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The truth is out there Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles on belief in conspiracy theories Stuart Wilson on the naturalness of weird beliefs
Incorporating Psychologist Appointments ÂŁ5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society
forum 538 news 544 careers 600 looking back 614
between a rock and a hard place: the vicious cycle for rape victims 556 student writer competition winners 568 interview: Darian Leader 574
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forum frontal lobe dysfunction; misrepresentation; Richard Gregory; and more
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THE ISSUE
news and digest healthy behaviours; assisted suicide; MRC research strategy; Royal Society fellowship; nuggets from the Research Digest; and more
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media ethics, children and reality television, with Kairen Cullen
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Welcome to your July issue. I am delighted to have been asked by the Editor, Dr Jon Sutton, to write this editorial as your new President. The Psychologist is received by all 48,000 members, plus many outside agencies. It serves a vital function in informing and provoking debate. This month, in addition to the plethora of regular features, announcements and adverts, there are articles on weird beliefs and conspiracy theories. Stuart Wilson asks whether we are hardwired to believe in supernatural agents and to seek meaning in our existence. Scepticism, it seems, is unnatural, ‘unsexy’ and cognitively demanding. In a similar vein, Swami and Coles ask why some people are prone to conspiracy theories while others are not. The answer may lie in individual differences in intellectual curiosity, an active imagination and a proclivity for new ideas. Enjoy! Dr Gerry Mulhern (President)
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Between a rock and a hard place Miranda Horvath and Jennifer Brown look at the vicious cycle for rape victims
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Social exclusion – an addictive context Matt Baker, joint winner in our student writer competition, shares his views on drug use and rehabilitation
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Images of the future, drawn from the past Stefania de Vito, joint winner in our student writer competition, on episodic future thinking
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On loss and mourning Renee Lertzman talks with psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader
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book reviews 578 a history lesson with attitude; mindsight; the newborn brain; and rehabilitation psychology society 582 the first column from new Society President Gerry Mulhern; Spearman Medal 2010; promoting global awareness; consultations; and more 600 careers an interview with Mark Griffiths on academia and addiction; pathways into occupational psychology; featured job; plus all the latest vacancies, and how to advertise looking back 614 the odd couple: Arthur I. Miller on a meeting of minds between Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli one on one …with David Lane
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The truth is out there Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles on belief in conspiracy theories 560 Stuart Wilson on the naturalness of weird beliefs 564
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The operatic brain The idea that the brain changes and adapts according to how you use it, including through adulthood, is now widely accepted in psychology and neuroscience. Some of the most striking examples of this have come from studies of musicians. It has been shown, for instance, that string and keyboard players have more neural tissue given over to the control of the hands and fingers than do nonmusicians. However, little researched until now is the brain reorganisation associated with professional singing. Like the playing of a musical instrument, singing involves skilled muscle movements – indeed, more than 100 muscles are used – but there are also some differences between singing and instrument playing. For example, you can watch your own fingers tap out a tune on a keyboard but you can’t ‘see’ your muscle In the May issue of Cerebral Cortex coordination whilst singing. Boris Kleber’s team had 10 professional opera singers, 21 singing students and 18 nonsinger controls lie in a brain scanner and sing six phrases from the first stanza of the Italian aria ‘Caro mio ben’. The most striking finding was that greater experience with opera singing was associated with more activation of the somatosensory cortex whilst singing. This part of the brain processes incoming signals from the body, and the finding suggests that singing expertise is particularly associated with enhanced processing of where the vocal muscles are positioned in space. This makes sense given that you can’t ‘see’ yourself sing and must instead rely on feedback from the vocal muscles. As you might expect, studies with people who can play musical instruments have generally found increased activation of the primary motor cortex – a key brain area involved in sending commands to the muscles. However, in the current study, it was only the most experienced opera singers who showed exaggerated activity in this brain area. Another neural characteristic associated with expertise in opera singing was more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved in working memory. The researchers speculated this could be because opera singing usually involves singing and acting at the same time, so the experts may have developed ‘more resources for performance monitoring’. More singing experience was also linked with more activation in the inferior parietal cortex, possibly reflecting comparison of ‘the actual kinesthetic feedback with the kinesthetic “expectation” for the produced sound’, and with greater activation of the cerebellum, which is known to be involved in coordination. ‘Opera singers must routinely adapt their vocal system to unusual postures during singing as part of their stage play,’ the researchers said. ‘It is likely that this group has a particularly developed adaptive system to cope with such demands, which might require increased cerebellar involvement.’
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Drawing out the truth In the May issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology Forget expensive fMRI-based lie detection or polygraph tests, give your suspect a pencil and paper and get them to draw what happened – a new study suggests their artistic efforts will betray whether they are telling the truth or not. Aldert Vrij’s new study involved 31 police and military participants going on a mock mission to pick up a package from another agent and then answering questions about the exchange. Crucially, they also drew the scene. Half the participants acted as truthtellers, the others played liars. Vrij’s team reasoned that clever liars would visualise a different location and therefore forget to include the agent who participated in the exchange. This thinking proved shrewd: liars indeed tended not to draw the agent, whereas truth-tellers did. In fact, 80 per cent of truthtellers and 87 per cent of liars could be correctly classified on the basis of this factor alone. ‘These are high accuracy rates and will be difficult to exceed by any traditional verbal, nonverbal or physiological lie detection tool,’ Vrij’s team said. ‘In fact, we would certainly expect such tools to fare worse.’ Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from a first-person perspective; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the firstperson perspective.
The big, the bad, and the boozed-up In the July issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology There are some obvious practical reasons why you might want to avoid provoking the big, drunk guy in the bar. After all, he’s bigger than you. However, according to a new study, there’s another more psychological reason to be wary – heavier men are, on average, more likely to be aggressive when drunk than are lighter men. Nathan DeWall (University of Kentucky) and colleagues say their finding is consistent with evolutionary theory and research on embodied cognition. Over five hundred women (average weight 149 lb) and men (average weight 183 lb), aged 21 to 35, consumed either an alcoholic beverage or a placebo drink before taking part in a reaction time contest. The winner of each round had the opportunity to inflict an electric shock on their opponent. Their choices of how strong and long a shock to inflict was the measure of aggression. Unbeknown to the participants, their opponent was fictitious and the game was fixed so that they won 50 per cent of the rounds. The key finding was that among the male participants only, alcohol interacted with body weight to predict aggression. That is, heavier men who had an alcoholic drink tended to be more aggressive than those who had an alcoholfree placebo drink. By contrast, having an alcoholic vs. placebo
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drink made little difference to the aggression of lighter men. Another way of looking at the results was that, among men who had the alcoholic drink, those who were heavier tended to be more aggressive. For the female participants, their weight bore no relation to their aggressiveness. These same findings were replicated in a second study with a further 327 men and women. It makes sense in terms of evolutionary theory that bigger men should be more prone to aggression, the researchers said, because ‘they’re more able than weaker men to inflict costs on others in conflict situations.’ The same isn’t true for women because even those who are larger will usually be smaller and weaker than potential male adversaries. An association between weight and aggression is also predicted by embodied cognition, the researchers said. This is the idea that the way we think about abstract concepts is rooted in physical metaphors. One example is that we think about importance in terms of weight, thus leading heavier people to feel more important and entitled to special treatment. Consistent with both these theoretical arguments, past research has indeed found that physical size is related to aggression. However, DeWall’s team said their new study is the first to show that weight is a predictor of alcohol-induced increases in aggression. ‘It seems that alcohol reduced the inhibition for heavy men to “throw their weight around” and intimidate others by behaving aggressively,’ they said.
