The Guardian: Last week, US President Donald Trump gave a speech to his supporters in Florida that was very widely covered by all the media. However, on social networks, people practically did not discuss this event: the US president was overshadowed by a certain "QAnon", another conspiracy theorist, broadcasting about some far-fetched crimes, including child trafficking.
Conspiracy theories are misconceptions about the world, about society, about public policy. They are not something new, but today conspiracy theories occupy an unprecedented, colossal place in the media and social space. Moreover, not only in the United States.
According to a recent study by sociologists, two-thirds! of the people interviewed in the Middle East and North Africa are confident that the US is secretly helping ISIS (a terrorist organization banned in Russia), and in Hungary, an entire official prime minister tells people that the liberal Jewish financier George Soros is going to remove him from his post!
And there are many other false beliefs that, at times, can be monstrously destructive. For example, a very significant number of Americans believe that more than half of the federal budget goes to paying interest on the government debt. After all, this is complete nonsense! But how to deal with these schizophrenic judgments? How do you make people think differently?
However, there is still hope: political scientists have found that sometimes surprisingly simple interventions can be enough to force some people to reconsider and abandon wrong beliefs.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have silver bullets,” says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Dartmouth who specializes in studying misconceptions. “It's a complex phenomenon that challenges simple solutions.
Nihan says that for many years, the standard view among political scientists has been that it is very difficult to change someone's mind in the right direction. However, sociological experiments show the opposite.
For example, there is a widespread misconception among people that modern vaccines can harm a child's health, including such dire side effects as autism. Up to 13.8% of American parents think so.
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Nonetheless, Nyhan provided the study group with rigorous scientific evidence taken from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, where scientists explicitly denied the link between autism and vaccines. As a result of the experiment, the percentage of people who believed that "some vaccines cause autism in healthy children" dropped from 9% to 5%.
Similar studies are being carried out by a political scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Adam Berinsky, who came to the conclusion that false rumors should not only be refuted, but done regularly.
In 2012, Berinsky decided to see how many Americans believed that Barack Obama was born in the United States and how that number has changed over time. In early April 2011, 55% were sure that Barack Obama was born in America, 30% were not sure of this, and 15% believed that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore, according to the Constitution, is not the President of the United States. However, after Obama published his birth certificate, a large number of Americans again became convinced he was born in the United States. But again a year passed and everything became the same as before, that is, less than 60% of Americans believed that Obama was born in the United States.
“The fixes quickly disappear,” says Berinsky. "Therefore, you have to kill the same annoying fly many times."
Joan Miller, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, has also studied conspiracy theories for a long time. According to her, these theories have existed for a very long time, since the American War of Independence, when rumors spread among the people that, having won, the British would turn all Americans into slaves. However, today such things are spreading much faster thanks to social media and the Internet. And after the false ideas have spread, they are very difficult to destroy.
According to Miller, the best tactic for destroying conspiracy theories may not be to "attack the belief itself, but rather the reasons people believe in conspiracy theories." This could include working to build trust in government or addressing deeper issues. For example, conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 reflect people's subconscious fears for their safety. So, Miller says, people need to be motivated to believe the right thing, and fighting the motivation itself is a waste of time.
Editorial comment
The reasoning of Citizen Joan and her colleagues of political lukas is moving to tears. For example, to put all conspiracy theorists to shame on the subject of 9/11, it is enough to show at least one fragment of an aircraft that crashed from the Pentagon, but there are somehow no such fragments.
With vaccines, too, everything is solved very simply: it is enough to create a control group of children of all polytoluchs campaigning for vaccines, carry out immunization and see the result. But somehow there are no people willing to lie on the altar in the name of science.
However, these are all small details. The main thing is that the conspiracy theory becomes a problem for the officials.
Politolukhov can be understood. They, the poor, spend hours splashing saliva and slapping their lips, telling on TV how to understand this or that event, but no one listens to them and, as a result, the state values them less and less, which is reflected in the salary. But the problem itself is much broader, since the conspiracy theory extends far beyond politics and affects not only vaccines, but also various UFOs, "new technologies" imposed on people and even the shape of the Earth.
And now it is very likely that if political scientists take on the conspiracy theorists, Conspiracy Theory begins to annoy someone. Now, probably, for non-believers in 9/11, they will introduce some kind of article, which else, perhaps, can be somehow experienced. But, we are afraid, the tendency will spread and spread, after which disbelief in officials will be widely viewed as extremism.