The question on concealment isn’t conceived the best. Of course the government is concealing what it knows about some of these things by definition because there are classified documents on some of these cases. Doesn’t mean conspiracies are true.
I'm now curious if this labeling error is also present in the rest of the analysis (potentially flipping the directions of the effects you're discussing here) or if it only affects this section/graph.
Yes -- though maybe it's just the first chart, the second one looks plausible for moon landing when I spot check it. Except it doesn't quite line up, if the correct number is 100-74=36% and all those numbers are in the 20s, unless maybe there's a "not sure" type response that's making up the difference.
I thought I was going crazy for a second because my sense is that doubting the moon landing is for complete crackpots, while JFK's assassination is clearly jam-packed with suspicious details, even though I think Oswald most likely acted alone.
I suspect these are more proxy questions for level of trust in public organisations. If someone goes to church regularly they have more trust in such an organisation so are potentially less likely to distrust the government. I wonder if a correlation could be done by regular involvement in non-religious organisations such as the Scouts or charity work? It feels like (always dangerous) the more people's lives are integrated with mainstream communities of any kind, the higher the likelihood to believe in conspiracies will go down.
"Also, being politically conservative had no impact at all on belief in conspiracy theories.
While Age, Married and Politically Consevative all touch that Zero in the composite, they don't cross it by very much. I think if I were looking at that same data in medical form and advising a patient on what to do, I would tell them that while there is some uncertainty, there is not a lot of uncertainty if an intervention in a study looked like that.
When the data skews that way, nearly all on one side of a unity line, "at all" is not quite how my intellect sees it.
Or as a juror, there is a shadow of a doubt so the defendant gets acquitted in a criminal case. In a civil case there is no ambiguity about preponderance of the evidence so the jury rules where most of the data falls.
I agree. I found it odd that Burge rejected everything that nudged against the middle line. I understand that means, academically, that they aren’t officially statistically significant, but they are all still likely (with some uncertainty). Granted, Burge is an academic….
There is no such thing as being "highly statistically significant" or "close to statistical significance" - it's a binary metric. Either it is or it isn't.
Now, of course, there's a roaring debate among statistician about this interpretation. In this case, I have one single dataset and one single regression.
If I replicated this analysis in 2-3 more surveys and the coefficient for political conservativism was in exactly the same spot, I think a fair analysis would be something like, "the data does seem to suggest that political conservativism does have the potential to drive up conspiratorial thinking, but that's not fully evidenced in this set of results."
I think something that might make both those who never go to church and those who go to church at least once a week the least likely to believe in conspiracy theories is that these may both be groups of people who value regularity and predictability.
What does it mean about my personality that I go to church every week? Well, that I do a thing at the same time every single week, even though I don't have to. It means that I'm the sort of person who values regularity.
What does it mean about my personality that I never go to religious services? Well, that I'm committed to never doing a thing, even for social reasons. This also speaks to valuing regularity.
People who value regularity are going to be less likely to invoke explanations that violate regularity, which is what a conspiracy theory is.
I think this is close to part of the answer, though maybe instead of regularity, I'd call it "conscientiousness", per the big 5 personality factors. I also suspect that agreeableness comes into play, which is associated with willingness to trust. Disagreeable people will tend to disagree [citation needed] with what they see as the mainstream narrative. They also won't get along as well with the people at church. A certain acquaintance would yell things out at a pastor if he disagreed with him during the sermon. Naturally wasn't exactly what you'd call a "regular", but also not a complete non-attender.
Yes, I think "conscientiousness" is exactly the concept I was looking for. It's both more precise and exhaustive than my word of "regularity." Thank you for this correction.*
*Also I attend church every week and don't believe in conspiracy theories but my conscientiousness requires me to note that that just makes me an illustrative anecdote of what we're talking about, not actual data. :)
Conspiracy theories are sometimes viewed as secular superstitions, e.g. by Michael Shermer who claimed that "agenticity" (everything happens for a reason) and "patternicity" (everything is related to everything else) are common to religious and conspiratorial thinking. (There is a contrasting opinion that they became prominent only after the Enlightenment had removed God as the all-encompassing explanation for everything, but I find it unpersuasive.)
