starting with a goal in mind also distorts the interpretation of evidence. "Consistent with..." is not the same as "evidence of..." For an example of how this works consider the videos freely available on the internet showing close-up shot of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. When zoomed-in these videos appear to show some people being blown out from the windows of the tower. There is little to argue about here; the extraordinary footage clearly shows this horrifying fact. However, the argument comes when trying to interpret what is going on. Conspiracy advocates claim this as evidence of explosives being placed in the buildings to bring them down deliberately. How else, they ask, could people possibly be blown bodily out of office windows unless by explosives? The reply comes from those with knowledge of the effects of large fires in buildings; fires can create huge differences in air pressures in buildings - the famous "Backdraft" (where oxygen is suddenly re-introduced into a space by the opening of a door or window, creating a dangerous flash fire) is one of these effects - in a building as large as a WTC tower with such a powerful fire burning such a pressure could build up that could easily blow a person out of a window, no explosives required.
This shows that even a rational, thorough researcher can come up with erroneous theories if they don't weigh up all the evidence fairly. Most conspiracy theories are emphatically sure of their theories because they were arrived at in a rational way, but starting from a biased perspective. In fact they often accuse their detractors of having the same problem. In their mind they are the ones thinking critically and asking the difficult questions and the rest of us are the uncritical believers, blindly going along with whatever the government or big business tells us. They consider themselves the 'scientific' thinkers, because they are questioning the status-quo, picking things apart and trying to find what is 'really' going on.
One of the most consistently surprising things about die-hard conspiracists is how frequently they are concerned by *exactly* the same problems as the skeptics who endeavour to debunk their theories. On message board after message board completely crackpot suggestions and ideas sit side by side with discussions that would not be out of place on a skeptical forum. Just as the skeptics ponder how so many conspiracy believers can be so credulous, the believers wonder how the general public can be credulous about the 'lies' they have 'been sold'.
Most conspiracists clearly know their stuff and have worked hard to amass their evidence and build their theories. The problem is that the conspiracist has frequently invested far too much time and emotion to be truly objective and rational. Self reinforcement and 'confirmation' bias extends to filtering out contradictory views. An author who has spent decades researching a particular historical event and constructing elaborate stories of conspiracy is not about to objectively examine all the evidence they have found and decide that they are mistaken and there is nothing to see. Humans are remarkably stubborn when it comes to changing our minds and with any historical event there is usually far too much information out there for the conspiracist to collect, ruminate on, and use to paint into elaborate theories, for them to ever change their minds
---- Cherry Picking
It could be that we are hard wired to have a skewed perspective. Just as we evolved caution to kept us alive through the millenia, so we developed a facility to learn by remembering things that seemed important and discarding those that did not. Nobody has the capacity to see the world completely objectively - we see what is relevant to us, whether it is the procedures at a job, the names of friends, or revising the key points in a textbook for exams. This is 'confirmation bias', remembering the hits and not the misses, or "cherry picking".
The upshot of this is that the conspiracy theory forms as a subjective view of the world rather than an objective end product of the study of the available facts. This is why such theories can frequently seem so blinkered to the impartial observer but perfectly rational to their proponents. Just as we may remember one particularly memorable person we saw during the day and forget all of the others, so a theory will focus in on one or two anomalous witness statements that contend something 'strange' was going on, while disregarding the hundreds of other witnesses who said no such thing. With thousands of bits of data to ponder over, with some anomalies and contradictions, almost any theory can be made to 'fit' the data.
---- Story Telling
It isn't just confirmation bias on it's own that creates a distorted view of reality; there is also our need to create a story. We all all natural born story tellers, it is how we usually communicate complicated information, experiences and knowledge. Stories are not abstract, they need causes and effects and internal logic, and they are usually simplified to improve comprehension for the listener. This is fine for casual anecdotes and for fiction writers but it creates a problem when trying to understand real world events, a place that frequently does not conform to expectations formed by the consumption of movies, novels and television dramas. In the real world things happen at random often without clear causes and emotionally satisfying conclusions.