Introspection reborn In the May issue of Cognition Introspection – people reporting their subjective experience of their own mental processes – was a favoured technique among psychology’s founding fathers. Today, by contrast, it has a poor reputation, often dismissed as unreliable and unscientific. But in a new paper published in the May issue of Cognition, Sebastien Marti and colleagues (Inserm Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, France) argue that introspection can be accurate and illuminating, providing a useful addition to objective measures. Ten participants completed a simple dual-task paradigm. First they listened to an auditory tone and pressed one of two keys as fast as possible to indicate whether the tone was high or low pitch. Straight after, they pressed one of two keys as fast as possible to indicate whether a ‘Y’ or ‘Z’ had subsequently appeared on a computer screen. When the second decision stage comes too soon after the first, reaction times to the second stage are prolonged – an established effect known as ‘the psychological refractory period’. The key twist in this study is that the researchers didn’t just record participant reaction times, they also asked them to make several subjective estimates after each trial: how long they’d taken to respond to the tone; how long they’d taken to respond to the letter; how soon the letter appeared after the tone; and whether the letter appeared before or after they’d made their decision about the tone. Reaction times didn’t vary
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on introspection versus control trials, suggesting, importantly, that introspection didn’t interfere with the basic cognitive processes required to complete the task. Participants displayed the usual ‘psychological refractory period’ and their subjective estimates of their own reaction times and other factors, although underestimates, were mostly highly correlated with the objective measures. The accuracy of introspection only went awry when the letter appeared too soon after the auditory tone or simultaneously with it. On these trials, not only did participants’ reaction times to the letter slow down, it seems they weren’t able to start an internal recording of the duration of their reaction time (to the letter) until they had finished processing the tone. Their estimates of the gap between the tone and letter also became inaccurate. It’s as if they weren’t able to consciously
perceive the letter until they’d finished processing the tone. It was a similar story regarding their judgement about whether the letter appeared before or after their auditory decision. Participants were accurate when there was a big enough time delay between tone and letter, but their insight was compromised when the letter appeared too early. ‘For the first time, we were able to reconstruct the sequence of conscious events in a psychological refractory period trial based on subjects’ introspection,’ the researchers said. ‘Overall, the present study showed that quantified introspection is a powerful tool. After each trial, participants can answer multiple questions that provide remarkably coherent data which are not always objectively true, but can be used to paint a consistent picture of the subjective phenomenology of an average trial during a cognitive task.’
The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more. Subscribe by RSS or e-mail at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Become a fan at www.facebook.com/researchdigest Awards A wards 2010 20 010
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The truth is out there Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles look at belief in conspiracy theories Given the widespread appeal of conspiracy theories, it is surprising that little empirical research has addressed the reasons why some people are more likely to adhere to such beliefs than others. This article reviews the available literature on the sociological and psychological antecedents of conspiracy theories, and concludes by examining the positive and negative impacts of conspiracy theories. For scholars, studying conspiracy theories may prove useful in better understanding the needs of individuals that conspiracy theories accommodate, while also allowing for a better conceptualisation of the everyday effects of such theories.
question resources
Hofstadter, R. (1966). The paranoid style in American politics. In R. Hofstader (Ed.) The paranoid style in American politics and other essays (pp.3–40). New York: Knopf.
references
‘T
From a psychological point of view, is it important to distinguish between conspiracy theories and genuine political conspiracies?
Abalakina-Paap, M., Stephan, W.G. et al. (1999). Beliefs in conspiracies. Political Psychology, 20, 637–647. Bale, J.M. (2007). Political paranoia v. political realism. Patterns of Prejudice, 41, 45–60. Bird, S.T. & Bogart, L.M. (2003). Birth control conspiracy beliefs, perceived discrimination, and contraception among African Americans. Journal of Health Psychology, 8, 263–276.
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he truth’, the TV show The X-Files told us, ‘is out there’. Millions of people worldwide seem to agree, disbelieving official accounts of important social and political events. In the United States, for example, scholars have noted a steady increase in the number of poll respondents who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing John F. Kennedy (Goertzel, 1994; McHoskey, 1995). In the wake of 9/11, commentators highlighted the proliferation of conspiracy theories about the event (e.g. Goldberg, 2004), with polls suggesting that more than a quarter of respondents believe the US government knew in advance (Zogby International, 2004), participated in, or took no action to stop the attacks (Hargrove & Stempel, 2006). But conspiracy theories are not a uniquely American phenomenon: in a poll of seven predominantly Muslim countries, Gentzkow and Shapiro (2004) reported that almost four fifths of respondents did not believe the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Arabs, believing instead that it was the work of the US or Israeli governments (for other conspiracy theories in the Middle East, see Zonis & Joseph, 1994). In Britain, the BBC’s documentary series The Conspiracy Files has examined a range of theories in current circulation, including those about the deaths of Princess Diana and UN weapons inspector David Kelly, the bombing of PanAm Flight 103, and the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Given such widespread belief in conspiracy theories across the globe, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that there remains a dearth of empirical
Bogart, L.M. & Thorburn, S.T. (2006). Relationship of African Americans’ sociodemographic characteristics to belief in conspiracies about HIV/AIDS and birth control. Journal of the National Medical Association, 98, 1144–1150. Butler, L.D., Koopman, C. & Zimbardo, P.G. (1995). The psychological impact of the film JFK. Political Psychology, 16, 237–257. Clarke, S. (2002). Conspiracy theories and
research on the topic (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999). Part of the problem may be that academics have traditionally not engaged with conspiracy theories for fear of being branded as conspiracy theorists themselves. Until recently, it was not uncommon to find accounts of possible or real conspiracies prefaced by disclaimers of the kind that Ramsay (1990) notes: ‘In intellectually respectable company, it is necessary to preface any reference to… conspiracies with the disclaimer that the speaker “doesn’t believe in the conspiracy theory of history (or politics)”.’ A related problem is in distinguishing between a conspiracy theory and an awareness of genuine political conspiracies. A broad definition of the former was provided in Hofstadter’s (1966) seminal essay, ‘The paranoid style in American politics’, where a conspiracy theory was described as a belief in the existence of a ‘vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character’ (p.14; for extended discussions, see Bale, 2007; Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). That such beliefs are relatively widespread suggests that they fulfil certain social functions or psychological needs; given this role, conspiracy theories are deserving of the same academic study as other religious, political or social beliefs (Bale, 2007). The remainder of this article discusses both early work in sociology and cultural studies on the causes of conspiracy theorising, and emerging psychological research focused on the individual difference antecedents of conspiracy theories. We conclude with reasons why further research on conspiracy theories is important, both in terms of academic research and sociopolitical practice.