I agree with this, because I grew up as a Traditional Catholic. In my congregation, belief in conspiracy theories was the norm among laymen and clergy. Although the sermons were not political or antisemitic, occasionally you could hear (and read) from the priests that freemasons had undermined the Church. Perhaps aided by autism, I found it all somewhat puzzling, but there seem to me clear commonalities between the faith and conspiracy theories:
1) the faith itself is a conspiracy theory. God's will is ultimately behind everything (he will drop clues in your everyday life, reminiscent of a Dan Brown novel), but he allows the devil to corrupt our world, who is the model of the nearly omnipotent and omnimalevolent agent known from conspiracy theories. Naturally he takes a personal interest in witchcraft, freemasonry, the New World Order etc.
2) truth is irrelevant. The details of a conspiracy theory never seem to matter because they feel true enough to their followers. But the same attitude is true of faith. Despite professing absolute certainty in their religion, most believers never investigate their religion intellectually, do not read the Bible etc. They are satisfied to follow the instructions of the Church, pray and attend to the sacraments regularly. I have not once heard criticism of a saint's story or a crazed pamphlet intended to encourage piety, no matter how absurd the contents. Critical thinking is simply absent. And is this not exactly how conspiracy theorists consume their information when they angrily scroll through the internet?
3) the community is what matters. Shared beliefs can unite people. Perhaps believing in conspiracies is adaptive since it allows people to keep track of others plotting behind their backs without guilelessly failing in human relationships with an evidence-based approach. I observe (and credit to my autism) that I do not instinctively believe what acquaintances tell me, but almost everyone acts this way and this is clearly important for human beings to bond and form alliances. It is probably misleading to think of conspiracy theories only as failed hypotheses to explain the world, similar to the attempts to think of religions as failed science rather than communities bound through invented traditions.
I don’t understand why the question on biblical literalism is worded the way it is: “The Bible means exactly what it says.” As opposed to what? The Bible meaning what it doesn’t say? Somebody who believes the Bible is 100% hot garbage can still believe it means what it says. Even somebody who believes the Bible communicates through grand allegorical metaphors still believes the Bible means what it says. They just have a different understanding of what it says.
I don’t think that “literalism” is even the best category to get at people’s differing views about the Bible since people’s disagreements are not about how many metaphors and similes there are per page. In any case the above question doesn’t even get at literalism. I’m not sure what it’s trying to get at.
I'm sure I'll get pushback for this but... isn't religious belief inherently a conspiracy theory?
Working off this definition: "a belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon."
Using Christianity as an example, the basis for Christian belief is that God came down to Earth in the form of Jesus and sacrificed himself to save us from ourselves. In this example, the secret but influential organization is the kingdom of God and the events this organization are responsible for are the creation of the universe, the natural order of the world, and various interactions with humans culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus.
I think you'd have to add to your definition something about the secret group's trying to conceal evidence of their involvement. Also, the phrase "secret group" implies that the group has tried to keep their identity unknown. You could theoretically still make your argument about religion, but it's less clean.
The same argument could be applied to the inventors of many key technologies, such as the wheel. We don't know who that was. So in a sense they're "secret."
Yea my argument for that would be that God could present himself to us as proof that he exists, but he doesn’t. So he is in essence trying to keep his identity unknown.
The difference with an inventor vs a deity is that no one is spreading the word of Jeff the Wheel Maker. In order for it to be a conspiracy theory someone has to be pushing it, right? There could certainly be conspiracy theories built around those inventions, but I don’t know of any.
Yea I’m thinking about specific types of religious beliefs that I would perhaps characterize as mythological. Like the virgin birth, Jesus rising from the dead, transubstantiation, or miracles attributed to saints. I’d characterize this things as conspiratorial because they allude to some sort of grand design or purpose. I wouldn’t say belief in a god is inherently conspiratorial, though.
The question on concealment isn’t conceived the best. Of course the government is concealing what it knows about some of these things by definition because there are classified documents on some of these cases. Doesn’t mean conspiracies are true.
Please double check your analysis.
I visited the Chapman website you linked to, and in each instance, it sure looks to me like your agree/disagree numbers are reversed.
For instance, 74% of Americans *disagreed* that the government was withholding information about the moon landings.
I have checked my code twice.
I coded 1 and 2 to become 1.
I coded 3 and 4 to become 0.
1 and 2 are strongly agree and agree.