It is often said that conspiracy theories are so popular because they are better, more *juicy*, stories than often mundane truth, and there is something to this, but perhaps more importantly conspiracies also thrive because they are perceived as the more ''plausible'' story. Consider any major assassination: What seems more likely to our story-telling, narrative-seeking minds; that a lone gunman can hit a world leader, with all of their security arrangements - bodyguards, secret agents, armed protection, bullet-proof cars etc. Or that somebody on the 'inside' somebody who can circumvent all the security, is the culprit? The latter option simply sounds more ''likely''; it is easier to understand and there is an obvious chain of cause and effect. Psychologist like the use the phrase 'agency detection' for this way of thinking - we latch on to the 'agent' - in this case a mysterious 'insider' - whose actions provide the trigger for all subsequent actions.
The lone gunman story relies on contingencies, chances, and blind luck, and how many fictional stories or anecdotes revolve around contingencies, chances and blind luck? How often do people recount a story about something they did at the weekend without a clear subject or a punchline? How many movies end with the hero being shot dead out of the blue by a stranger for no reason? Some do - ironically enough they are usually referred to as more 'avant-garde' offerings despite being somewhat authentic to the real world.
The fact is that we are not very good at understanding probabilities. Conspiracy theories may often seem like the more plausible story but that is only because we so frequently fail to take into account the fact that highly improbable things are bound to happen every day. The most commonly-cited paranormal example of this is the so called 'psychic connection' phenomenon where people report thinking or dreaming about a person and finding out soon after that they died at that exact moment. For an individual person this is an extremely improbable event, but in a population group of hundreds of millions of people it is bound to happen to at least a few hundred people a year. Lotteries are another example of this; individual odds are astronomical but the chance that the prize will be won is nearly 1 in 1. Apply the same thinking to conspiracies and suddenly the 'lone gunman' doesn't seem so unlikely. The chance that somebody in the crowd will try to assassinate a politician on any given day is very small, but ask the same question of the politician's entire career and suddenly the odds shorten considerably.
The facts bear this out: Several American presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) have been assassinated by a single gunman with a grievance (although Lincoln's death was planned by a conspiracy of men- as mentioned before conspiracies ''do'' happen), and several others (Teddy Roosevelt, FD Roosevelt, Ford, Reagan) were shot-at by would-assassins who missed the target. Terrorist groups have been involved in countless hijackings of large airliners, and several simultaneous hijackings had taken place before 9/11. There had been thwarted attempts to commandeer planes by individuals bent on a destructive suicide mission, and in California in 1987 at least one example of a somebody who did succeed in overpowering the pilots and crashing an airliner. Strangely enough, this was (almost) an 'inside job' - the perpetrator was a disgruntled ex-airline employee, circumventing security with his credentials. The lesson of course is always to consider the evidence on it's own terms without applying 'gut' feelings to the situation. Unfortunately the 'evidence' isn't always easily forthcoming.
---- Unknowns
In history there will always be many unknowns to ponder, and the unknown is the fuel for the conspiracy fire. Anybody who questions the conspiracy theory will almost inevitably be met with the familiar retort; "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", or 'just because we can't prove it happened doesn't mean you can prove it didn't happen'. This maxim is the backbone of most conspiracies because it is impossible to argue against. No matter how hard the disbeliever tries, they can never conclusively eliminate absolutely every possible alternate theory or answer every question. Some questions by their very nature are perfectly valid but impossible to answer. For example JFK conspiracists will challenge skeptics to explain the motives of Lee Oswald; why, they ask, if Oswald was so keen to assassinate the President why did he not confess when caught? A good question, but sadly as Oswald was himself shot before a trial the answer is forever unknowable to us.
