This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.
Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
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Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#52Kind 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.
That's not really the mechanism at work here. Lonely people don't turn to conspiracy theorizing because they somehow happen upon "secret knowledge" that, in the absence of any external social pressures, spontaneously becomes apparent to them.
Rather, for these lonely people, conspiracy theories are how they project their own unmet emotional needs outward onto the perceived world around them -- as a coping strategy. They need to feel like they belong and are relevant in the world. This leads them to harbor resentment toward the rest of the world whom they perceive to be in league with an amorphous "them". The conspiracist's belief that he possesses "secret knowledge" about the world fulfills his needs for belonging and relevance by making him feel as if he is part of an in-group superior to the one he perceives to be alienating him[1].
But why do this through "secret knowledge"? Usually this is the conspiracy theorist's way of coping with some inexplicable world-changing event like 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the loss of their chosen political candidate in an election; they need to "know" why immediately, but cannot, and therefore move straight from the "thinking" stage (which requires holding uncertainty and multiple possible explanations) into the "knowing" stage (which is a kind of faith-based certainty about the world)[2][3].
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1. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000392.pd...
2. https://overcast.fm/+CuhudQ56w
3. https://psmag.com/social-justice/thinking-vs-knowing-when-fa...
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#53The 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…
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 fla…
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Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#54This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.
Reminds me of Spurious Correlations
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#55This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.
Would you mind citing any specific passage that you perceive to be "incredibly politicized"? Can you cite one of these "political judgments" from the paper?
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#56Loneliness 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 yo…
Social media exposure also facilitates the Illusory Truth effect, in which a lie repeated many times becomes perceived as truth.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#57[flagged]
I've never heard it claimed that there was no laptop. It is a question of provenance and whether the laptop somehow indicts Joe Biden. The claim was that Hunter Biden was getting paid millions and funneling it to Joe, and Joe in turn was pulling strings in Ukraine to protect his son and this money stream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
"A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 did not find wrongdoing by Joe Biden with regards to Ukraine and his son's business dealings there. Despite persistent allegations that the laptop contents indicated corruption by Joe Biden, a Republican House Oversight committee investigation in April 2024 also found no wrongdoing."
Despite that, certain media outlets continue to claim otherwise, and a large online community continue to believe it.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#58The 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…
> The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?"
Everyone here seems to be missing the 'essence' of the study and article. Do these conspiracy theorists influence global pandemic policy? Do flat earther conspiracy theorist affect global climate change policy?
That's what the article and the 'study' is ultimately implying. That lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers are controlling global policy.
Some think reptilians are controlling the world. Nature and these 'researchers' think that lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fla…
> 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. Yeah but you're basically describing ideologues here. This is how the vast majority of political activists approach the world where, last time I checked, parties even pretending to do things by scientific consensus are rare…
This is partly why I said science isn't truth. Science evolves. And the virus evolved.
I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some talk about herd immunity and what that means.
Another problem is that experts aren't always the greatest communicators and the science is hard to communicate.
Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
#60Kind 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.
Anecdotally in my experience, autistic people are a lot more likely to "not care" about social consequences and also more often think about or believe conspiracy theories. It's also not a bad thing to have some people believing in conspiracies, especially when the media/government decides that any stories about them are crazy conspiracies and everyone believes them.
Herd mentality means you share conspiracy theories with the herd, so they don't get recognized as conspiracy theories. Think Nazi Germany etc, that only gets recognized afterwards.
So you might identify more crazy stuff in autistic people who don't align with the herd, but if you sum up all the crazy stuff the herds thinks that is roughly on a similar level to an average autistic person, just that its all aligned in a thought bubble so people don't see it unless you look outside your bubble.
To illustrate, do you think a devout democrat feels an average autistic person or a republican believe in more dumb stuff? And vice versa. Regardless which of those sides are right it still adds up to a ton of crazy shit for the average herd.