Are we certain it's not the other way around? Conspiracist world views could also be what leads to loneliness (because nobody wants to hang out with you).
Its probably somewhere in the middle - a feedback loop.
Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
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Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#12Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative. When you are interacting with people, there is pressure to conform to consensus reality, regardless of the merit of that reality. Anybody who goes against the grain, wether they are wrong, or correct and eventually vindicated, first has to face negative social pressure from their peers.
It comes across to most people as obvious and negative from the get go. They’re not antonyms.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#13During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild…
Which one?
That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#14During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild…
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Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#15it’s not that any specific conspiracy theories are wrong just that you had more free time to reflect on things and consider the nature of mankind
I think the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” and thus provide some modicum of validation for their existence. When you’re alone, you can also be as wild and wacky as you want because there’s no one to push back against it.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#16The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey.
To me, this says that lonely people probably have more time to reflect on the world. For example more social people don't have time to keep track of, say, the financial and electronic tracking systems that have been developed over the last 20 or so years. They really are quite frightening considering what the Nazis achieved in 1940s tech. The next industrial genocide may well be unprecedented. How alert people are to that fact is probably correlated to Q3.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps...
Saving people a click:
1...many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about.
2...politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions.
3...government agencies closely monitor all citizens.
4...events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities.
5...there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#17it’s not that any specific conspiracy theories are wrong just that you had more free time to reflect on things and consider the nature of mankind
I think the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” and thus provide some modicum of validation for their existence. When you’re alone, you can also be as wild and wacky as you want because there’s no one to push back against it.
> the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep”
It’s one deeper. It’s the anxiety of confronting the fact that nobody is in charge, there isn’t a secret cabal pulling the strings, it’s a bunch of competing, chaotic forces that you’re caught—somewhat meaninglessly—in the middle of.
Replacing that with a puppeteer, even a horrible one, is relieving. (The fact that inventing divine origins for natural phenomena—and cruel gods—is so well preserved across cultures extant and historic strikes at this being a need, not a comfort.)
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which one?
That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.
There's a minor industry doing that now. See r/metaverse_blockchain, where there's a new "memecoin" being hyped every day. Many are very similar. Some are clearly using the same template for their scams. Most of them forward their links through Linktree.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#19During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild…
Which one?
I fell into the lableak/fauci covering it up conspiracy theory
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#20The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey. To me, this says th…
That's a pretty awful poll. 3 is essentially a statement of fact, 5 is describing any "dark money" PAC, and 2 is a healthy skepticism of people who are asking to have enormous power over us.