Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Journalism 2014

Chapter 7: Conclusions

The facts, studies, and arguments reviewed in this thesis tend to support several broad conclusions:
1. Conspiracy theories, myths and other false beliefs have always been -- and will likely always be -- with us.
The general consensus of those who have spent time studying conspiracy theories and their believers is that they are not going away.
 Richard Hofstadter, whose book Anti-intellectualism in American Life was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1964, wrote in his seminal Harper’s essay: “This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture – it is no more than that – that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population.” He ended his essay with this wistful observation, “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.[1]
Author Jesse Walker, the books editor of Reason magazine, summed it up this way in his own 2013 book, The United States of Paranoia:
The conspiracy theorist will always be with us, because he will always be. We will never stop finding patterns. We will never stop spinning stories. We will always be capable of jumping to conclusions, particularly when dealing with other nations, factions, subcultures, or layers of the social hierarchy. And conspiracies, unlike many of the monsters that haunt our folklore, actually exist, so we won’t always be wrong to fear them.

Which leads to another fundamental conclusion of this research, namely:

2. Belief in conspiracies is not, in and of itself, irrational.
The predisposition to believe the worst about the government, the media, large corporations or other groups with vested interests is not necessarily a sign of irrational paranoia. It can often be a sign of healthy well-founded skepticism. Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine writing in Scientific American, notes:
Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, "Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.”[2]

3. What we think we know from history can be wrong.

Our beliefs are often viewed through the lens of what we believe has happened in the past. The common maxim, “History is written by the victors,” is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but quote researcher Ralph Keyes says it is actually an old idea given modern expression by many people, including Napoleon, Nehru, and Stalin.[3]
 A pithier and more cynical view of history is rendered by Ambrose Bierce in his classic Devil’s Dictionary: “History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”[4] But a more scholarly examination of “things we know that ain’t so,” is offered by American University Professor W. Joseph Campbell in his examination of what he labels, “ten of the great misreported stories in American journalism.” He blames not fringe conspiracy theorists for the persistence of many false beliefs, but mainstream news organizations and well-respected historians for perpetuating what he terms “media myths.” Campbell debunks what he calls “some of the most treasured stories in American journalism,” such as the belief that President Lyndon Johnson, after watching a broadcast by CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, experienced a sudden epiphany, saying, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”[5]
Media myths also tend to minimize or negate complexity in historical events and present simplistic and misleading interpretations instead. Edward Murrow no more took down Joseph McCarthy than Walter Cronkite swayed a president’s views about the war in Vietnam. Yet those and other media myths endure, in part because they are reductive: they offer unambiguous, easily remembered explanations of complex historic events.[6]

The corrosive effect of such false accounts of historic events is that they erode trust in what purports to be factual, accurate reporting. If the accepted view of history is wrong, how reliable is the accepted view of anything? And the media myths also tend to support negative stereotypes. Campbell cites what he labels “the widely misreported pandemic of crack babies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the exaggerated reports of violence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005” as two examples that falsely confirmed the “worst pathologies associated with inner-city poor people.”[7]
Those who do not remember history may be condemned to repeat it, as the adage goes, but those who misremember history are also at risk of learning the wrong lessons and perpetuating damaging stereotypes.

4. There can be honest disagreement about what is a fact and what constitutes truth.
Is Jesus the son of God? For many Christians this is a matter of faith, not subject to any scientific, evidence-based test. But a rational fact-driven argument can be constructed as well. Paul Little does a commendable job in his book Know Why You Believe.[8] And because the scientific method leaves room for doubt, and in fact encourages doubt and the search for disconfirming facts, it is by its nature a process that accommodates new ideas and concepts that may have at one time seemed unthinkable or improbable. All human knowledge is subject to revision if new facts or evidence emerge. There is a difference between what is “settled science,” and what may be an immutable law of the universe. Truths we hold to be “self-evident” may not always be true or self-evident.
5. Human nature is not predisposed to unemotional rationality.
In this thesis I have explored many ways we humans fool ourselves into thinking we are behaving rationally and acting logically when in fact we are not. I have examined how heuristics – the mental shortcuts that help us navigate life’s decisions without having to burden our brains with exhaustive analysis – also make us more likely to believe and accept false beliefs and faulty logic. And I have concluded that this is not necessarily a failing. We simply could not function if we had to do an exhaustive analysis before we adopted any belief. We trust our instincts and that mostly works for us. I do think that it can be very beneficial to attempt to be more cognizant of when we are relying more on intuition than reason. Just that increased understanding of the subconscious ways our brain fools us can improve our judgments and decision-making.
6. Efforts to correct false beliefs are often ineffective and sometimes counterproductive.
This paper also documents the strong emotional attachment we have to our beliefs. Satirist Stephen Colbert is widely credited with the tongue-in-cheek observation, “I'm not a fan of facts. You see, the facts can change, but my opinion will never change, no matter what the facts are.” I spent an inordinate amount of time searching for time and place Colbert originally made that comic riff, including scouring an entire book about his life, but never found the source.[9]  Maybe he never really said it. I cite it anyway because it so perfectly encapsulates our natural tendency toward cognitive dissonance. After reviewing hundreds of pages of research and dozens of books on the subject, if I had to distill the reasons we believe things that are not true, in defiance of all logic and reason, it would be this. “We believe untruths mostly because we want to.”
7. It’s complicated.
Some subjects are just very complex and difficult to understand, and not just for the layman. Some may require special knowledge in areas such as science, mathematics, medicine, or even history. And we all have gaps in our knowledge. We simply can’t know everything there is to know about everything. The result is we may defer to experts, who themselves can be confused, or more often just rely on our instincts, which the research shows can mislead us in myriad ways.

