Who is susceptible to conspiracy theories about health, and why?
Caption: A “Q Anon” chart that a childhood friend sent me in July 2020, insisting that it “explains everything.”
Recently I wrote a twitter thread about an argument that had taken place on another social media platform. The thread sank like a stone, so I’ve reworked it and am plunking it here for posterity, in case anyone is ever curious about how a post regarding eating worms when you’re allergic to mammalian meat can quickly devolve into two groups of people arguing over whether Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are trying to force country folk to move to cities, and whether climate change is a hoax of the political left (two topics that don’t especially mesh well, if you think about it, given that urban areas tend to be about 10 degrees warmer than rural ones).
I was scrolling through a Facebook group about cooking for people with alpha-gal syndrome (a tick borne allergy to meat), and happened across a post about preparing and eating earthworms. I clicked into the comments section because I was intrigued by the large number of people weighing in; did they all have night-crawler recipes? What I found was a long series of comments in support of a “conspiracy theory” that AGS is being intentionally spread by Fauci and Gates (who apparently want us to eat worms, according to one person).
This led me to ponder that age-old question: “why on Earth would people think that?”
I never studied conspiracy theories or theorists professionally, but we did deal with a fair amount of conspiratorial thinking in the early years of HIV intervention. I’ve certainly seen this type of reasoning before.
What I was really wondering, as I scrolled through the comments about the government trying to infect everyone with a tick-borne allergy and get people to abandon country living, was what the neurocognitive associations between conspiratorial thinking & brain function might be. That’s not my field, so I did a quick search, which turned up little that’s new beyond this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10550632/ . But even this doesn’t really tell us much about how brain function might affect conspiratorial thinking, because causality is a tricky thing to parse, even in neuropsychology; what people think and do can affect the brain, just as the brain can affect what we think and do.
But there are many things we do know about the associations among conspiracy thinking, personality & the social/political environment. So here is a short laundry list of those things:
First, conspiracy theorists tend to have some particular individual characteristics. They’re often biased against outgroups, and are anti-government or suspicious of authority – though, interestingly, they’re not necessarily members of one particular political party versus another. When I politely asked, in the AGS group, that we refrain from discussing politics and stay on the topic of cooking around a meat allergy, several people immediately demonstrated this bias (revealing an “anyone not standing with us must be against us” assumption) as they accused me of being “jabbed” or having had “29 boosters.” One asked, “where is your biohazard suit?” even though I’ve never mentioned covid, vaccines, or any health condition except AGS in that group. But outgroups are suspect, and conspiracy theorists tend to lump together everyone who doesn’t support their views into one cohesive, homogeneous set of enemies. (The immediate interjection of more politics right after I had reminded folks of the no-politics policy was also likely an example of psychological reactance; basically, a belligerent “you don’t want politics? Well, here’s some more!” response to the perception that I was trying to control group members’ behavior. Note that the comment in the screenshot above saying “They want complete control!” is a good hint as to what was bugging them. There were also a number of “I’m not being political, YOU are,” comments that were pretty unhinged, given that my own comment had literally just asked people to refrain from interjecting politics, but this is at least characterologically consistent.)
Second, people who have low “perceived self-efficacy” (the belief people hold that they can control & change their environment and what affects them) are more likely to be conspiracy theorists. Likewise, so are those with low perceived political efficacy – who think their vote (or voting in general) doesn’t matter – though there’s likely some back-and-forth in causality, there. Donald Trump has pushed hard to get people to think that, before he came on the scene, they had no political power. In any case, it’s no surprise that the conspiracy proponents in the AGS group expressed worries about being controlled (which is to say, not having enough ability to direct their own lives and outcomes).
