Have deranged conspiracy theories actually exploded? The short answer: probably not.

This is cross-posted from my Substack.

“There’s been a massive explosion of deranged conspiracy theories. It’s because of social media / right wing populism / misinformation / [fill in your favorite explanation].”

This is a really common belief nowadays.

But is it true?

The answer is: probably not.

Roughly the same percentage of people believe in deranged conspiracy theories as ever. (More nuance and evidence below).

The reason it feels like there’s way more of it is probably due to:

Visibility surge. The news and social media covers this way more than in the past. QAnon awareness went 23% to 47% in 2020 while belief stayed at 15%.
Elite adoption. In the past it was mostly your weird uncle who believed in crazy conspiracy theories. Now he still does, but so do presidents and VPs, so we notice it more and it has more potential for harm.
Motivated perception. Believing the other side has “gone completely crazy” is a great way to demonize and dismiss your out-group.

Evidence that conspiracy theorists haven’t increased

First off, we have to define “conspiracy thinking”. After all, conspiracies do happen sometimes. Often, even. Psy ops, false flags, dark money, astroturfing, coverups, powerful people secretively coordinating, and many other things totally exist. Wondering if a certain event is influenced by any of these things might be happening is often reasonable.

However, the world is definitely not run by lizard men. And Hillary Clinton is definitely not running a child sex trafficking ring.

I decided to run the analysis on clearly deranged conspiracy thinking. Where I feel quite confident that they are simply not true and that the vast majority of smart, independent thinkers would agree.

At first I just did some basic research and found that some conspiracy theories were increasing, others decreasing, and others staying the same. But then I realized a critical flaw with this sort of research: conspiracy theories follow fads.

It would be a mistake to say “nobody believes in Jews poisoning wells anymore, therefore conspiracy thinking is going down.” Nobody’s alive anymore when that was a hot topic. Likewise, much fewer conspiracy theorists are going to believe in conspiracy theories about JFK, because if you were alive when he was assassinated, you’re over 62 years old. Nobody cares.

What people care about now is whether Hillary is a satanic pedophile. If those same people were around in the 80s, they’d be worried that daycares were filled with satanic pedophiles.

So I had to try to get an index of the most popular conspiracy theories controlling for era, then compare frequency of belief.

So for example, in the 90s, Diana’s death and a fake moon landing were common. In the 2010s it was more Obama is the antichrist and wasn’t born in America. In the 2020s it’s more Gates microchips and QAnon.

Here are the results, including confidence intervals:

The results are statistically indistinguishable, with admittedly wide error bars. The point estimates drift up by 2 percentage points per decade and that’s totally in keeping with noise and reporting error, etc.

(If you want more details as to how the research was done, check out this summary that Claude wrote. I’ve even had it write a guide for how to try to replicate the research, since I would love to nerd snipe somebody into doing a deeper dive into this.)

But this can’t be true, right? It certainly feels like it’s gone up. Which is an excellent observation. It does feel that way. But feelings can be wrong, and in fact, often are.

So what’s going on? Why does conspiracy thinking feel like it’s on the rise?

Trump believing in deranged conspiracy theories brought it to the fore

Trump is of dubious intellectual and ethical virtues, but he is superhumanly good at one thing: getting attention. And he brought attention to himself believing in deranged conspiracy theories like nobody’s business.

And then he started hiring people who also believed crazy things, and now, a substantial fraction of the high visibility elites in politics believe crazy things.

The news then covers this because it is genuinely concerning and newsworthy.

However, remember, all of these people held crazy beliefs before. We just weren’t paying as much or any attention to them because they didn’t have control over the nukes.

Two things can be true at the same time:

Conspiracy thinking is at about the same levels as it was before.
The consequences of conspiracy thinking are currently worse than they were before.

Hitler probably didn’t increase anti-semitism all that much (see this excellent book on how Germany was already incredibly anti-semitic). However, giving a raging anti-Semite dictatorial control over a rich industrialized country made the anti-semitic conspiracy theories much worse for its victims.

We are seeing way more of the conspiracy thinking that was always there because of the news and social media

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: paying attention to the news is not a virtue. It systematically shows you the worst, most enraging things that the other side does. It makes you feel more informed while actually deeply distorting your views that make you demonize your outgroup.

It’s called nutpicking. Instead of cherry picking evidence, you selectively show the craziest form of the other side (the “nuts”) and act as if they’re the whole side.

The right finds a video of a blue haired activist saying we should kill all white men and acts as if this is all the “woke”. The left finds a video of a neo-nazi saying we should kill all the black people and act as if this is all the “anti-woke”.

If you want to see something that really helps you internalize this, try playing this game. Don’t worry. If you are “not a gamer”—it’s ~5 minutes of play, it’s free, it plays on your browser, and it requires no reaction time. It is however, the best illustration I’ve ever seen how the news and social media focus on the worst of the other side. It influenced my mind far more than any blog post ever could because of how vivid and interactive she made it.

Go play it now. I’ll wait.

Great, now you get it. Remember this and if you want to actually be informed, read a book. Read the scientific publications. Actually proactively research a topic you think is important. Don’t just passively consume information created by corporations that are paid to keep you hooked.

We want to believe the out-group is bad

Why does the political out-group disagree with you? It can’t be that they have genuine disagreements that smart people can disagree on.

They’re the out-group.

If they disagree it’s because they’re evil and stupid / crazy.

Both sides do this all the time.

The right often says that the left is mentally ill. It’s been a trope in their political grab-bag for decades.

The left used to focus on how the right believed in crazy religious things, like creationism. Now the left focuses on the conspiracy theories the right believes in.

Here’s the original XKCD comic, back when the Democrats were freaking out about Republicans believing crazy religious things.

So part of the reason we feel like there’s more conspiracy thinking is because it’s become a way for the Democrats to dismiss and demonize the Republicans.

So there you have it. It’s not that there are more people believing in lizard people. It’s that one of the conspiracy theorists got the nuclear codes, the news built an industry covering him, and we just love hearing about the craziest people on the other side.

The crazy was always there. Now it’s just more noticeable.

This post was inspired by reading the amazing Conspicuous Cognition’s piece Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It To Us Good And Hard? I highly recommend it.