An interesting paper appeared in June in the open-access online journal PLOS ONE, which analyzed the differences between real conspiracies, and the conspiracy theories that are threatening to choke us to death. This work was also previously described in a Daily Kos story, which links to the press release, but it’s worth having a look at the original paper (Tangherlini, Timothy et al. “An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web”, PLOS ONE, June 16, 2020), which can be found here. The authors are from the Culture Analytics Group at UCLA.
The paper applies network analysis to collections of text that relate to two conspiracies. One, Bridgegate, an actual event from Chris Christie’s administration in New Jersey that involved an act of political revenge; and Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact. Using mostly off-the-shelf Natural Language Processing tools, the authors extract entities and relations from the text, and build a graph of these entities and relations. Thus if a sentence in the corpus states that Clinton then captured the children, the system will construct a node for Clinton a node for children and a relation capture. Obviously, such NLP tools are not perfect, and extracting entities and relations remains a difficult task for machines to perform. But the techniques have improved dramatically in the last 20 years or so, so that while there is inevitably noise, much of the information extracted will be clean. Importantly, the authors also analyze how the graph evolves over time.
Their results show clear differences between the two cases. In the true conspiracy, Bridgegate, there may be a lot of actors involved, but the relations between them and events are quite circumscribed in scope. The network evolves and becomes more coherent over time, reflecting the fact that more information is added as more real facts emerge. The network is densely connected so that removing one or another actor does not materially affect the network’s structure. This is the character of a coherent fact-based model.
Pizzagate, on the other hand, has a very different set of properties. There are relatively few actors, and they are connected to a wide range of other entities, with little in the way of a coherent central theme. The network is sparsely connected, so that removing one actor can break the network into multiple components. The network structure does not evolve much over time, starting out as a more or less fully formed conception. This is exactly what one would expect of a fact-free conspiracy theory. Such “theories” are formed in the mind of a few people or maybe even one person. Since they are not based on reality, there is no reason for their network to acquire more structure as more facts come in, since there are no facts. The graph has just a few actors because the whole point of a conspiracy theory is to plant in the mind of the follower the idea that there is a grand scheme by a small select group of people behind the scenes to infiltrate and control everything in the world. Think of the Protocols of the Elders of ZIon and the supposed international conspiracy of the Jews to take over the world.
Of course one limitation (acknowledged by the authors) is that they are looking at just two cases. It is hard to generalize much from this, even if the results on the whole make intuitive sense. As one commenter on the previous Kos story noted, the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, which were popular for about 20 years after the event, were much narrower in scope than Pizzagate. On the other hand, they probably did share the property with Pizzagate that the actors changed little over time. At least from what I recall of such conspiracy theories popular in the 1970’s, there wasn’t a lot of change in the basic stories; since little if any additional evidence was forthcoming, there was little basis for any change.
True conspiracies and their near enemy conspiracy theories, taken together, share some similarities with true science and its near enemy pseudoscience. It is therefore not surprising that pseudoscience has a strong following among the same sorts of people as fall for conspiracy theories. Take my favorite example of pseudoscience, namely so-called “Scientific” Creationism. While this is perhaps less salient in the current setting than some other pseudoscientific ideas — think the many alternative “cures” for COVID 19 — it is actually relevant to the current political atmosphere. This is not only because many of the players in the right-wing universe are believers in “Young Earth Creationism” (Pence is but one example); but it was also with “Scientific” Creationism that some aspects of the modern right wing modus operandi were honed back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. After a failed full-frontal assault in the courts (McLean v Arkansas) to get their alternative to standard science taken seriously and taught in schools, the Creationist camp realized that after all they did not need to be acknowledged by the scientific establishment, of which there was in any case no hope. All that was needed was to plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of people who were naturally antipathetic towards science and easily sought refuge in an intellectually simple and perhaps more comforting view of the world. As a result, Creationism is alive and well, as evidenced by such monstrosities as the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Similarly for other issues on the right wing agenda: who cares what the “elites” think, if you can get people to buy into the ideas, often by planting doubt in their minds?
The similarities between “Scientific” Creationism and conspiracy theories are several. Both involve rather tenuously connected actors and entities, and the network will fragment if you remove some of the actors: Consider removing God from the Creationism model and see what you are left with. In contrast, evolutionary theory provides a wide set of mechanisms to explain various aspects of evolution: remove one (by showing that it is false) and it will not destroy the whole architecture. But even more saliently, while evolutionary theory has evolved over time as more facts come to light and more mechanisms are understood, “Scientific” Creationism has hardly changed. Indeed how could it?The only point of “Scientific” Creationism is to use pseudoscientific argumentation to support the Biblical story of creation. It is not open to change since no matter what new facts may come to light, the only goal is to show that the story of the Creation in Genesis is the true origin of life on Earth. Therefore it cannot evolve over time.
And both conspiracy theories and “Scientific” Creationism have another thing in common, something that isn’t particularly brought out by Tangherlini et al’s analysis: both offer a seemingly simple explanation for something that is comforting for people who don’t have the willingness to learn many details about the sometimes complicated world we inhabit. In the case of “Scientific” Creationism, it offers an easy-to-understand “theory” that works fine if your understanding of biological diversity is well modeled by Sunday school depictions of Noah’s Ark, but falls flat when the true complexity of life on Earth is understood. In the case of a conspiracy theory, the theory itself is not actually explaining anything directly since what it purports to explain is invariably a fantasy. But it does salve the minds of people whose lives may be difficult sometimes, and who are looking around for something to explain the difficulty: evil plots hatched by powerful “elites” are tailor-made for this purpose.
Of course, from time to time, everyone has such fantasies about mysterious forces afoot. In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the hero Arthur Dent learns from the aged Magrathean Slartibartfast that the Earth was actually built by the Magratheans for their clients, the mice, as an organic computer running a 10 million-year program to determine the question corresponding to the ultimate answer of life, the universe and everything: 42. Upon learning this, Arthur says:
“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
Slartibartfast’s response:
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
Paranoia is indeed common, but it is apparently much easier to exploit in some people than in others.