“Flat Earthers aren’t Stupid” Why we should Meaningfully Engage with Conspiracy Theorists

“Flat-earthers aren’t stupid”

Why We Should Meaningfully Engage with Conspiracy Theorists

Laura Scaife sat down with University of Nottingham’s Professor Philip Moriarty to discuss his views on engaging with conspiracy theorists as a scientist. How do you control your anger and frustration when talking to flat-earthers? Is it possible to connect with someone who has such different views to yourself?

It can be very frustrating trying to communicate with conspiracy theorists who believe the earth is flat, climate change isn’t real and that establishment scientists are sheep. Professor Moriarty argues that the best way to engage with these people isn’t to shout them down with scientific facts, however. It is, instead, to meaningfully engage with them and try to understand why they believe what they do.

Professor Moriarty began by arguing that the problem with engaging with flat-earthers and conspiracy theorists scientifically, is that “the science is done and dusted.This is not about the science, this is about the psychology and the sociology, it’s about them finding a community to belong to.” Often “the more narcissistic among them” feel proud to be outsiders, they believe they’ve found something no one else has spotted and they are desperate to be proved right.

“Flat-earthers aren’t stupid,” Moriarty says, and the worst thing you can do when interacting with the flat-earther community is to patronise them and bombard them with scientific facts. “We need to move beyond the idea that they’re completely rock stupid,” he tells me. They are “very, very good at picking holes in science” and they will argue that they are “the true scientist because they’re sceptical”.

This means that if you try to adopt a scientific approach when arguing with such individuals, they will just keep moving the goalposts. This can make arguing with them “exhausting, absolutely exhausting,” Professor Moriarty says. In fact, he had to “kill” his Twitter account and take his blog offline for 18 months after trying to reason with these science sceptics became just too frustrating.

You may be wondering, however, why it is so important to engage with the flat-earther community in the first place. After all, surely they’re fairly harmless, if very much illinformed? However, as Professor Moriarty argues “the ideology and mindset that underpins the flat-earth view is very, very closely aligned with the same type of ideology and mindset that underpins antivax; that underpins scepticism about climate; that underpins so much of the misinformation and, for want of a better term, fake news.” He believes these ideologies are “going to kill someone”. Therefore, the flat-earthers offer a test case on how we can engage with these denialist communities and begin to try and change their minds.

As Moriarty argues, the way to begin to change their minds isn’t by educating them, it is instead by engaging and listening to them. Moriarty gives the example of a time when he was arguing with a flat-earther and realised they were also a “massive Black Sabbath fan”. While they “didn’t go away agreeing with each other”, he found that “certainly it was a lot less aggrieved and a lot less swearing [was] involved” than if they hadn’t found that common ground. Professor Moriarty then spoke about the YouTube channel ‘Sixty Symbols’, which was created by the School of Physics at the University of Nottingham, in collaboration with the videographer Brady Harran. Videos often capture the pain of experiments that go wrong in an effort to humanise the scientists behind them. Professor Moriarty praises the importance of the channel in reaching these sceptical communities: “scientists are willing to engage with them, even if we disagree with them. If that person can feel that they’re being taken seriously, then you’re in a position of trying to sway their beliefs; if all you do is bark at them, laugh at them, ridicule them, and tell them they’re wrong, you’ve lost, absolutely lost.”

There is hope that this approach can be effective as well. Moriarty gave the example of Rising Out of Hatred, a book about a man who rebelled against the beliefs of his family, who were avowed white supremacists. “The book is about how he rejected all that. Ultimately, it was about personal interactions. It was about people not ridiculing him, people not taking his view seriously but being willing to engage and counter his views.” It shows there is “promise and potential” if we stop shouting. If instead, we are willing to both listen and engage.

By Laura Scaife

Photography by Rian Patel Page Design by Chiara Crompton