Prominent conspiracy theorist Billy Te Kahika, pictured at a 2021 anti-lockdown protest in Auckland at which he was led away by police. Researchers have delved into what makes people adopt conspiracy beliefs. Photo / Dean Purcell
Prominent conspiracy theorist Billy Te Kahika, pictured at a 2021 anti-lockdown protest in Auckland at which he was led away by police. Researchers have delved into what makes people adopt conspiracy beliefs. Photo / Dean Purcell
Many Kiwis believe in some conspiracy theory – whether it’s that the All Blacks were poisoned on the eve of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, or that man never landed on the Moon
Studies show that it’s not the uneducated – nor is it the left or right of politics – that exclusively buy into these beliefs, but those with some unmet psychological need
Now, a team of researchers have delved into data tracking tens of thousands of Kiwis to learn more about the roots of conspiracy thinking
We all have those people in our lives who’ve bought into outlandish conspiracy theories, in an age where they thrive online. So what is it that tips people down the rabbit hole? Jamie Morton reports.
The workmate who believes Bill Gates wants to microchip us.
That Facebook friend who sharesposts about chem-trails and international plots being hatched by the financial elite.
Once, we might have dismissed such people as harmless, misguided eccentrics: but in today’s post-pandemic, post-truth landscape, conspiracy thinking is seemingly everywhere.
Unregulated, algorithm-powered social media platforms expose us to misinformation that spreads far more widely and quickly than fact-checked journalism.
Next year, the US will swear in a health secretary who’s espoused bogus ideas about vaccines, fluoridation, antidepressants and 5G technology, reflecting how conspiracy theories have now reached well beyond society’s fringes.
Misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines and health measures pushed Kiwis toward other conspiracy theories – including racist and violent ideologies. Photo / Warren Buckland
Those who believe them are often far from the tinfoil-hat-wearing crackpot of stereotype.
It might be your sister-in-law, a health worker suspicious of vaccines – or your engineer uncle, who thinks the scientific consensus on human-driven global warming is some elaborate scheme.
“It’s not as simple as saying people believe in conspiracies because they’re ‘uneducated or dumb’,” said Professor Marc Wilson, a psychologist at Victoria University.
Victoria University psychology researcher Professor Marc Wilson. Photo / NZ Herald
Rather, researchers have come to understand conspiracy thinking as complex and notoriously difficult to untangle – yet serves some underlying psychological need.
So what are those needs, exactly?
‘Meaning and belonging’
Conspiracy thinking has been a part of human societies for centuries, but academics have only recently begun to examine its psychological roots.
Two events in particular have shifted the ground: the Covid-19 pandemic, and before that, the advent of social media, enabling believers to link up with like-minded online communities.
“Social media platforms provide instant feedback, nudging content creators toward more sensational and conspiratorial material if it garners attention,” said Dr John Kerr, a senior research fellow at Otago University.
“[Prominent conspiracy theorist Billy Te Kahika’s] journey is a prime example of how these platforms can amplify conspiracy thinking, sometimes with financial incentives involved.”
Most of the claims surrounding Covid-19 originated from just a handful of influencers, with that incoming health secretary, Robert F Kennedy, among the most prominent.
Psychology researchers have long theorised it’s those who feel undervalued, disempowered, or disconnected from society who are most likely to be attracted to conspiracy theories.
Yet correlation is not causation. Does conspiracy thinking lead to those feelings? Or is it caused by them? There hasn’t been enough evidence to test this.
That’s where a just-published study, led by social psychology researcher Dr Elianne Albath of Switzerland’s University of Basel, offers important new insights.
It drew on data from more than 55,000 Kiwis, collected over four years through the longitudinal New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study.
The researchers focused on four core psychological needs: control, belonging, self-esteem and having meaning in life.
“When people feel devalued, that they don’t belong, that they don’t have a say, or that life is lacking meaning, they’re more likely to see gaps in the official story that can be filled by other explanations for important events,” Wilson explains.
“Does this sound like what we experienced at the height of Covid?”
The Covid-19 pandemic had a massive influence on conspiratorial thinking. Photo / Dean Purcell
The study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, added weight to many of these key assumptions – but also turned up other interesting findings.
One was that even subtle changes in how people perceive their control over events might significantly influence their likelihood of believing in conspiracy theories.
Another was that, when people reported higher levels of meaning in their lives, they weren’t less likely to embrace conspiracy thinking, but more likely to.
“While this effect was smaller than the one related to control it challenged the idea that only unmet needs drive conspiracy beliefs,” Albath says.
“It’s an exciting direction for future research.”
A further interesting takeaway: self-esteem didn’t appear to be strongly linked with conspiracy beliefs.
“This suggests that a common scapegoat in studies – low self-esteem – may actually have little to no impact on people’s actual tendency to believe in conspiracies,” said study co-author Dr Danny Osborne, of the University of Auckland.
New Zealand and conspiracy theories
While many of the psychological patterns observed in the study hold with global patterns, some conspiracy theories are uniquely Kiwi.
The best-known example that studies have repeatedly turned up?
That a mysterious waitress named Suzie poisoned the All Blacks’ food, allegedly at the behest of shady gambling forces, leading to their 1995 Rugby World Cup loss to South Africa.
At least a third of Kiwis remain convinced there was foul play – coach Laurie Mains went as far as hiring a private investigator – though most members of the team have publicly played down the notion.
Joel Stransky drops the winning goal for South Africa during the 1995 Rugby World Cup final.
Photo / Allsport
“Indeed, sports conspiracies seem to be enjoyed quite widely,” Kerr says.
“That’s likely because they are a convenient, low-stakes way of explaining why your team didn’t win.”
More troublingly, one in eight Kiwis falsely thinks the Government uses 1080 poison – crucial for protecting under-threat native wildlife from pest predators – as a nefarious means to control the food supply.
“And for just about any natural disaster in New Zealand – or indeed the world – someone will point at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project as the secret cause,” Kerr says.
Nearly one in 10 survey respondents believed the Christchurch earthquakes were linked to a US programme that studies the upper atmosphere but has been the subject of bizarre conspiracy theories about mind control and weather manipulation.
Local surveys also suggest nearly one in two Kiwis agree that major pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer to protect their profits but, more encouragingly, found virtually all rejected theories about Covid-19 vaccines containing microchips.
Other widely believed conspiracy theories well pre-date the Facebook era.
Earlier studies have suggested as many as one in six Kiwis think Nasa's moon landings were faked. Photo / Nasa
Broadly, Wilson says, most of us believe in at least one thing that might be considered a conspiracy – including some more debated theories, like those surrounding US President John F Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
“But it’s the 5% or so of us who believe in most, or all, of the conspiracies going that we regard as ‘conspiracy theorists’.”
They didn’t always stay that way: research shows people indeed sometimes do decide to reject conspiracy theories they earlier bought into.
For those wondering about how to talk a loved one out of conspiracy thinking, Wilson warned against one common mistake: telling them they’re gullible or foolish.
“That generally just ticks people off and makes them reactive in the opposite direction: address these underlying concerns, rather than targeting the symptoms.”
For educators and policymakers, Wilson emphasises the importance of ensuring people feel listened to – having control, after all, was a crucial factor highlighted by the new study.
He also points to emerging research on “pre-bunking” – alerting people to misinformation before they encounter it and giving them tools to critically assess claims.
For researchers, meanwhile, he says more data is still needed to understand how conspiracy beliefs develop, and how they might be countered effectively.
“We’ve identified statistically significant factors that contribute to conspiracy beliefs, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about why people believe what they do,” he says.
“We haven’t found the, ahem, smoking gun yet.”
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
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