Early sociological work Hofstadter’s (1966) essay on the ‘paranoid style’, in which he examined right-wing conspiracy theories, effectively set the tone of much of the research that was to
conspiracy theorizing. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 32, 131–150. Combs, D.R., Penn, D.L. & Fenigstein, A. (2002). Ethnic differences in subclinical paranoia. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 8, 248–256. Davis, D.B. (1969). The slave power conspiracy and the paranoid style. Baton Rouge, FL: Louisiana State University Press. Douglas, K.M. & Sutton, R.M. (2008). The
hidden impact of conspiracy theories: Perceived and actual influence of theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana. Journal of Social Psychology, 148, 210–221. Edelman, M. (1985). The symbolic use of politics (2nd edn). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Fenster, M. (1999). Conspiracy theories: Secrecy and power in American culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of
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follow. The paranoid style, Hofstadter (Miller, 2002). A conspiracy theory, in this (1971, pp.2–3) argued, was a result of sense, helps explain those ambiguities and ‘uncommonly angry minds’, whose ‘provides a convenient alternative to living judgement was somehow ‘distorted’. with uncertainty’ (Zarefsky, 1984, p.72). Following this vein, some scholars came Or as Young and colleagues (1990, p.104) to view conspiracy theories as a product have put it, ‘[T]he human desire for of psychopathology, such as extreme explanations of all natural phenomena – paranoia, delusional ideation or a drive that spurs inquiry on many levels – narcissism (e.g. Groh, 1987; Plomin & aids the conspiracist in the quest for public Post, 1997). In this view, the acceptance.’ incorrectness of conspiracy theories was In addition, it is also thought that usually assumed a priori and, more than conspiracy theories offer explanations of this, the delusional aspect of the world that are not contradicted by conspiratorial beliefs was thought to information available to adherents. In the result in an incapacity for social or context of extremism, Hardin (2002) has political action (e.g. Hofstadter, 1971). discussed what he calls a ‘crippled While it is possible that some people epistemology’: in some cases, extremism is who believe in conspiracy theories suffer not an irrational response, but rather stems forms of psychopathology, this in itself is from the fact that people have very little an incomplete explanation given how correct or accurate information. Sunstein widespread conspiracy theories are and Vermeule (2009) apply a similar (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009; Waters, perspective to conspiracy theories: those 1997). Hofstadter, however, has remained who believe in conspiracy theories may be influential for his interest in why people responding rationally and logically to what acquire conspiracy theories, suggesting little information they receive, even if that that a belief in information appears conspiracy theories was absurd in relation to more likely to emerge wider, publicly among those who felt available knowledge. powerless, disadvantaged Other scholars or voiceless, especially in have extended or the face of catastrophe. revised Hofstadter’s To use a contemporary original example, believing that powerlessness the 7/7 London conjecture in order bombings were to explain how perpetrated by the British adherents come to or Israeli governments hold conspiracy may be, for some theories. Some have individuals at least, a suggested that an means of making sense inability to attain of turbulent social or goals leads to political phenomena. conspiracy theories To the extent that (Edelman, 1985; Commentators highlighted the conspiracy theories fill Inglehart, 1987), proliferation of conspiracy theories while others view a need for certainty, it is about 9/11 thought they may gain conspiracy theories as more widespread affording adherents a acceptance in instances means of maintaining when establishment or mainstream self-esteem (e.g. Robins & Post, 1997), explanations contain erroneous coping with persecution (Combs et al., information, discrepancies, or ambiguities 2002), reasserting individualism (Davis,
Minnesota Press. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row & Peterson. Gentzkow, M.A. & Shapiro, J.M. (2004). Media, education, and antiAmericanism in the Muslim world. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18, 117–133. Goertzel, T. (1994). Belief in conspiracy theories. Political Psychology, 15,
731–742. Goldberg, R.A. (2004). Who profited from the crime? Intelligence and National Security, 19, 249–261. Groh, D. (1987). The temptation of conspiracy theory, or: Why do bad things happen to good people? In C. F. Graumann & S. Moscovici (Eds.) Changing conceptions of conspiracy (pp.1–37). New York: Springer-Verlag. Hardin, R. (2002). The crippled
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1969; Melley, 2000), expressing negative feelings (Ungerleider & Wellisch, 1979) or reaffirming imagined positions of exclusive knowledge (Mason, 2002). These contrasting theories, however, share the distinguishing assumption that conspiracy theories are a rational attempt to understand complex phenomena and deal with feelings of powerlessness. In this sense, such beliefs reveal not psychopathological minds but the lived experience and consciousness of groups of individuals (Sanders & West, 2003).
Psychological accounts Early psychological studies often sought to highlight characteristics of conspiracy theories themselves, rather than characteristics of the audience. So, for example, conspiracy theories were described as being characterised by poor or unproven evidence, circular reasoning, repetition of unproved premises, and the creation of false predicaments (e.g. Young et al., 1990; Zarefsky, 1984). On the other hand, once the notion that conspiracy theories serve some psychological need became established, a small number of studies began to explicitly examine the socio-cognitive basis of those beliefs. For example, one early study examined the effects of exposure to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, in which it is alleged that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. The authors found that the film changed beliefs toward accepting the broad conspiracy theory and ‘significantly aroused anger’, which was explained as a function of helplessness (Butler et al., 1995, p.237). Moreover, viewing the film was found to be associated with a decrease in viewers’ (self-reported) intention to vote or make political contributions, suggesting that the message of the film carried over to general political judgements. Other research activities have focused on the psychological factors and processes associated with belief in conspiracy theories. For example, some early work suggested that conspiracy theories emerged
epistemology of extremism. In A. Breton et al. (Eds.) Political extremism and rationality (pp.3–22). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hargrove, T. & Stempel III, G.H. (2006). A third of U.S. public believes 9/11 conspiracy theory. www.shns.com. Heath, C., Bell, C. & Sternberg, E. (2001). Emotional selection in memes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1028–1041.
Hofstadter, R. (1966). The paranoid style in American politics. In R. Hofstader (Ed.) The paranoid style in American politics and other essays (pp.3–40). New York: Knopf. Hofstadter, R. (1971). The paranoid style in American politics. In D.B. Davis (Ed.) The fear of conspiracy (pp.2–8). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Inglehart, R. (1987). Extremist political positions and perceptions of
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because of ‘an irrational need to explain big and important events with proportionately big and important causes’ McCauley & Jacques, 1979, p.637; see also Leman, 2007). Clarke (2002), on the other hand, has discussed conspiracy theories in the context of the fundamental attribution bias: because of the general tendency to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors, conspiracy theorists are more likely to blame Hofstadter’s (1966) ‘preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network’ even when adequate situational explanations are available. This may be especially true when people are outraged or distressed and seek to justify their emotional state by claiming intentionality of actions even in the absence of evidence (cf. Festinger, 1957). Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) have suggested that the emotional content of many conspiracy theories plays an important role in their dissemination and acceptance. They cite studies showing that ‘urban legends’ that are devised to trigger strong emotions are more likely to be spread among populations (e.g. Heath et al., 2001). Applying this to conspiracy theories, they postulate that conspiracy theories create intense emotions that help spread similar beliefs, while also providing a justification for affective states produced by some traumatic event. Other relevant work has examined the psychological impact of exposure to conspiracy theories, particularly in relation to mass media sources (e.g. Butler et al., 1995), but also in relation to the thirdperson effect (the tendency for people to believe that persuasive media has a larger influence on others than themselves). In one study, Douglas and Sutton (2008) had participants read material containing conspiracy theories about Princess Diana’s death before rating their own and others’ agreement with the statements, as well as their perceived retrospective attitudes. They found that participants significantly underestimated how much the conspiracy theories influenced their own attitudes. In an earlier study, McHoskey (1995)
conspiracy. In C.F. Graumann & S. Moscovici (Eds.) Changing conceptions of conspiracy (pp.231–244). New York: Springer-Verlag. Keeley, B.L. (1999). Of conspiracy theories. Journal of Philosophy, 96, 109–126. Kramer, R.M. (1994). The sinister attribution error. Motivation and Emotion, 18, 199–230. Leman, P.J. (2007, July 14). The born conspiracy. New Scientist, pp.35–37.