People who have more difficulty with information processing; critical and analytical thinking; scientific reasoning; and parsing cause and effect can also be easily derailed by conspiracy theories. When a situation or event is new (as AGS is, to many, or like covid was, in 2020), people have less prior knowledge to draw on to help form realistic conclusions. As an example of such reasoning challenges, when I noted in the group that AGS is increasing because the ticks that carry it are becoming more common in more places, one person immediately insisted ticks aren’t spreading (because, as the enemy, I must be selling untruths), but then he immediately noted in the very next sentence, “when I was diagnosed there were less than 3500 cases. I saw on a recent report there are 450,000 cases.” This statement (though not entirely factual) would seem to support the view that ticks are spreading, but this person’s disconnect wasn’t apparent to him.
When folks experience, or fear experiencing, personal harm (whether from AGS, HIV, or covid), they may also be motivated to find someone to blame & at whom to direct anger. Threats to health, well-being and one’s life can be especially triggering; often, the greater the health threat, the greater the anxiety. And if people can recall past abuses, they may assume that something similar is happening again, even in the absence of evidence in the current circumstance. When HIV first started spreading in the U.S., many people who could recall the abhorrently unethical Tuskegee syphilis study theorized that something similar was occuring with HIV, and so, that the government was deliberately planting the virus to eliminate people of color from the population.
This tendency to react from a place of fear is worse when things are in crisis or people don’t know what might happen next, as has been the case in the U.S. for some time. At such points, anxiety is especially likely to fuel irrational conspiracy beliefs. When the going gets tough, people think less clearly and get angry. Tribalism increases paranoia, which politicians on both sides of the aisle promote. Republican fear-stoking about immigrants hit a fever pitch with Donald Trump. Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Adams have been similarly characterizing mask wearers as “criminals” who mean to harm the public. Previous fear appeals stoke anxiety, which primes the public to believe additional conspiracies when they arise. It’s a downward spiral into paranoid delusion.
Proportionality bias can also lead folks to misattribute “big” problems to “big” causes. So in the case of the AGS worm eating thread, AGS was viewed as a result not of a small, natural occurrence (a tick bite) but of a deliberate plot to make people allergic to meat so they’d have to eat unsavory food, and also, according to one person, move from the country to “urban jungles” (for reasons unclear). We’ve seen similar conspiracies over the past few years that covid was deliberately released to harm one nation or another, though who people think did the evil deed depends on the country in which they reside.
For many conspiracy theorists, these views are socially motivated. Holding conspiratorial beliefs provides membership in communities in which folks get social support from like-minded people. Members also typically get affirmation of their intellectual prowess for having discovered superior “secret knowledge” that others don’t have; the friend who sent me the Q-anon chart above was convinced of her exceptional reasoning abilities in having “figured it all out,” despite the fact that she was probably the least cognitively complex person I knew, growing up. This validation from similar thinkers builds self- and social esteem, especially among the disenfranchised. Here’s a comment from the AGS thread that provides an example:
Due to the tremendous growth of social media, people now get most of their news from unvetted strangers. As a result, we have more access and exposure to conspiratorial beliefs than we used to (even when we aren’t seeking out fringe theories). People also have a greater ability to form connections and relationships with like-minded folks (even those in other countries, or on troll farms) who are all too happy to affirm both their inaccurate beliefs and the exceptional wisdom demonstrated by spreading those views. It was no surprise to me that the worm conversation (which wasn’t much about worms at all) triggered such a spin-out on Facebook, or that the group quickly split into two camps, each lauding their own reasoning abilities and personal character and denigrating those of the other “side.”
Eventually the Facebook thread seemed to be deleted (both I and others had reported it to group moderators for violating rules); at least, I can’t access it anymore. One of the last comments I saw was from a conspirator to someone (not me) trying fruitlessly to explain that science isn’t political This reply demonstrates how tribalism and fear of authority can lead to paranoia, which gives rise to whole sets of conspiracies that have no real-world connections, but are somehow tied together in people’s minds. Remember, the original conspiracy on the thread was that AGS is deliberately being caused by Fauci and Gates, rather than by ticks doing what ticks naturally do – but then it drifted, and everything that people had been told they should be for or against was fair game.
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