Whether it ’s hoi polloi think Hitler is actually alive and survive in Argentina , or the classic " JFK was killed by the CIA " guess , conspiracy theories are everywhere .
But what makes people think in them , rather than the Truth that Hitlerdefinitely died in 1945and JFK waskilled by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone ?
A new study from the Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research propose it ’s all down to how much you misunderstand probabilities , hate dubiousness , and want to find an explanation for unlikely upshot .
The subject , bring out inApplied Cognitive Psychology , involved a total of 2,254 participant and five experiment . In one of these experiment , the military volunteer were ask to read fictional news program stories involving a diarist having a heart attack . In different interlingual rendition , they were told that his doctor had intimate he either had a 1 percent , 25 percent , 50 percent , 75 pct , or 95 pct chance of have a heart onslaught , PsyPost reports . They werethen askedto pace how probable it was that the diarist had had a heart flack , or had been bump off .
When the fictional news paper state that a heart attack was unlikely , the participants were more likely to believe that the diarist was a dupe of murder . In a 2d experimentation , they were told that the journalist had lately reported on administration corruption . In this scenario , even more participants conceive that he had been murdered .
" The low the probability of an event , the strong participants embrace conspirative explanations , " the authors wrote in their study .
" Conspiratorial intellection , we conclude , potentially lay out a cognitive heuristic : A coping chemical mechanism for dubiousness . "
The research could explain conspiracies around deaths of public figure , such as the John F Kennedy assassination , where a lone gunman was able to kill a sitting chairwoman from an improbable distance .
" The results suggest that high - wallop scenarios as well as scenarios with absolved ulterior motif stimulate stronger belief in conspirative explanation , " the authors compose .
" A turn of cognitive biases are , in nub , errors in probabilistic thinking , and conspiratorial reasoning might typify just another such preconception . For model , we know that humans tend to have a difficult time with handling blue chance effect , peculiarly if the outcome in question have both low probability and mellow encroachment . "
The authors try that more work needs to be done to investigate the link further , though they ’re hopeful that it could be used to serve debunk conspiracy theories in time to come .