The admonition that 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence' matters only if the opponent is arguing that the absence of evidence is proof that there never can be any evidence in the future. 'They laughed at Galileo', 'They laughed at Copernicus', 'They laughed at the Wright Brothers' claim those promoting tenuous theories. And indeed they may have done, but over time for those people the absence of evidence became the abundance of evidence, the laughter stopped, and the naysayers faded away. Just as alternative medicine becomes simply 'medicine' if it is proven to work, then a conspiracy theory becomes a conspiracy fact if there is enough proof.
A prime example of conspiracies springing from a paucity of evidence is matter of the Shakespeare authorship question. For all that William Shakespeare is the most famous of English language playwrights we know very little about the man himself beyond a few legal documents in the British national archives. We have a few likenesses of the man, but cannot be certain how accurate any of them are. There are no original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays, no personal journals or notes, no other works in Shakespeare's hand. All that connects us to Shakespeare's work is the First Folio posthumously compiled by his colleagues Hemings and Condall, and the contemporary published versions of his sonnets. Naturally all of this uncertainly leads to speculation. Did this mysterious 'Shakespeare' character really write the plays? Perhaps the name was a pseudonym for someone who could not reveal their identity. A nobleman perhaps, or maybe even a noblewoman?
While this is all very interesting it doesn't alter the fact that while there is very little evidence for Shakespeare there is zero evidence for anybody else being Shakespeare. And while there is little evidence for Shakespeare there is still some evidence, and some of it is quite strong. For example contemporary records of the Royal court name Shakespeare as author of several of his plays, a pretty unimpeachable source of information. The diaries of other contemporaries mention Shakespeare as playwright. Fellow playwright Ben Jonson wrote a eulogy praising his talent - a strange thing to do for somebody who didn't exist. Unless more evidence is unearthed the default position of historians, experts and school textbooks remains that Shakespeare was the author, just as Oswald was the shooter of President Kennedy, 9/11 was an act by 19 terrorists and TWA flight 800 was an accident.
---- Bias
Then there is the question of bias, be it political, personal, or ideological bias. Nobody in the world is exempt from bias. Everybody plays favourites; from favoured political ideals to our favourite movie stars, we are all inclined to view some people and ideas more favourably than others. Even the most resolutely skeptical historian cannot claim that there aren't a few conspiracy theories or salacious rumours that deep in their heart they would *like* to be found true, even if their rational head knows that is unlikely to happen. For those less grounded in rationality the effect of bias is obvious. Many ardent conservative right-wingers in America are "Birthers" because they ''want'' Barack Obama to be found ineligible for the Presidency. On the other end of the spectrum the leftists think George W Bush had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks because they ''want'' Bush to held accountable for what they percive to be war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When emotions run high the chances of a rational impartial skeptical inquiry rapidly flies out of the window.
Curiosity is driven by desire and passion - be it the passion for knowledge or the desire to become emotionally or physically closer to a subject. This powerful emotional force drives biographers to devote years of work to writing about a single individual, it leads UFO buffs to flock to small desert towns, leads millions to the gates of Elvis Presley's Graceland, JFK's grave at Arlington, Shakespeare's Stratford upon Avon, and many many more sacred grounds.
Just as conspiracies are fuelled by the great mysteries, so they gather around the great people. And the when mystery combines with importance and a cult of personality conspiracy theories are bound to follow. From JFK to RFK, MLK to Malcolm X, Princess Diana to Princess Grace, John Lennon to Kurt Cobain ... if they were powerful, important, talented, beautiful people whose deaths left more questions than answers then alternative histories are guaranteed. It is not hard to understand why; officially Marilyn Monroe died from an overdose of sleeping pills. ''Un''-officially she was murdered by CIA operatives on the orders of Bobby Kennedy. One of these stories is emotionally satisfying - one of the 20th century's most iconic, beautiful people was not so depressed that she committed suicide (or, even more unthinkably, *accidentally* killed herself) with a bottle of pills. Something, anything, else must have happened. Just as a charismatic political leader ''could not'' be killed by a nobody with a rifle, and Princesses don't die because they didn't put a seat belt on.
