“We need consensus on when something is true and when it isn’t”

“We need consensus on when something is true and when it isn’t”

Frank Haas in conversation with the social psychologist Roland Imhoff ILLUSTRATIONS Shiwen Sven Wang

There are relatively good surveys on these two conspiracy theories from Germany. They garner roughly the same levels of endorsement from respondents – between 16 and 19 percent. But the idea that it’s a fabrication is the main one sustained by the various social networks. The perceived inability of politicians to tackle the infection rate is what is driving most of the protests and theories. If I claim that COVID-19 was deliberately created in a lab, that isn’t going to help me reopen my store or attend concerts. Because that’s when infection is sure to be a risk. The assertion that the virus does not exist makes far more sense if the endgame is to regain our personal freedoms.

Professor Imhoff, you know a lot about this area. Which conspiracy theory is most popular right now?

That depends on how we look at it. If we are assessing the volume of social media traffic generated, then the various theories about the pandemic would undoubtedly sweep the board – that COVID-19 does not exist at all, that it was created in a laboratory, or that the vaccinations are designed to control our minds. This kind of theory is really popular right now. But another approach is to look at acceptance levels in opinion polling, and see which theories are most widely accepted. In the United States, for example, this would be the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t solely responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. According to most surveys, over 50 percent of Americans believe this.

That seems to be one for the ages.

Exactly. The deaths of the famous usually capture people’s imaginations.

What about Elvis Presley?

People are more likely to suspect that he did a runner because he couldn’t bear being in the spotlight anymore. And very few of the theories about him state clearly whether he acted alone or a group was behind it all. If he decided to secretly grow a beard and repair shoes for a living in the Bahamas, that wouldn’t fit the definition of a conspiracy at all. He wasn’t conspiring with anybody. After all, who was Elvis conspiring with? It was all his own decision. That’s why this story doesn’t feature as often among the main conspiracy theories. The evergreens still include the various accounts of the landing on the moon and Area 51 – where extraterrestrials are supposedly kept in storage by the American intelligence agencies etc.

What’s the most popular theory about the current pandemic? Is it the idea that the whole thing is faked and doesn’t really exist at all, or more the version that the virus was spread intentionally? But given the very real mortality rates, this must sound pretty absurd to sensible people. Are there other theories that sound plausible enough to arouse your suspicions?

(laughs) Well, I like the easy life! In my view conspiracy theories don’t have to be wrong. Because if I use “conspiracy theory” as a synonym for “lie,” then I can no longer talk about it as a serious phenomenon. My definition is therefore as follows: a conspiracy theory is when people or groups are thought to be conspiring to achieve something. And that theory can be true. After all, a proven conspiracy remains a conspiracy.

Of all the theories, do you have a personal favorite? Maybe one that’s particularly entertaining, particularly durable or just particularly nutty?

There are quite a few where I ask myself if anybody really believes them. Or whether respondents who say they agree with them in surveys are laughing up their sleeves. For example, there is the one about the Nazis living on the dark side of the moon. I can’t really imagine that’s true. And then there are theories that are truly outrageous in some way, but nonetheless interesting. For example, there’s the one about the lizard people, according to which we are ruled by an elite caste of shape-shifting reptiles that slip into their human exteriors every

morning. I find it fascinating that so many people devote their time to searching through photographs for yellow-eyed politicians – and indeed lizard-eyed scientists.

What kind of people believe this type of thing? Do you have a way of describing them?

It’s possible to try, but we aren’t really dealing here with a distinct genus, but rather with people who share certain characteristics. For example, people who feel they have little control over their lives are more likely to agree with conspiracy theories. People who have a really strong need to be different, to stand out from the crowd – they tend to subscribe to them. And one of the strongest common denominators is called hyperactive agency detection in the psychology of religion. It describes the extent to which people project purpose and intention onto actions where, objectively speaking, neither appear relevant. And this trait too can also be measured in surveys. These are the people who agree with statements like “the wind blows where it chooses” and “if the TV switches off, it has lost interest.” Uncovering motives gels with conspiracy theories which, after all, work the same way. They infer that everything happens because somebody wanted it to; nothing occurs by chance.

What role does social media play in spreading conspiracy theories?

Well, needless to say, conspiracy theories flourish on social media. But cat videos and Korean recipes are faring better than ever as well. The Internet has accelerated information flow across the board and simultaneously inflated the volume of information available. If I were to print out Wikipedia, it would no longer fit on the shelves where I keep my encyclopedias. The interesting question implicit in this is as follows: do conspiracy theories have an asymmetric advantage that helps them prevail in such a crowded field? Theoretically, there would be good grounds for believing this. Whatever the subject, conspiracy theories have a better story to tell. Put simply, they are more fun to read than official press releases.