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predicted that conspiracy theories concerning the assassination of JFK, and possibly all conspiracy theories, would continue endlessly because of the processes of biased assimilation and attitude polarisation. In the first instance, when opposing sides were presented with the same evidence, McHoskey (1995) showed that there was a tendency to uncritically accept evidence that was supportive of one’s own argument, while scrutinising and discrediting contrary evidence. When participants were presented with mixed evidence, there were signs of Douglas and Sutton’s experiment found participants attitude polarisation, with participants reporting that they were more in favour significantly underestimated how much reading conspiracy theories influenced their own attitudes of their initial viewpoint, rather than reporting a reversal of their beliefs. In a similar vein, Leman and Cinnirella Related work in this area has provided (2007) found that conspiracy believers some support for early sociological work judged fictitious accounts of an on conspiracy theories. For example, assassination more plausible if it was studies have variously reported significant consistent with their beliefs, a tendency associations between conspiracist ideation called ‘confirmation bias’. Conspiracy and anomie, distrust in authority, political believers found that ambiguous cynicism, powerlessness and self-esteem information fitted better with a (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; Goertzel, conspiracist explanation, whereas non1994; Swami et al., in press). Interestingly, believers believed it suited a nonat least two studies have also reported conspiracist account. In other words, the significant associations between same piece of information can be used to conspiracist beliefs and authoritarianism support very different accounts, depending (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; McHoskey, on who it is presented to. 1995), which the former study explained as a manifestation of the tendency of Individual differences believers in conspiracy theories to blame Perhaps one of the most important outgroups for problems experienced by the conclusions to emerge from the handful of ingroup. studies to focus explicitly on the individual Most recently, Swami and colleagues antecedents of belief in conspiracy theories (in press) found that 9/11 conspiracist was Goertzel’s (1994) assertion that beliefs were significantly associated with conspiracy beliefs form part of a the Big Five personality factor of Openness ‘monological belief system’. This allows to Experience, with the authors suggesting conspiracy theorists to easily assimilate that intellectual curiosity, an active explanations for new phenomena that imagination, and a proclivity for new ideas would otherwise be difficult to understand results in greater exposure and subsequent or would threaten their existing beliefs. assimilation of conspiracist beliefs. Recent work supports this, showing that Interestingly, Swami et al. (in press) also those who more strongly endorsed 9/11 found that individuals who more strongly conspiracy theories were also more likely believed in conspiracy theories were more to believe in other, seemingly unrelated supportive of democratic principles. They conspiracy theories (Swami et al., in press). went on to argue that, for participants who
Leman, P.J. & Cinnirella, M. (2007). A major event has a major cause. Social Psychological Review, 9, 18–28. Mason, F. (2002). A poor person’s cognitive mapping. In P. Knight (Ed.) Conspiracy nation (pp.40–56). New York: New York University Press. McCauley, C. & Jacques, S. (1979). The popularity of conspiracy theories of presidential assassination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37,
637–644. McHoskey, J.W. (1995). Case closed? Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 395–409. Melley, T. (2000). Empire of conspiracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Miller, S. (2002). Conspiracy theories: Public arguments as coded social critiques. Argumentation and Advocacy, 39, 40–56. Plomin, R.S. & Post, J.M. (1997). Political
paranoia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ramsay, R. (1990). Conspiracy, conspiracy theories, and conspiracy research. Lobster, 19, 22–29. Robins, R.S. & Post, J.M. (1997). Political paranoia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sanders, T. & West, H. (2003). Power revealed and concealed in the New World Order. In H.G. West & T.
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reject the political system as undemocratic, mainstream explanations of social events are unsatisfactory precisely because they are provided by the very sources that these participants doubt.
Good or bad? What practical impact do conspiracy theories have? Some scholars (e.g. Clarke, 2002) argue that conspiracy theories are ultimately beneficial because they reveal actual anomalies in mainstream explanations and demand greater transparency from governments (see also Leman, 2007). The fact that some conspiracy theories (such as US Department of Defence plans to stimulate acts of terrorism and blame them on Cuba) have turned out to be true certainly bears out this point. Miller (2002) likewise contends that conspiracy theories provide individuals with a public opportunity, otherwise likely denied to them, of addressing the credibility of governments or other socio-political actors. As Fenster (1999, p.109) writes, conspiracies ‘must be recognised as a cultural practice that attempts to map, in narrative form, the trajectories and effects of power’. In this view, conspiracy theories may be regarded as the beginnings of social movements that could create positive change and foster solidarity (Sasson, 1995). The same authors, however, are also quick to caution that conspiracy theories remain limited because their critique of power structures is often highly simplistic. In many cases, conspiracy theories succumb to racist or exclusionary narratives, thus losing any positive thrust. Moreover, conspiracy theories typically threaten to unravel and ‘leave unsettled the resolution to the question of power that [they] attempt to address’ (Fenster, 1999, p.109). For Fenster (1999) and Miller (2002), in particular, conspiracy theories have the potential to create constructive socio-political change, but also the ability to sow discord, violence and public mistrust, while diverting attention from
Sanders (Eds.) Transparency and conspiracy (pp.1–37). London: Duke University Press. Sasson, T. (1995). African American conspiracy theories and the social construction of crime. Sociological Inquiry, 65, 265–285. Soni, D. (2007, June 4). Survey: ‘Government hasn’t told truth about 7/7’. www.channel4.com. Sunstein, C.R. & Vermeule, A. (2009).
political issues of real significance and undermining democratic debate. Some scholars have also noted the negative practical effects of conspiracy theories on a range of behaviours. Consider, for example, the conspiracy theories held by some that birth control and HIV/AIDS are plots against African Americans (e.g. Bird & Bogart, 2003). Certainly, the history of segregation in the US, the conducting of unethical research with African Americans (such as the Tuskegee syphilis study), and contemporary experiences of racism help explain the existence of such theories. However, adherence to such conspiracy theories has also been associated with less consistent pregnancy prevention and condom use, possibly impacting upon knowledge about HIV/AIDS and AIDS prevention programmes (e.g. Bogart & Thorburn, 2006).