What’s the Answer?


There are essentially two areas of pursuit when it comes to correcting false beliefs: debunking the purveyors and/or convincing the believers. It may seem, at first blush, that the two areas are in fact the same. That is to say that the first goal, “debunking the purveyors,” is simply a means of achieving the second goal, “convincing the believers.”
But they are in fact two very different things. If someone is spreading a false rumor about you, you can try to get the gossipmonger to stop, or you can try to convince people the rumor is untrue.
As we have seen when it comes to the false narrative about the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, efforts to dissuade the purveyors of the misinformation ultimately proved fruitless. To the extent there was any success in containing the spread of the Pentagon attack “inside job” conspiracy theory, it came not from curbing the selling of the story, but from discouraging the buying of it.
Simply offering an alternative product – in the form of a higher-quality, more authoritative, better-reasoned, fact-based account – also had limited effectiveness among those who were predisposed to accept the false account.
In his book, On Rumors, Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein posits – for the sake of argument – that society could be thought of as consisting of two groups: the “sensibles and the unreasonables.” Both groups, he argues, are likely to process information in a biased manner, accepting those materials that fortify what they thought before and rejecting those that contradict their original views as “implausible, incoherent, ill-motivated, and probably a bit crazy.”[10]
Sunstein cites two factors in the biased assimilation of information: strong prior belief and skewed trust, and he cited the research of Kahan, et al in asserting: “If you want to move people away from their prior convictions, it is best not to present them with the opinions of their usual adversaries, whom they can dismiss, but instead the views of people with whom they can closely identify.” [11]
So while Thomas Patterson argues in Informing the News the solution is training better journalists and giving them a more solid grasp of their subject matter, and a knowledge of using knowledge, I would argue that the solution, to the extent there is one, is to expand that argument to education as a whole.
A more savvy news and information consumer is the best defense again the flim-flam artists peddling pseudo facts to an all-too-gullible public. One can marshal all the facts, logics and reason in the world, but a closed mind will remain an impenetrable barrier.
Researchers Green and Donahue recognized this factor in their study of the effect of corrective information on people exposed to fictional narratives. For the new facts to change beliefs, the subjects had to be open to the information, as well as have the thinking and reasoning skills that would allow them to properly process the information. “People also have to possess certain qualities of mind: critical reasoning skills essential to drawing valid inferences from evidence; a faculty of cognitive perception calibrated to discerning when a problem demands such reasoning; and the intrinsic motivation to perform the effortful information processing such analytical tasks entail.” [12]
In 2012, Charles Negy, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Central Florida, encountered what he considered a deficit in critical thinking skills in his Cross-Cultural Psychology lecture class of almost 500 students. The issue arose when a small number of Christian students asserted their religious views to be the “most valid,” and when one student urged others not to engage in an exchange of ideas because presumably the validity of Christianity is not debatable, it was more than Professor Negy could stand.
After the class, Negy composed an email he students decrying what he labeled as “let's just put our fingers in our ears so we will not hear what we disagree with,” “anti-intellectualism,” and “religious bigotry,” and in particular the unwillingness of college students to seriously consider other points of view.  “Some students,” he wrote, “erroneously believe a university is just an extension of high school, where students are spoon-fed ‘soft’ topics and dilemmas to confront, regurgitate the ‘right’ answers on exams (right answers as deemed by the instructor or a textbook).”[13]
Negy’s email went on to explain that the purpose of a university, and his course in particular, is to struggle intellectually with some of life's most difficult topics, while noting “it is not the case that all views are equally valid; some views are more defensible than others:”
Critical thinking is a skill that develops over time. Independent thinking does not occur overnight. Critical thinkers are open to having their cherished beliefs challenged, and must learn how to “defend” their views based on evidence or logic, rather than simply “pounding their chest” and merely proclaiming that their views are “valid.” One characteristic of the critical, independent thinker is being able to recognize fantasy versus reality; to recognize the difference between personal beliefs which are nothing more than personal beliefs, versus views that are grounded in evidence, or which have no evidence.[14]

