Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

Dallas Texas, November 22^nd 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald takes aim and fires on the then president John F Kennedy, these shots would echo through the pages of history and conspiracy for decades to come. The Assassination of JFK is still widely debated, as many contemporary Americans refuse to believe the official story and instead choose to explore the alternate world of conspiracy theories. This blog aims to gain a greater understanding of the reasoning behind those suspicious minded individuals who devote themselves to conspiracy theories. I will be exploring three aspects of how someone may believe in a conspiracy: by connecting the dots, a willingness to believe and the big history.  

Connecting the dots:  Much of the evidence for conspiracy theories are built on small inconsistences and gaps in the main stream story, this coupled with the human mind’s incredible ability to discover and decipher complex patterns, leads us to the dot connecting theory for conspiracy theories.  The assassination of JFK is riddled with coincidences and inconsistences, which make it ripe for theorists. By creating an elaborate story founded on inconsistences, this does make conspiracy theories hard to disprove. In fact, by their very nature conspiracy theories are almost impossible to prove or disprove, as they are constructed using coincidences and inconsistences.

Willingness to believe: This camp falls into two; as there are those who find the official story boring and find it fun to speculate in conspiracy. The other camp are those theorists who believe any story apart from the official, even if these stories contradict each other. An example of this would be someone who believes that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in the assassination of JFK but this person also believes that JFK was not assassinated. These oxymoronic theories take the willingness to believe to a brand new level, and this level of conspiracy can be dangerous. Rob Brotherton in his book Suspicious minds posits the idea that the reason people chose to reject the official story is because they feel threatened by forces out of their control. Brotherton added that in the context of the JFK conspiracy, people who believed tended to feel more threatened by their own government.  

Big history: Proportionality bias is the theory that we believe a cause is greater or equal to the consequence.  For example, the death of a president must have a big cause. It is perfectly natural for humans to think this way; therefore, I would like to pose a thought experiment, as we compare the assassination of JFK with the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Of these two assassination attempts, one was successful and steeped in conspiracy, whereas the other was not and has very little to no conspiracy adjoined to it. What if it had been the other way around? What if Kennedy had lived and Reagan died? Would there be a grand conspiracy surrounding the Reagan assassination? Questions like these help us to think more deeply about why we believe the things that we do and why people might believe in a conspiracy theory.

To summarise, there are many reasons as to why a person might choose to believe in a conspiracy theory, as these theorise ultimately play into our natural ability of pattern finding. Moreover, as conspiracy theories are difficult to disprove they can attract those suspicious minded individuals who remain sceptical.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.   

 - Jack Cerullo :)