/lit/ - Literature

>>16727288
I am fascinated by the psychology of conspiratorial thinking. These days garish conspiracy theories run rampant, propagating without constraints through the internet. There are five components to conspiracy theory psychology. QAnon, which started as a larping shitpost on this very site, has now become an actual political current. It got me interested in how these things happen.

My investigations have brought me to the following conclusions.

1. Cognitive intolerance of ambiguity
2. The "intentional stance"
3. unrestricted, non-hierarchical, open ended (mis)information access online.
4. A desire to believe that one has insider knowlege, is "in on" the secret order of the world, and therefore important and distinguished from the "sheeple"
5. Distrust of conventional sources

These three are intimately related, and each of them revolve around the internet. Intolerance for ambiguity is an obvious enough trait. People hate not knowing, they loathe not having an explanation for what goes on. This abhorrence of mental voids, causes one to fill in the blank with one's own construction, connecting imaginary dots willy nilly in order to resolve the stress of having no answer.

The intentional stance is the tendency to view events as having been caused by an agency. We tend to think of many things as having a mind as the cause behind it, and this is the source of belief in gods and ghosts and other such fancies. When unexplained events happen, it's natural to want to attribute an intentional agency to it , even if it was just a chaotic, incidental event. Hence the illuminati, freemasons, secret satanic cults, etc.

The internet creates the dynamics where these paranoid belief systems can propagate without constraint. Conspiracies become vast, crowd sourced imaginative projects , collective hallucinations that are spun together through spontaneous, asynchronous online communications.

A big motive for conspiracy thinkers is that they are intellectually insecure. They wish to obtain secret, special knowlege which sets them apart from the ignorant and elevates them as the enlightened elect. The draw of conspiracy theories is that it gives you the feel that you're "drawing back the curtain" and piercing the veil into a world of covert evildoings or cunning plots.

Finally, it fits in with the conspiratorial mindset that mainstream, widely accepted explanations are part of the conspiracy, to delude and misguide the masses. Conspiracy theories thus become self-sustaining by strategically shutting out alternative, often valid sources of information that might disrupt their narratives.