Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

Are you sure? The Conspiracy Theory Questionnaire is 38 questions but the CMQ is 5 questions. Today's HN link talked about the CMQ. And figure one lists 5 observed indicators which I took as a hint.

You can grep for "The 38 items administered in this study [dubbed the Conspir-acy Theory Questionnaire (CTQ) by Darwin et al., 2011] con-tained 33 items measuring the belief in specific conspiracy theoriesand five items assessing participants’ general tendency to believe inconspiracies or their conspiracy mentality. We refer to these latterfive items as the CMQ (see Appendix for complete item wording)." in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps... to see the context of what I'm going off.

Essentially the only thing this study is saying, without the social psychologists themselves realizing it, is that people who stick to their views despite a majority of their peers disagreeing with those views tend to be ostracized from social groups. Sometimes those views are false conspiracy theories, sometimes they’re reasoned skepticism, sometimes they’re pointing out uncomfortable truths. I would be more interested in studying how people are convinced to ostracize peers when their beliefs about something unrelated to their survival or day-to-day life are opposed to their own.

There isn't actually such a big difference between flat earthers and other conspiracy theories. The common theme is that it's the opposite of science or the scientific process.

Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is flat. The scientific process, to contrast, would drive you to try and falsify your theory via experimentation, and the flat earth theory is so easily falsifiable.

If you look at vaccines, or climates, or 9/11, or those guys that believe nobody was killed in some massacre, they all use the same sort of logic (or shall we say non-logic). Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.

It's not impossible to have conspiracies in the real world. But I'd say those are rare. The more people are involved the harder it is to keep a secret. There are also situations where the evidence isn't necessarily pointing overwhelmingly one way or another, and there is science that later gets refined or even overturned as more data/knowledge is acquired. Science isn't necessarily absolute truth, it's just the model that best explains the observable phenomena.

Loneliness and social media are are potent mix of self-reinforcing behavior.

Loneliness creates the conditions for greater social media use because social media is a pseudo-satisfier for real human connections.

Meanwhile, short form social media like twitter & tiktok mimics a schizophrenia-like experience of hearing many unrelated voices in quick succession. Social media use is also habitual and addictive, meaning you're not entirely in control as you keep scrolling for hours on end.

It's not a stretch to imagine that one consequence of this situation is to start seeing connections where there are none, which at the extremes is the root of conspiracy thinking. Making connections is also a form of regaining control, and when played out on social media is a way to feel like you're connected with others and part of something of consequence. Of course outside of devices, this conspiratorial slide further isolates you from society, and so the self-reinforcing spiral continues.

Bonus points if they don't ACTUALLY exist in the cartoon.