Conspiracy theorists rarely believe they're actually conspiracy theorists.
Instead, we must look at their actions, especially how they orient themselves to genuine domain expertise and how they contend with refuting evidence.
This is a common pattern across many different forms of pseudoscience and conspiracism. I am most familiar with it through the lens of people who reject mainstream climate science and espouse debunked conspiracy theories about various scientists and aspects of climate science.
Despite there being no a priori tie between topics as diverse as the JFK assassination, evolution via natural selection, the events of 9/11, vaccine safety, the reality of human-driven climate change, or the Apollo moon landing, parallels abound due to similar cognitive pitfalls.
Some of the unifying themes can include:
- an event/topic with far-reaching societal implications
- access to special or secret Truths that the public ("sheeple") are ignorant or in denial about
- delegitimization of experts as part of the conspiracy or corrupt & untrustworthy
- elevation of pseudo-experts & fringe viewpoints over mainstream expert views
- a reversal of the standard burden of evidence, wherein the conspiracy is assumed to be true/likelier
- circular arguments, where an assumption of the conspiracy is used as evidence for itself
- while mainstream must contend with consilience of evidence, conspiracy relies on mutually inconsistent lines of "evidence" in support of underlying claim
- inability to cede existence of coincidence, mundane error, or malfeasance that do not support underlying conspiracy claim
- allusions/self reference to mavericks, heretics, past iconoclasts who purportedly proved everyone else wrong
- claims of persecution, censorship, gatekeeping by mainstream experts, media, or society
- citing existence of past conspiracies (real or imagined) as justification
- perhaps most importantly, inability to contend with contrary evidence in a normal way, including rejecting the evidence as further proof of conspiracy or expanding/complicating the scope of the conspiracy to explain how the contrary evidence does not refute the original claim
- avoidance of normal evidence/fora for empirical resolution of inquiry (scientific papers, conferences, formal investigations) in favor of things like quotes from media pieces or personal correspondence where context & rigor is frequently missing, meta-data, procedural "fouls"
- (to circle back to the beginning) a denial that one is advancing conspiracy theories, frequently by claiming one is Just Asking Questions, Demanding Balance, Who Is Against More Inquiry, etc
People shouldn't be embarrassed to align their views with experts' absent compelling reason to not, and they are always free to shift their views in accordance with changes in evidence:
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