When celebrity is absent then political ideology can be a powerful force in it's own right, and will create martyrs out of ordinary folk and cause-celebres from mundane circumstances. Consider an unusual murder case from England; In 1984 a British pensioner called Hilda Murrell was found dead in woodland near her house. The house had been disturbed by an intruder but strangely nothing of value was missing. Witnesses reported seeing the elderly lady's car being driven erratically through nearby streets. The investigating police were confounded - there was no motive, few clues and no leads, and the case went cold. But soon the rumours began - Hilda Murrell had been a prominent campaigner against nuclear weapons, and her son had been a senior officer on board the British submarine that infamously sank the Argentine cruiser ''General Belgrano'' outside an exclusion zone during the 1982 Falklands war, an international incident that presented one of the few potential problems in the facade of Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher's government.
In the following years the consensus of most of the left-leaning, anti-government, anti-nuclear, anti-Thatcher intelligensia was that Hilda Murrell had been 'silenced' in a botched surveillance mission by MI-6 operatives. In the absence of any other evidence those sympathetic to ideals that Hilda Murrell stood for formed their own satisfactory answer. Then, twenty years after the murder, police arrested a local man who had been a teenager in 1984. Samples of genetic material saved from the cottage and the body were tested for a DNA profile (technology unavailable to police in 1984) and a match was made. The suspect was found guilty of murder and jailed. There had been no conspiracy, no MI-6 operatives, no government cover-up. Merely a disturbed teenager who broke into a random cottage and panicked when confronted by the owner. Still, despite the conviction, Hilda Murrell's son refused to believe the 'official' story and stuck by his opinion that MI-6 and the government *had* to be in on it somehow.
Time and again conspiracy theories come back to the all-pervading enemy:'The Government'. The Government is the easiest of targets. Every day will carry news of government mistakes, corruption and downright lies. Mistrust of government is an enormous driving force behind conspiracies - the skeptical voice is inevitably met by tides of dismissive, almost condescending voices decrying the naivety of anybody who doubts the limitless power and total moral bankruptcy of 'The Government'. Undoubtedly governments around the world do little to dispel the cynical opinion of them, but all too often conspiracy theories are built on a shaky foundation of guilt by association rather than solid evidence.
September 11th conspiracies provide the most prominent example of politicians being tried and convicted by popular opinion based on their various other indiscretions. The presidency of George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008 was marked by three enormously contentious controversies. The initial election in 2000 was one of the most messy events in American electoral history. Bush won over Al Gore but only after a Supreme Court ruling that stopped recounts in the key swing state in Florida. Then after the 9/11 attacks came the US military invasion of Afghanistan, an invasion made without the consent of the United Nations Security Council and an act of questionable legality. Thirdly came the invasion of Iraq; a second potentially illegal invasion predicated on a threat that the country supposedly possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction despite the complete lack of any evidence of this. In light of these abuses of Presidential and governmental power the leap that 9/11 'Truther's' make to accuse the Bush administration of being at best complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen, and at worst of planning and executing the entire attack seems to be a very small one.
To more easily understand the logical problems involved with Guilt By Association it helps to consider the accusations that conspiracy theorists make in the context of a legal case. Convicting the Bush Administration of planning 9/11 because they have been involved in other crimes is logically no different to convicting a defendant of murder because they already have another conviction for murdering someone else. In the same vein the classic conspiracist tactic of suggesting that the lack of evidence of a conspiracy is evidence of the sheer overarching power of the Government to cover up their actions is equivalent to convicting a defendant of murder because the complete lack of evidence proves how well they executed the murder. The legal system requires positive evidence for a murder conviction, and for 9/11 conspiracies to be accepted would require some hard evidence too, not just pointing fingers at other government scandals.