Conclusion Documenting the prevalence of conspiracy theories only provides a starting point for tackling their negative effects. Because of their nature, beliefs in conspiracy theories have proven very difficult to repudiate (Keeley, 1999): group members may segregate themselves (informationally, though also, sometimes, physically) and over time become increasingly distrustful of the motives of others. Kramer (1994) called this an example of a ‘sinister attribution error’: because in extreme cases they feel under constant scrutiny, individuals may overestimate personalistic motives among others and see purposeful plots where there are in fact benign actions. In such a scenario, what should be the Viren Swami
is in the Department of Psychology at the University of Westminster v.swami@wmin.ac.uk
Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures. Journal of Political Philosophy, 17, 202–227. Swami, V., Chamorro-Premuzic, T. & Furnham, A. (in press). Unanswered questions: A preliminary investigation of personality and individual difference predictors of 9/11 conspiracist beliefs. Applied Cognitive Psychology. Ungerleider, J.T. & Wellisch, D.K. (1979). Coercive persuasion (brain-washing),
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response of scholars and other interested parties? Some authors have recently suggested possible practical means of tackling false and harmful conspiracy theories, such as enlisting independent groups to rebut theories or ‘cognitively infiltrate’ conspiracist groups (see Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). The assumption here is that beliefs in conspiracy theories reflect insufficiently critical assimilation of knowledge and that practical steps can be taken, albeit with difficulty, to counter that crippled epistemology. On another level, however, many contemporary conspiracy theories also reflect a deep cynicism toward, and diminished faith in, governance (Goldberg, 2004). For example, the finding that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe that the four men blamed for the London bombings did not carry out the attacks (Soni, 2007) reflects, in part at least, the alienation of many British Muslims from mainstream politics and governance. A first and important step in tackling potentially harmful conspiracy theories would be to address such causes of popular discontent. For scholars, there remain several neglected individual difference variables, including just-world beliefs, locus of control, subjective happiness, and possibly even paranormal beliefs. It may also prove useful to distinguish between beliefs that reflect ‘political paranoia’ in the traditional sense, and political realism. In doing so, it will be important for scholars to drop the assumption that all conspiracy theories are equally unbelievable. Only by evaluating and understanding ‘both the context of the explanation and the effects of the explanation’ (Waters, 1997, p.123) will we appreciate to what extent conspiracy theories reflect everyday cognitions.
religious cults, and deprogramming. American Journal of Psychiatry, 136, 279–282. Waters, A.M. (1997). Conspiracy theories as ethnosociologies. Journal of Black Studies, 28, 112–125. Young, M.J., Launer, M.K. & Austin, C.C. (1990). The need for evaluative criteria. Argumentation and Advocacy, 26, 89–107. Zarefsky, D. (1984). Conspiracy
Rebecca Coles is in the Department of Psychology at the University of Westminster
arguments in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Journal of the American Forensic Association, 21, 63–75. Zogby International (2004). Half of New Yorkers believe U.S. leaders had foreknowledge of impending 9-11 attacks and ‘consciously failed to act’. http://zogby.com. Zonis, M. & Joseph, C.G. (1994). Conspiracy thinking in the Middle East. Political Psychology, 15, 443–459.
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INTERVIEW
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On loss and mourning Renee Lertzman talks with psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader
How did your book, The New Black, come about? Over the years, I was very curious to see differences in the way that my patients responded to the relatively brutal experience of loss that happens with a bereavement. I was also curious as to why, after Freud’s essay on mourning and a few others, all the literature looks at the various phases we go through, the external manifestations of mourning, and it doesn’t really look at the unconscious processes. In my practice, certain things kept cropping up for patients in the years following a bereavement, which indicated that things were moving along because changes had happened at an unconscious level. I wanted to explore that. So, more than any of the other things I’ve written, this book comes from my patients, and trying to explore the logic behind what they are saying. Is depression something you have struggled with yourself? Any research comes from experience, but not necessarily a direct experience. But the first question we have to ask is whether there is such a thing as ‘depression’, and this is one of ideas that the book slightly goes against. It is saying that depression is different for different people, hence you have to attend and listen very, very carefully to what it is for each particular person. That’s why one of the arguments of the book is that as you listen more to people who are given the blanket term ‘depression’, you see that very often stories and experiences of loss and unresolved mourning lie behind it. I say right at the beginning of the The New Black, that not all depression covers over a problem with mourning, but it happens often enough to make it worthwhile thinking about. The most well-known stages of mourning were introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, which many are familiar with. However you are quite critical of
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these stages; when I read your critique, it seemed almost sacrilege! Some people, when seeking bereavement counselling, often feel absolutely enraged that they’re being put into a kind of box – now this is this stage, and then it’ll move to this one, and then it’ll move to this. Mourning doesn’t have such neat stages. It’s a very complicated thing, it takes a long time, and it can also never happen. The nub of the question is, are the important moments in a mourning process conscious or not? And crucially most of the time we don’t mourn. I went back to an essay Freud wrote about mourning and for the first time, it really registered: he talks about revolt in the human mind against mourning. Why? Because mourning is so painful and it’s
period. Not necessarily immediately, but sometime after the experience of loss, rather than having dreams about the person you’ve lost, there may be a dream about your telling someone else about that person, or about the loss, as if something has changed in your relationship with the person you’ve lost. This sort of dream suggests you’re no longer inhabiting the same space; you could have dreams maybe for a year or two, that you’re fighting with a dead person, and then you could have a dream where you’re on a stage talking about them. That’s very different, it means something’s changed: you no longer inhabit the same space as the dead. So many rituals in different societies are about quite literally banishing the dead to a different space. Our culture often encourages us to do the opposite, which is to live in the same space as the dead: think of the internet memorial sites where you can stay in contact with the voice and the image of the dead person, or endless TV shows about dead celebrities. The second indicator of the work of mourning is ‘killing the dead’. Very often people have dreams where they’re killing someone who’s already dead – why was that necessary? Again, many rituals in different cultures involve someone being buried twice; there’s a first burial and then a year later, or six months later there’s another burial, which implies that now the person is finally laid to rest. It suggests that there’s a difference between biological death and symbolic death. Is this the same thing as letting go? I’m not sure it is. This might seem trivial, but one of my patients makes a very fine distinction, when talking about his dead father, between letting go of him and letting him go and for him these two are radically, totally different things. Something more has to happen in relation to the one we’ve lost than their simple empirical absence. Mourning is never an automatic process.
easier in a sense to deny a loss than to try to engage with it. Which is an amazing thing: it means that even though we all lose relatives, family, people who are important to us, maybe most of the time, mourning doesn’t take place. In the book you discuss four main ‘markers’ that can provide a sense of how the mourning is progressing. Let me go through the first ‘marker’ which is signalled often by dreams. In fact, it’s so common for people in the mourning
We do have rituals around death, for example when people scatter ashes at a particular location. Is that what you are getting at? Well, that’s very interesting, because scattering ashes often creates great problems in families, because there’s no set ritual for it. You hear it all the time, what do you do with the ashes? How are they divided between the relatives? Where do you scatter them? Many people can’t bear to separate from the ashes, so they never scatter them, they put them under their bed or they’re in the garage, they don’t know what to do with them.
