Conspiracy theorists get a bad rap in popular culture, yet research has shown that most Americans believe conspiracy theories of some sort. Why then, if most of us believe conspiracies, do we generally think of conspiracy theorists as loony?
New research from the University of Illinois Chicago found that it’s because people are quite bad at identifying what is or isn’t a conspiracy theory when it’s something they believe. The finding held true whether people self-identified as being liberal or conservative. “Conspiracy blindness” became less pronounced when study participants took more time to consider whether something was a conspiracy theory, and when they were given a definition of conspiracy theories to consider. The research is published in PLOS One.
“A lot of people believe these things, but it just never occurs to them that they may be a conspiracy…