---- Evidence
So what about the rest of us, the people without vested interests. What reels in the fence sitters to believing in the conspiracy? Put simply we are not, and cannot be, experts in everything. Most of us can only claim to be experts of a few subjects, for the rest we are ignorant. "Ignorance" is a word with a pejorative flavour to it, but it is the only word to describe how many people come to believe in conspiracies. But it is not ignorance of the world, ignorance of people, ignorance of world affairs or in any sense a consequence of lack of general education or a sign of stupidity. It is ignorance of ''details''. It usually takes experts to take a stand and dismantle conspiracy theories because specialised expertise is needed to understand and explain the flaws in the theory. Without it then it is hardly unreasonable to draw a conclusion of conspiracy if one honestly thinks that is what the evidence suggests.
The Moon Landing Hoax is a perfect example of a theory that has been formed around lack of knowledge, misunderstandings, and the following of received wisdom over the laws of physics. At first glance the idea that NASA somehow faked the Apollo moon missions between 1968 and 1972 seems absurd yet the contentious points raised by theorists are superficially intriguing. Why, if the astronauts are on the moon are there no stars in the photos? Why is there no blast crater under the lunar lander? What about the solar radiation in space that would've cooked the astronauts? How could the American flag planted on the moon wave as if in a breeze? To the expert they are all easily explained and the idea that anybody would use them as a basis for a conspiracy is laughable, but all of these questions seem reasonable to the lay person without much knowledge of the moon and space exploration. It takes specific insight to understand why they are not contentious issues at all.
Our 'common sense' tells us that if we can see stars in the night sky then we should see stars in photographs, but we forget that our cameras work differently from our eyes. Even on the moon, stars are far too dim to be picked up by relatively short photographic exposures. We are used to living on a world with an atmosphere, but the moon has no atmosphere. When the lunar lander touched down it left no blast crater because there were no air currents to 'blast' a crater, merely the small interactions between dust particles directly hitting each other. Solar radiation is indeed a problem ''in a long exposure'', the Apollo craft was only briefly exposed to danger and part of the flight plan was to orient the ship to place the spaceship's fuel tanks as a 'buffer' between the crew and the solar radiation if an unexpected solar flare arose. The flag was in fact ''designed'' to look as if it were flying by being hung from an L shaped frame. It moved when the astronauts touched it, but at no other moment did it move even when astronauts walked right past it. There are many other examples of things that suggest strongly the astronauts are indeed on the moon; the perfect parabolic arcs of dust rising from the wheels of the lunar rover being a prime example.
Movies and TV must share some of the blame for propagating the misconceptions that lead conspiracies to flourish in the general consciousness. Firearms are an essential element of most action movies and cop shows yet few people know much about the mechanics of how they work. This ignorance has been a huge driver in the continued existence of JFK assassination conspiracies. When the Zapruder film of the assassination was first shown to the American public on a television talk show in 1974 the initial reaction of the host (Geraldo Rivera) to the violent backwards motion of Kennedy's head at the fatal shot reflected most people's reaction; Kennedy was shot from the front. Ergo; the official story was wrong. We expect people to fly backwards away from their shooter because that is what happens in movies. But in movies people are not being shot, they are jumping backwards while an explosive squib on their front pops. To a physicist the backwards motion in the film is perfectly consistent with a shot from behind; it is Newton's third law at work. The huge exit wound creates a recoil in the head, which moves back, towards the shooter.
Many conspiracy claims are easily refuted by simple experimentation. The Kennedy shot has been replicated by shooting head-sized grapefruits with a rifle and the fruit dutifully falls back towards the shot. Oliver Stone's movie 'JFK' contented that Lee Oswald could not possibly have reloaded his bolt action rifle in time to make all the shots. Many people have found a Mannlicher Carcano rifle and tried the task on the shooting range. The result? There is no problem at all, Oswald easily had enough time to make his shots. Unfortunately the videos of these experiments have barely a fraction of the viewers that Stone's blockbuster movie has had, although perhaps in a world of Youtube channels the balance may start to shift slightly in the future.
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