3 and 4 are disagree and strongly disagree.
calculate_ci <- function(data, question, label) {
data %>%
mutate(qq = case_when(
!!sym(question) == 1 | !!sym(question) == 2 ~ 1, # Agreement
!!sym(question) == 3 | !!sym(question) == 4 ~ 0 # Disagreement
)) %>%
mean_ci(qq, wt = weight, ci = .84) %>%
mutate(type = label)
}
Ryan, I'm not sure what's up with your code or the data you received, but the labeled Stata file says you have it flipped: https://imgur.com/a/rivCOnY
So does the summary on Chapman's website: https://thearda.com/data-archive?fid=CSAF2021&tab=4&vName=Q20C (which the weighted Stata tab matches exactly; https://imgur.com/a/kSudgIv)
I'm now curious if this labeling error is also present in the rest of the analysis (potentially flipping the directions of the effects you're discussing here) or if it only affects this section/graph.
Thanks for doing the work on this. I ran the code again and the numbers are exactly like the ARDA site.
I have switched the first graph out for the correct one and amended the text. I also added an editorial note to that effect.
The other analysis is correct, though. So, I don't know exactly what I did to screw up the first graph.
Yes -- though maybe it's just the first chart, the second one looks plausible for moon landing when I spot check it. Except it doesn't quite line up, if the correct number is 100-74=36% and all those numbers are in the 20s, unless maybe there's a "not sure" type response that's making up the difference.
I thought I was going crazy for a second because my sense is that doubting the moon landing is for complete crackpots, while JFK's assassination is clearly jam-packed with suspicious details, even though I think Oswald most likely acted alone.
Oof. I was wondering about that list too because it seemed like the more plausible conspiracies were at the bottom of the list.
I suspect these are more proxy questions for level of trust in public organisations. If someone goes to church regularly they have more trust in such an organisation so are potentially less likely to distrust the government. I wonder if a correlation could be done by regular involvement in non-religious organisations such as the Scouts or charity work? It feels like (always dangerous) the more people's lives are integrated with mainstream communities of any kind, the higher the likelihood to believe in conspiracies will go down.
"Also, being politically conservative had no impact at all on belief in conspiracy theories.
While Age, Married and Politically Consevative all touch that Zero in the composite, they don't cross it by very much. I think if I were looking at that same data in medical form and advising a patient on what to do, I would tell them that while there is some uncertainty, there is not a lot of uncertainty if an intervention in a study looked like that.
When the data skews that way, nearly all on one side of a unity line, "at all" is not quite how my intellect sees it.
Or as a juror, there is a shadow of a doubt so the defendant gets acquitted in a criminal case. In a civil case there is no ambiguity about preponderance of the evidence so the jury rules where most of the data falls.
I agree. I found it odd that Burge rejected everything that nudged against the middle line. I understand that means, academically, that they aren’t officially statistically significant, but they are all still likely (with some uncertainty). Granted, Burge is an academic….
When I teach regression, I make it clear:
There is no such thing as being "highly statistically significant" or "close to statistical significance" - it's a binary metric. Either it is or it isn't.
Now, of course, there's a roaring debate among statistician about this interpretation. In this case, I have one single dataset and one single regression.
If I replicated this analysis in 2-3 more surveys and the coefficient for political conservativism was in exactly the same spot, I think a fair analysis would be something like, "the data does seem to suggest that political conservativism does have the potential to drive up conspiratorial thinking, but that's not fully evidenced in this set of results."
I think something that might make both those who never go to church and those who go to church at least once a week the least likely to believe in conspiracy theories is that these may both be groups of people who value regularity and predictability.
What does it mean about my personality that I go to church every week? Well, that I do a thing at the same time every single week, even though I don't have to. It means that I'm the sort of person who values regularity.
What does it mean about my personality that I never go to religious services? Well, that I'm committed to never doing a thing, even for social reasons. This also speaks to valuing regularity.
People who value regularity are going to be less likely to invoke explanations that violate regularity, which is what a conspiracy theory is.
I think this is close to part of the answer, though maybe instead of regularity, I'd call it "conscientiousness", per the big 5 personality factors. I also suspect that agreeableness comes into play, which is associated with willingness to trust. Disagreeable people will tend to disagree [citation needed] with what they see as the mainstream narrative. They also won't get along as well with the people at church. A certain acquaintance would yell things out at a pastor if he disagreed with him during the sermon. Naturally wasn't exactly what you'd call a "regular", but also not a complete non-attender.