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It’s something we see more and more today, in many different contexts linked to death. People have to invent their own rituals because there isn’t the dominance, or availability, of set cultural rituals. That’s a very interesting change in our times.
which can be a very disturbing experience.
You also speak about a process of ‘settling debts’ with the dead. The thought ‘I should have done more’ can haunt someone for decades after a That does relate to the other point death. That’s a pretty normal reaction to you’ve written about, the concept of a loss, but sometimes this can become a social dimension of mourning. amplified and exaggerated and take over Yes, I think very often you need to engage a whole life. There are two dimensions of with how other people show that they’ve debt – the idea of a debt that you could responded to a loss, for your own actually, in reality have paid, such as, ‘if mourning to get going. A classic example I had paid more money for the casket, it is Hamlet – he’s not really grieving for would be OK.’ Or, if I had said to this anyone until he sees Laertes grieving in a person how much I love them before they ridiculously ostentatious way for his sister died it would be OK, or if I had spent this Ophelia. It’s only then that he can start to money on the flowers. All these things are engage with his loss. treated as if they could Think of the situation be settled in reality, if in a family, when you could just turn “something’s changed: you someone dies and the clock back. But no longer inhabit the same everyone carries on as if there is another more space as the dead” nothing has changed. fundamental debt we How’s the child going to have. For example, the be able to mourn, if no debt of life, what you might one else is registering a loss? So you owe to a parent. Those debts can never be get some very complex and important settled and often in mourning you have a transactions between mourners. confusion of the two debts, as if… Mourning isn’t an individual enclosed …the more superficial debts are really process; we need to relate to other about something else. people’s experiences of loss in order to Yes, they start to take on the place of the do something with our own experience, impossible debt that can never be repaid, to work it through. And that’s one of the and so you’ll spend your whole life important aspects of human culture, tortured by these ideas of what you which provides us with arts, literature, should have done. So in mourning it’s cinema. It shows us the way that people very important to distinguish things that have made something out of an can be paid and things that can’t. This can experience of loss, and that can help us happen at an unconscious level, it can in making something for ourselves. happen in therapy, it can happen without The third ‘marker’ for the work of therapy. It happens in different ways for mourning involves what you describe people, there’s no rule. as symbolising the dead. Yes, it’s the idea that on an unconscious In your book, you differentiate between level, we start to engage with the fact that mourning and melancholy in relation to maybe there was something about the what we tend to simply label as person we have lost, that we didn’t know, ‘depression’. I am not using melancholia in the and there was always something perhaps everyday sense of the term, as a sort of strange and unknown about them. Very self-absorbed, nostalgic sadness. It’s used often you find that, in later phases of in a very specific sense, as a diagnostic mourning, someone will look at a category, very different from mourning, photograph or a memento and it will in which the person makes a wholesale, seem strange to them; it’s like, who is massive identification with the dead that? It’s a very, very odd experience. It person. It is as if, when someone dies, can happen in a dream, that someone you you ‘die’ with him or her; or when they loved can somehow seem totally alien to go away, you become ‘dead’. At an you, totally strange; you know them, but unconscious level, the person is quite who are they? What do they want? When literally dead, which might mean that we love someone, we’re always imposing they’ll kill themselves, or their life will our own projections onto them. In the be totally mortified, or they might have work of mourning, there’s a process hallucinations where parts of their body whereby those projections are questioned are parts of the corpse. So it’s a very or challenged or stripped away, and we’re serious thing, which modern psychiatry confronted with the tension between our doesn’t really understand. For Freud, the projections and the reality of that person,
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main feature of melancholy was selfreproach – the person would very vocally blame him- or herself for being the cause of all the problems in the world. Actually, they are reproaching the person they’ve lost, but that’s turned inward, and they have incorporated them, so attacking them means that you attack yourself. Spears become boomerangs. We see that again and again. It’s very important to understand that in order to do work with people that have melancholia. How does this relate to large-scale incidents of loss, such as traumas like September 11 or casualties in war? It is crucial that we continue to give importance to the arts, because the arts are instruments for the work of mourning – art gives us tools to help us think through losses. It does this by showing us how it’s possible to make something – it’s the very principle of the memorial. You don’t leave the place where something terrible has happened the same – you change it in some way, you make a minimal symbolic, artificial intervention. That shows that you’ve made something, you’ve created something from an experience of loss. I’ll give you a clinical vignette. One of my patients was obsessed with the footage from 9/11 and would spend all day, every day watching again and again all the available footage of the towers. She didn’t know why she was doing it, but she had to do it, as if there was something so unimaginable about the whole thing that all she could do was try to see it from every possible viewpoint. Then she remembered that when she was a child she also, for several months, spent all her time trying to represent from every possible angle, a particular scene in which there had been a savage act of violence between her parents, which she could only see from one angle. It’s very interesting to see the comparison and how it was the engagement with what had happened in the towers that brought back her childhood memories. It shows that one’s response to a tragic event, on a public scale, will have very different resonances for different people on a private scale. As a psychoanalyst, do you find you see the world differently from most people? It’s not so much me that does, it’s other people! If I go to a party and say I’m a psychoanalyst, suddenly they’ll either spend the whole evening telling me their dreams, or they’ll become incredibly aggressive because they or a relative had a bad experience. Someone sitting next to me at a dinner party the other night
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found out I was an analyst and spend the next three hours telling me, in great detail about all her dreams, of being eaten by a big shark! It seems psychoanalysis still carries the association of being a practice of the ‘chattering classes’, the bourgeoisie. A lot of people who do analysis come from working-class backgrounds. The great thing about Lacanian analysis is that there’s no fixed-length session, and you don’t charge people set fees, so people who don’t have money, who aren’t privileged, pay a few pounds and people who come from other backgrounds will pay more. If you only see people for a certain number of sessions per day, you’re effectively excluding other people from being able to do it. In the Lacanian tradition you have people from all different walks of life and all different backgrounds thanks to this flexibility. So it’s a myth that only the wealthiest sectors of the population receive analytic treatment? People think psychoanalysis is about bored housewives who’ve got money and a few minor neurotic problems. Actually psychoanalysis is a very real thing for people with very serious problems. If someone comes in and they just want a natter, and not engage in any real work – which is uncommon – they probably won’t be taken on by the analyst. More than half of the cases in most analytic practices today involve psychosis. So we are dealing with very real levels of human suffering. But, you know there probably will always be that myth about chattering classes, too. It’s also related to what we associate with Freud, which of course psychology is a product of. Reading Freud often undoes what we associate with Freud – we realise that his arguments are far more subtle and complex than their standard expositions. Just take one example: look at what Freud says in his 1915 paper ‘The unconscious’ about the relation between ideas and affects. Isn’t this far more sophisticated than most current cognitive theories? It seems that cognitive behavioural therapy is on the rise, and risks crowding out other forms of therapies such as psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Is this the case? This is already happening in many areas of the public health sector. CBT, after all, offers a value system congruent with that of the State. The interesting thing is that now some psychoanalytic therapists are
