Conspiratorial thinking

Along with cultural beliefs, dogmas, faith, and so on, vested interests can influence and motivate our thinking, and our beliefs can become invested with an emotional attachment. Views about Holocaust denial or that the universe was created within the last 6,000 years can be strongly held. As we have seen, rejecting a belief can often be harder to do than continuing to accept it and looking for evidence, however flimsy, to back it up. Avoidance of cognitive dissonance, motivated ignorance, and confirmation bias are examples of motivated cognition. As a result, we can end up being susceptible to selfdeception, wishful thinking, the rejection of science, or to a belief in conspiracy theories.

Bertrand Russell wrote, with a degree of hyperbole, that, 'The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed, the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately" (Russell, 1928, p. 3). He was referring to that class of opinions where there can be no obvious clear answer or where an idea has not yet been tested. It is perfectly possible to hold opinions with passion for which good grounds do exist. Some opinions may turn out to be true (then we have knowledge* rather than opinion) and others may be shown to be false (although that doesn't always stop people believing them).

If fake news and conspiracy theories get repeated often enough, then people will start to believe them despite mere repetition being an illogical basis for thinking that an assertion is true. From a political strategy website discussing ‘tools and tips for winning elections’, the main advice is 'repeat, repeat, repeat". Social media often tend to provide an echo chamber where fake news gets repeated. Thus, more than a quarter of US adults think the government is hiding aliens in Area 51. Just under a quarter think 9/11 was an inside job and that climate change is a hoax (YouGov survey January 2019; Inhofe, 2012). A fabricated story about a pizza restaurant being the centre of a Clinton campaign paedophile ring during the 2016 US presidential election was believed by 17% of Clinton supporters and 46% of Trump supporters. There are many internet blogs inveighing against vaccination and denying the science behind it. This science denial merges into a belief, for example, that climate science is a hoax: a conspiracy, presumably involving many tens of thousands of scientists around the world and millions of dodgy thermometers.

As mentioned in Chapter 7, most people do not prick up their ears and listen carefully when political ads appear on the media. Their attention is peripheral. However, if a phrase or epithet or idea is repeated often enough, then that will eventually be remembered. As a persuasive technique, repetition in an emotional speech, whether the assertions are true or dubious, can be very effective indeed. Martin Luther King Jr's repetition of ‘I have a dream' was effective for this reason. Stating something three times in this way seems to have the optimum rhetorical impact. Aesthetics, therefore, can have a strong role to play in techniques of persuasion because, as with the Keats effect, it seems to be easier for us to process the information when the form it takes is pleasing.

In 1977, Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino (1977) gave participants 60 plausible assertions at 2-week intervals about topics in geography, politics, science, sports, and so on. Some were true, such as, ‘lithium is the lightest of all metals’, and some were false such as, ‘it takes twice as much force to move a ton of freight by railroad as it does by truck'. Participants were asked to estimate their validity on a seven-point scale. A total of 20 of the first 60 statements were repeated in subsequent presentations. What they found was that the repeated statements significantly increased participants' belief in their validity whether they were true of false. This has come to be known as the illusory truth effect. Brashier, Eliseev, and Marsh (2020) found that initial fact checking protected people from the illusory truth effect but only if the person had relevant background knowledge to begin with. Furthermore, young people often needed a ‘nudge’ to check the validity of a statement whereas older people did so spontaneously (Brashier, Umanath, Cabeza, & Marsh, 2017).