The body of research on false beliefs and magical thinking firmly demonstrates that they’re not a manifestation of ignorance or psychological problems. Rather they are a normal and common part of our psychology, a coping mechanism for humans to process and understand a world that can seem disordered and even sinister.
In his book, Believing in Magic, Connecticut College psychology professor Stuart Vyse argues, “Without making criminals out of believers, we must adopt policies that encourage people to choose reason over unreason. We must provide alternate methods of coping with life’s uncertainties, and promote other more rational systems of belief.” But he concedes, “It will not be an easy task.”[15]
Professor Vyse teaches a class that I would think should be required at all universities, in all disciplines. It is a freshman seminar called “Psychology and Critical Thinking,” and he describes it as basically “how to tell a good argument from a bad one.” His assigned reading is an essay by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, in which the 19th Century pragmatist outlines four basic ways of attaining knowledge: tenacity, authority, a priori, and the scientific method.[16]
Vyse argues tenacity – holding onto an idea because of “stubborn loyalty” is the poorest source of knowledge. Authority is not much better, he says, because authorities are often wrong, especially when they “resort to their powerful status as support for the validity of their ideas.”[17] A priori is essentially our intuitive sense: something that makes sense or seems to fit. Earlier in this thesis, I outlined the shortcomings of relying on intuition over reason, and why it is prone to error. Finally is the “scientific method,” which Vyse actually divides into two methods, “empiricism” and “rationalism.”[18]
It would take another thesis entirely to explore the ways scientific methods differ and how the self-correcting process of scientific inquiry can result in theories that are modified or discarded over time.
But Vyse makes the overarching case, that I would make as well, namely that it is important to teach the skills of critical thinking early, not waiting until students get to college, but rather beginning in elementary school.
Students could be taught to evaluate the authorities they encounter on television and elsewhere. They can learn how to determine whether the views of the authority are based on empirical inquiry (good) personal experience (not so good) or yet another authority (bad). Does the authority attempt to convince her audience by an appeal to the evidence or to her personal status and power? Does the authority have a vested interest in a particular view? What is the quality of the evidence given?[19]

I would suggest journalists seeking to find and further the truth, as well as engaged citizens at every level, would do well to ask and answer those questions.
This thesis took me on a journey of inquiry that over a period of several years circled back close to where I started, when finding myself at the center of a conspiracy theory, I wondered: how could so many smart people believe dumb things? I thought then, as I think now: We all have to learn to think more critically, except now I have a much better understanding of how challenging that can be, and why for some people it is not likely to happen.
I have concluded from my research and from my personal experiences as detailed in this thesis that there is no quick fix, no antidote to human nature and all its cognitive errors, no way to marshal facts, logic and reason that can’t and won’t be met with pseudo-facts, faulty logic, and emotion.  But that does not mean it is not a fight worth fighting.



[1] Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” Harper’s Magazine. November 1964. http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
[2] Michael Shermer, “Paranoia Strikes Deep” Scientific American, September 2009, Vol. 301, Issue 3.
[3] Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006), 90.

[4] Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911 p.57), as cited by Leonard Roy Frank, Random House Webster’s Quotationary, (New York: Random House, 1999).
[5] W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Berkley: University of California Press, 2010), 5.
[6] Ibid, 4.

[7] Ibid, 5.
[8] Paul E. Little, Know Why You Believe (Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1971).
[9] Lisa Rogak, And Nothing But the Truthiness: The Rise (And Further Rise) of Stephen Colbert (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011).
[10] Sunstein, On Rumors, 51.
[11] Ibid, 52.
[12] Melanie Green, and John K. Donahue, "Persistence of Belief Change in the Face of Deception: The Effect of Factual Stories Revealed to Be False," Media Psychology 2011, no. 3: 312-331.
[13]Charles Negy, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Central Florida, email to students, Huffington Post, Aug 16, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/16/charles-negy-reddit-letter-to-students_n_1789406.html
[14] Ibid.
[15] Stuart Vyse, Believing in Magic, The Psychology of Superstition, Updated Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 255.
[16] Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly, November 12, 1877), 1-15. http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
[17] Vyse, Believing in Magic, 256.
[18] Ibid, 255.
[19] Ibid.