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trying to repackage their own work as a version of CBT. This new psychoanalysis dispenses in practice with the unconscious, infantile sexuality, etc. These new therapies radically change the philosophical underpinning of clinical work – they see human beliefs not as the expression of some inner truth, but as scientific hypotheses about reality. So you can now tell someone seeking a particular form of therapy that they are wrong, that it won’t help them. The next logical step is the regulation of religions, as if people can be told what is a correct belief. This is a very dangerous line to cross, as it
Psychoanalysis is a very real thing for people with very serious problems
ignores the meaning that beliefs have for a human being But surely CBT can be effective and help treat depression? CBT is of course helpful to many people, but for reasons which cannot be subsumed in the cognitive model. CBT has been around in different forms for a long time, and in the last ten years it has expanded exponentially. For example, if you work in the NHS and are using a form of psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic therapy, drawing on say family systems or psychodynamic work, management are telling you, ‘Don’t do that, you can’t do that, you need to focus on the management of the patients symptoms.’ The overwhelming stance is that these therapies don’t work because they are not ‘evidence-based’. Thus the criteria for the evaluation of therapies has moved to a very narrow view of evidence, based on the medical model of randomisedcontrolled trials. This is the medical model of a trial experiment, with a control group, and so on. You can’t do that with therapy, because the whole point of
therapy involves the beliefs the person has initially about their treatment or therapeutic experience. So you can’t randomly assign someone to a therapist. The second point is that, regardless of the tradition being used – whether it’s Lacanian, Freudian, whatever – the work is done by the person in therapy, not really by the therapist. The therapist facilitates, but the patient makes the choices. The current CBT model is seen as basically business. Involved in the 450 rules for the conduct of psychoanalysis is something called ‘skills for business’. It’s all based on a business model and a business ethic – you are providing a service to users, they need to be kept happy, you avoid risk, all the things which are pretty incompatible with psychoanalysis. Politically, cognitive behavioral therapies are forcing out other traditional forms of very valid work in this country, which is a serious thing. This ideology is infiltrating the trainings of other non-cognitive approaches, so trainings will be more and more pushed into the cognitive model, where there’s no place for the unconscious, no place for human history, no place for the dignity of human beliefs. How are you, as a psychoanalyst and scholar, responding to this? It’s an uphill struggle. Every day my colleagues and I have literally hundreds of e-mails going round about this issue. So I am engaging with government, trying to make the arguments heard, though it’s very difficult because most of the time they’re not heard at all; there’s no listening taking place. In fact, to be more precise, today’s society is about listening not hearing. There are cosmetic listening processes to make people feel understood, but they are never really heard Is the main difference between a cognitive behavioural approach and a psychoanalytic one in the way you work with unconscious dimensions of human experience? Yes. And the key difference is that in the field of ‘mental hygiene’, which is what cognitive therapy is, you know in advance what’s best for the patients – for example, they need to get back to work, be economically productive, not have too many visits to see shrinks, not have too many problems fitting in with society. So the difference is that if you have symptoms you can either see them as something to be got rid of or you can see them as a clue to exploring your inner life. Symptoms can either be got rid of or given a voice.
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But what if people don’t necessarily want to explore their inner life? Absolutely, most people don’t. That’s why you can never impose therapy on anyone. And that’s why cognitive therapies suit many people and why they should be available. The problem is that cognitive therapies are pushing out other forms of therapeutic practice, and introducing methods to different therapies, such as the technique of going through a checklist of points at a session. It’s a method, which presumably means you’d get pretty much the same results, or you’d hope to. But, of course, why should anyone be obliged to do that? The government has embarked on a project to ‘provide’ psychotherapy in Islamic communities to young people suspected of harbouring terrorist aspirations. Therapy here is seen as a tool of re-education, a procedure to be applied to a passive recipient. This breaks radically from traditional conceptions of what therapy is. I guess in some ways we haven’t come very far from the 1960s and 1970s when people like R.D. Laing and the transpersonal movement challenged
the politics of psychology and its potentially coercive applications in mental health. It’s interesting – in the 60s and 70s the big focus on ethics in medicine was in psychiatry. Today this has moved to genetics, and a few other areas, and the whole debate about ethics and psychiatry has taken a back seat. In many ways, the 60s and 70s were much less repressive than today, and the parameters of mental health work are actually more restrictive today. Who could get funding today for the community experiments of the 70s? From very early in your career as a young adult, you’ve had a strong attraction to psychoanalytic work. What was it that attracted you? Initially, I think it was the fact that psychoanalysis didn’t restrict me to learning about one thing. If you study Lacanian analysis, you have to read history, economics, philosophy, mathematics. Psychoanalytic work is absolutely full of references to the plurality of different disciplines, and to understand what that means, you have to study lots of different fields. It’s a way of
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engaging with some general questions about culture and the history of science, which I find fascinating. The most interesting thing about a Lacanian approach for me is the fact that it does take seriously that analysis involves words, and hence you need theories about language and interpretation. Also, the tradition that Lacan comes out of is early 20th-century psychiatry. Early psychiatry had a lot of bad things about it, but it also had some very good things. Psychiatrists back then were very interested in listening to their patients and trying to make distinctions, rather than grouping everyone together into one category. Rather than seeing madness as that which is abnormal and which we need to just shut away, there was an attempt to try and engage with madness and see what could be learnt from it. That’s the tradition that Lacan comes out of, and that’s very important today in terms of general approaches to so-called mental health and psychiatry. At the beginning of the 20th century, in most psychiatric articles you actually hear the patient’s words. That is rare in psychiatric papers nowadays.
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LOOKING BACK
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The odd couple Arthur I. Miller on a meeting of minds between Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli
ore than 20 years ago I was intrigued to discover that the renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the great psychologist Carl Jung had co-authored a book entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (published by Bollingen, 1955). I tracked it down and read it with growing fascination. It is actually made up of two articles. Jung’s is on synchronicity and was about what I expected. But Pauli’s was an eye-opener. Its title stopped me in my tracks: ‘The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler’. Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and key figure in the 17thcentury scientific revolution. Pauli’s is an authoritative and yet passionate exploration of his discoveries, emphasising the roots of his ideas in alchemy, mysticism and religion. It is written with great authority and bears the stamp of Jung’s analytic psychology. There was more, because Pauli went on to argue that quantum theory – despite its grandeur, and in the faces of his distinguished colleagues – was not a complete theory: it lacked the power to explain biological and mental processes, such as consciousness. Here was a totally different person from the one exhibited in Pauli’s many scientific articles. As a physicist, I knew about Pauli and his contributions to science, and of course was well aware of Jung. But the two together – the rational Pauli and the iconoclastic Jung? Who was the real Pauli, and how was he influenced by Jung?