So conspiracy theories make better campfire stories?

Yes, that’s one explanation. Another derives from what psychologists call error management theory. The basic idea: in everyday life, as indeed in evolution, there are always two mistakes you can make when facing danger. First of all, you can sound a false alarm and, for example, shoo people back into their cave once too often, because a mammoth is supposedly approaching. Or, secondly, you can overlook the mammoth. The logic underpinning this error management theory is that raising the alarm unnecessarily is less costly than failing to spot the danger. In other words, viewed from the perspective of evolution, suspicion pays.

But isn’t being over-suspicious a risk too?

In my view, all conspiracy theories are potentially incendiary. If we look at assailants and assassins, whether they are religious extremists or neo-Nazis, their pamphlets are almost always packed with conspiracy theories. Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 predominantly young people in Norway in 2011, sings from the same hymn sheet as fundamentalists, the right-wing terrorist Tobias Rathjen who shot nine people at a shisha bar near Frankfurt, and all the others. Individuals abandon the social contract, i. e. the consensus on how we produce truth, how we generate knowledge, who we can trust. 99.8 percent of what we have learned does not come from personal experience. Newton’s law of gravity? With the help of an apple, I can still judge that for myself. But I get the vast majority of my knowledge off the Internet, from textbooks, from people who tell me things – in the press, on TV, or on YouTube. All of this information is second-hand, and I need to trust authoritative sources if I am to believe it. Yet this trust is vital if we are to agree as a society on what the world is, or what knowledge is. If, as a conspiracy theorist, I cut myself off to the point that I revoke this epistemological consensus, then I am rendering all knowledge discretionary. And then everything I want to believe – or, for that matter, don’t want to believe – becomes the truth. And that, specifically, is something that I consider really dangerous. As a society, we need the ability to reach agreement on when something is really valid and when not. We need to have a discussion about basics here.

Who should be having this discussion? Is it a private matter?

Discussing something like this privately is, of course, quite feasible. But I also see it as a function of education. In the area of schooling,

there’s always an abundance of debate surrounding media literacy – but mostly people are referring to doing their own fact-checking, looking for alternative sources etc. That’s all well and good, and it’s sensible too, but its main thrust is to train schoolchildren in skepticism. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we also need to learn how to trust. Otherwise, we ultimately get to the point where we stop believing anything. In my view we need something in school that we don’t normally get until college: a solid grounding in epistemology or a critical induction into the nature of knowledge.

In other words, we need to train our ability to identify what is really true. So is it possible to increase our awareness of conspiracies? In other words, are there terms, words or phrases that occur regularly in conspiracy theories, helping us to recognize them?

(laughs) Good question. I’d say that if the name “Rothschild” appears, then it has a good chance of being a conspiracy theory. The same most likely applies to “intelligence agencies” as well.

Where do you draw the line between amusement and danger?

When people withdraw, start inhabiting a parallel universe, and there seems little prospect of them extricating themselves. But I would warn against two things. Firstly, falling into the trap of thinking that the whole of civilization is disintegrating and that people will simply end up believing whatever they want. We have representative samples from society, and they don’t reveal an increasing acceptance of these theories – not even now, during the pandemic. Their propagators might be more vocal, more conspicuous and maybe even more organized – which can indeed represent a threat – but the resonance across society isn’t growing overall. Secondly, we do ourselves no favors by immediately demonizing anything that might smack of a conspiracy theory. Just exploring them can be interesting, and sometimes there really can be substance to them. The moment I discover evidence, I am no longer moving in the realm of conspiracy theories. I have entered investigative journalism. As long as people are willing to discard hypotheses that lack evidence, no harm is done.

This leads me to one final, very practical question. If I have someone in my immediate vicinity who believes in something preposterous, what should I do? Counter their arguments? Or leave them be?

The ability to change people’s minds is an illusion that we should dismiss once and for all. We’ll never succeed in that. We can offer persuasive arguments, but ultimately people have to change their own minds. In relations with others, we can either call a truce and say, “Let’s not talk about this right now.” Or we opt for a full-frontal attack, at which point the situation becomes more strenuous. I would avoid questions like whether the melting point of steel is 2,000 or 4,000 degrees centigrade. I’d rather talk about who we can believe and why. Most people follow conspiracy theories not because they are bored, but for a specific reason, to fulfil a need, e.g. to save themselves from becoming lonely or socially irrelevant. Maybe I can just address one such need directly so that, at some point, conspiracy theories become superfluous.

Frank Haas is Head of Brand Strategy and Communications at Gebrüder Weiss – and editor-in-chief of ATLAS.

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