How loneliness creates conspiracy theorists

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While writing about Inside Job, I thought it worthwhile to investigate what the empirical research says separates conspiracy theorists from non-believers.

What I came away with is one more way loneliness seems to be exacerbating authoritarianism.

I found one 2016 study that looked into why education predicts decreased belief in conspiracy theories.

It found that two of the four factors studied seem to help explain the connection:

1. Cognitive complexity

2. Powerlessness

The cognitive complexity component

The authors define cognitive complexity as the “ability to detect nuances and subtle differences across judgment domains, along with a tendency to consciously reflect on these nuances.” They find that trouble with cognitive complexity predicts lower educational attainment and a higher likelihood of buying into conspiracy theories.

People who find it difficult to think through more complicated explanations for complex events may buy into conspiracy theories just because they’re simpler and therefore easier to understand.

Occam’s Razor says the simplest plausible explanation is often the most likely to be true. Deciding which of the posited explanations is the simplest and also plausible requires the ability to fully understand every posited explanation.

Cognitive complexity means that everyone has an upper limit on how complicated a story can be before they’re no longer able to follow it. If your cognitive complexity is low, you may be forced to believe the simpler story because you couldn’t follow the more complicated (but more plausible) one.

For example, there’s lot of compelling evidence that multiple members of FBI leadership had good reason to believe Jeffrey Epstein was sexually molesting underage girls but waited many years before taking any significant action.

One explanation for this inaction is that FBI leadership had to weigh the cost of likely significantly embarrassing many powerful people and taking on a very wealthy, intelligent defendant against the benefit of protecting and getting justice for mostly low-SES, unconnected girls. It’s a combination of laziness, classism, misogyny, and the everyday corruption that creates one system of justice for the powerful and one for everyone else.

Another explanation for this inaction is that the world is run by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

The powerlessness predilection

This study also showed that people with low levels of education and people who believe in conspiracy theories are both likely to feel more powerless than people with more education and people who don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Another “core predictor” of believing in conspiracy theories is identification with a group that’s under threat.

Here’s another interesting bit: People with lower levels of education are also more superstitious and more likely to believe in paranormal phenomena.

Superstition is essentially the tendency to attribute unexplained random phenomena to agentive forces. The rustling in the bushes is definitely a lion. God controls the weather. If you don’t knock on wood someone will cause something bad to happen.

It’s easy to imagine how being a simple thinker who is paranoid and feels powerless would be drawn to superstition. Maybe I can’t figure out how to get a better job because it’s complicated and I feel like even if I put a lot of effort into it nothing will come of it because nothing seems to work out for me and also because everyone is out to get me. But hey, I can knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder and keep mirrors out of my bedroom! Simple, low effort rituals give people a sense of much-needed safety and control in what feels like a very unsafe and out-of-control world.

The loneliness connection

Here’s where I see loneliness tying in most directly, as far as this study goes.

Feeling powerless, paranoid, and under threat are all heavily associated with unintegrated trauma. According to The Body Keeps the Score, a traumatic event is necessarily one in which the victim feels under threat and powerless. Lingering, chronic paranoia is a hallmark of unintegrated trauma.

However, not every event in which one feels under threat and powerless leads to lasting trauma. The key difference between whether an event is traumatic or not is whether and to what extent the victim experiences social support surrounding the event. In this way, loneliness creates trauma and connection prevents it.

It really seems like trauma may be helping create conspiracy theorists by creating or exacerbating feelings of powerless and paranoia.

If loneliness is helping to create trauma, then it’s necessarily helping to create conspiracy theorists as well.

Loneliness, is there anything it can’t do?

One last bit. “The current findings… do not exclude the possibility that children who feel powerless, and who lack cognitive complexity, are less likely to attain high education levels,” the authors write.

They also recommend the following to help:

By teaching children analytic thinking skills along with the insight that societal problems often have no simple solutions, by stimulating a sense of control, and by promoting a sense that one is a valued member of society, education is likely to install the mental tools that are needed to approach far-fetched conspiracy theories with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Listen, I can’t recommend teaching children complex thinking, autonomy, civics, and skepticism more. How tragic that the compulsory K-12 public education monopoly beats these things out of kids rather than installing them.

As powerful as loneliness seems to be, one must assume connection (being its antidote) is equally powerful in the opposite directions.

The links between belief in conspiracy theories and authoritarianism are pretty clear. But I think the links between trauma, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and loneliness are becoming clearer. If you’re not loneliness-pilled already, hopefully the fact that it’s likely contributing to rising fascism will help get you on board that this is something worth putting some effort into.

Header images come from me putting the headline text or a snippet of body copy into OpenAI’s DALL-E.