M
Two mavericks strike sparks
My 2009 book, Deciphering the Cosmic Number (to appear in paperback as 137) is the story of two mavericks – Pauli, the scientist who dabbled in the occult, and Jung, the psychologist who was sure that science held answers to some of the questions that tormented him. Both made enormous and lasting contributions to their fields. But in their many conversations they went much further,
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exploring the middle ground between their two fields and striking sparks off each other. In 1931 Wolfgang Pauli was at the height of his scientific career. He had discovered the exclusion principle – known to this day as the Pauli Exclusion Principle – which explains why the structure of matter is as it is and why certain stars die as they do. Just a year earlier, he had made the audacious
Carl Gustav Jung
suggestion that there might be an as yet undiscovered particle – an outrageous suggestion in those days. Besides the electron, proton and light quantum, which everyone took for granted, he insisted that there had to be another particle, which became known as the neutrino. Twenty-six years later Pauli’s neutrino was finally discovered in the laboratory. But while his friends and colleagues competed to win science’s glittering prizes, Pauli was a different kind of character. He seemed almost indifferent
to success. His scientific work was not enough to give him satisfaction and his personal life too fell deeper and deeper into chaos as he trawled the bars of Hamburg, sampling the nightlife and chasing after women. In 1932 a prizewinning film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came out, starring Frederic March as the tormented doctor. Pauli’s life too seemed to have fractured. He had reached a dangerous low. The solution was obvious. He turned to the world-famous psychologist Carl Jung who, as it turned out, lived not far from him just outside Zurich. Jung remembered vividly what Pauli looked like the first time he walked into his office: ‘When the hard-boiled rationalist… came to consult me for the first time, he was in such a state of panic that not only he but I myself felt the wind blowing over me from the lunatic asylum!’ Pauli was 31. Jung, his senior by 26 years, was firmly established and hugely famous. He was the toast of the wealthy ladies and gentlemen of European and American high society, who came to him hoping to solve their various psychological malaises. Along with Sigmund Freud, Jung had opened up the concept of the mind as something that could be studied, understood, and healed. But the approaches of the two legendary psychoanalysts could not have been more different. Right from the start Jung wanted to shed light on those deep recesses of the unconscious that were beyond Freud’s method, which dealt only with the areas of the unconscious generated by events in one’s daily life. Yet Jung was far more than just a psychologist. His interests ranged far and wide across Chinese philosophy, to alchemy and UFOs. He saw the same patterns underlying radically different ways of thinking across the world, and he was convinced that these patterns arose from the mind. He called them ‘archetypes’, essential elements of the pysche. Thus he developed the concepts of the collective unconscious and of archetypes, which are today taken for granted. He then came up with the concept of synchronicity, which he always considered one of his most important ideas. He was sure that bonds as strong as those that linked Eastern and Western thinking could also link the apparently coldly rational world of science with the
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supposedly irrational world of intuition and the psyche. One area that brought all these interests together was numbers. Jung was fascinated by the way 3 and 4 popped up again and again in alchemy and also in religion, and in the power of numbers to predict occurrences in life – as codified in the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching. But it was not until he met Wolfgang Pauli that all this began to coalesce.
The cosmic number
The problem was that the fourth quantum number could not be visualised as something we can actually see. For Pauli the problem came down to numbers: to the ‘difficult transition from three to four’. And 137 turned out to be linked with this transition. Jung’s analysis of Pauli’s dreams brought out the connection between Pauli’s scientific discovery – which involved going from three to four quantum numbers, a momentous step in atomic physics – and the extraction from his deep unconscious of his feeling function. This could then join his other
Pauli, a kindred spirit, was also infatuated with numbers. It had begun when he was a physics student, when his mentor Arnold Sommerfeld used to extol the wonders of whole numbers with all the fervour of a kabbalist. Among them was 137. It was Sommerfeld who discovered this extraordinary number in 1915, while trying to solve one particular puzzling feature of atoms: the ‘fine structure’ of spectral lines, the characteristic combination of wavelengths of light emitted and absorbed by each chemical element – the fingerprint or DNA, as it were, of each wavelength of light. It was dubbed the ‘fine-structure constant’ (which in fact equals 1/137, though for convenience physicists refer to it as 137). From the moment 137 first popped up in his equations, he and other physicists saw that its importance went far beyond the fact that it solved this one puzzle. They Wolfgang Pauli quickly realised that this unique ‘fingerprint’ was the sum of certain fundamental constants of nature, specific quantities believed to be invariable three basic functions – thinking, intuition throughout the universe, quantities and sensation – in his consciousness, central to relativity and the quantum another transition from three to four. In theory. Perhaps it was not surprising, this way Pauli achieved individuation, or then, that physicists began referring to a balanced psyche: the goal of Jung’s 137 as a ‘mystical number’. To add to the analytic psychology. mystery, the sum of the Hebrew letters in Three hundred years earlier, a fullthe word kabbalah happens to be 137. scale row over a very similar issue had By the time Sommerfeld stumbled broken out between the mystic and across 137 in 1915, whole numbers were scientist Johannes Kepler and the beginning to crop up everywhere in Rosicrucian Robert Fludd. Kepler argued atomic physics. Two years before, the that three was the fundamental number at Danish physicist Niels Bohr had worked the core of the universe, using arguments out that the energy levels of the electrons from Christian theology and ancient within atoms could be expressed with mysticism. Fludd, however, argued for whole numbers, so-called quantum four on the basis of the Kabbalah, of the numbers. He assumed that only three four limbs, the four seasons and the four quantum numbers were necessary to elements (earth, water, air and fire): God’s locate an electron in the atom, just as creation of the world was a transition it takes only three numbers to locate from two to three to fourness, he asserted. an object in space: its coordinates in the But where did 137 come in? Pauli three dimensions. But then 10 years later became convinced that the number was the 24-year-old Pauli showed that in fact so fundamental that it ought to be a fourth quantum number was needed. deducible from a theory of elementary
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particles. This quest took over his waking and sleeping life. Driven beyond endurance, he sought the help of Jung.
Alive to the alchemy Jung’s theory of psychology offered Pauli a way to understand the deeper meaning of the fourth quantum number and its connection with 137, one that went beyond science into the realm of mysticism, alchemy and archetypes. Jung, for his part, saw in Pauli a treasure trove of archaic memories, as well as a great scientist who could help him put his theories on a firm footing. Pauli told very few colleagues about his discussions with Jung. He feared their derision. Nevertheless, his sessions with Jung convinced him that intuition rather than logical thought held the key to understanding the world around us. Many scientists see Pauli as the epitome of rationality and logical thinking. They assume that a scientist who worked as hard as he did, and achieved as much, must have lived strictly a life of the mind, devoted to physics. This still tends to be the image that both ordinary people and scientists themselves have of scientists. Scientists who have not examined Pauli’s vast correspondence and writings still place him in this straitjacket. But Pauli was alive to the alchemical roots of science. Modern science, he believed, had come to a dead end. Perhaps the means to break through and to develop new insights was to take a radically different approach and return to science’s alchemical roots. Although a 20th-century scientist, Pauli felt an affinity with the 17th century – perfectly natural to anyone who, as he did, accepted that there was, as Jung postulated, a collective unconscious. Pauli and Jung spent many evenings in Jung’s Gothic-like mansion discussing topics that included physics and psychology, and ranged over Jesus Christ, alchemy, mysticism, Far Eastern religions, the I Ching, Yahweh, consciousness and Armageddon. The high level at which they discussed these topics should not be forgotten. Jung’s and Pauli’s was a truly unique meeting of the minds. It was, as Jung wrote, to lead both of them into ‘the noman’s land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious…the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times’. I Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London www.arthurimiller.com
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