Yes, I think "conscientiousness" is exactly the concept I was looking for. It's both more precise and exhaustive than my word of "regularity." Thank you for this correction.*
*Also I attend church every week and don't believe in conspiracy theories but my conscientiousness requires me to note that that just makes me an illustrative anecdote of what we're talking about, not actual data. :)
Conspiracy theories are sometimes viewed as secular superstitions, e.g. by Michael Shermer who claimed that "agenticity" (everything happens for a reason) and "patternicity" (everything is related to everything else) are common to religious and conspiratorial thinking. (There is a contrasting opinion that they became prominent only after the Enlightenment had removed God as the all-encompassing explanation for everything, but I find it unpersuasive.)
I agree with this, because I grew up as a Traditional Catholic. In my congregation, belief in conspiracy theories was the norm among laymen and clergy. Although the sermons were not political or antisemitic, occasionally you could hear (and read) from the priests that freemasons had undermined the Church. Perhaps aided by autism, I found it all somewhat puzzling, but there seem to me clear commonalities between the faith and conspiracy theories:
1) the faith itself is a conspiracy theory. God's will is ultimately behind everything (he will drop clues in your everyday life, reminiscent of a Dan Brown novel), but he allows the devil to corrupt our world, who is the model of the nearly omnipotent and omnimalevolent agent known from conspiracy theories. Naturally he takes a personal interest in witchcraft, freemasonry, the New World Order etc.
2) truth is irrelevant. The details of a conspiracy theory never seem to matter because they feel true enough to their followers. But the same attitude is true of faith. Despite professing absolute certainty in their religion, most believers never investigate their religion intellectually, do not read the Bible etc. They are satisfied to follow the instructions of the Church, pray and attend to the sacraments regularly. I have not once heard criticism of a saint's story or a crazed pamphlet intended to encourage piety, no matter how absurd the contents. Critical thinking is simply absent. And is this not exactly how conspiracy theorists consume their information when they angrily scroll through the internet?
3) the community is what matters. Shared beliefs can unite people. Perhaps believing in conspiracies is adaptive since it allows people to keep track of others plotting behind their backs without guilelessly failing in human relationships with an evidence-based approach. I observe (and credit to my autism) that I do not instinctively believe what acquaintances tell me, but almost everyone acts this way and this is clearly important for human beings to bond and form alliances. It is probably misleading to think of conspiracy theories only as failed hypotheses to explain the world, similar to the attempts to think of religions as failed science rather than communities bound through invented traditions.
It seems to me there is a growth and conspiratorial thinking on both the right and the left.
On the right: QAnon at all
On the left: RFK and crunchy left is libertarians who believe in Do it yourself mixtures of spiritual cocktails.
Are you familiar familiar with “ conspiratuality podcast?”
It was super helpful to me and understanding that conspiracies seem to know no politics or religious tradition
I don’t understand why the question on biblical literalism is worded the way it is: “The Bible means exactly what it says.” As opposed to what? The Bible meaning what it doesn’t say? Somebody who believes the Bible is 100% hot garbage can still believe it means what it says. Even somebody who believes the Bible communicates through grand allegorical metaphors still believes the Bible means what it says. They just have a different understanding of what it says.
I don’t think that “literalism” is even the best category to get at people’s differing views about the Bible since people’s disagreements are not about how many metaphors and similes there are per page. In any case the above question doesn’t even get at literalism. I’m not sure what it’s trying to get at.
I'm sure I'll get pushback for this but... isn't religious belief inherently a conspiracy theory?
Working off this definition: "a belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon."
Using Christianity as an example, the basis for Christian belief is that God came down to Earth in the form of Jesus and sacrificed himself to save us from ourselves. In this example, the secret but influential organization is the kingdom of God and the events this organization are responsible for are the creation of the universe, the natural order of the world, and various interactions with humans culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus.
I think you'd have to add to your definition something about the secret group's trying to conceal evidence of their involvement. Also, the phrase "secret group" implies that the group has tried to keep their identity unknown. You could theoretically still make your argument about religion, but it's less clean.
The same argument could be applied to the inventors of many key technologies, such as the wheel. We don't know who that was. So in a sense they're "secret."
Yea my argument for that would be that God could present himself to us as proof that he exists, but he doesn’t. So he is in essence trying to keep his identity unknown.
The difference with an inventor vs a deity is that no one is spreading the word of Jeff the Wheel Maker. In order for it to be a conspiracy theory someone has to be pushing it, right? There could certainly be conspiracy theories built around those inventions, but I don’t know of any.
Yea I’m thinking about specific types of religious beliefs that I would perhaps characterize as mythological. Like the virgin birth, Jesus rising from the dead, transubstantiation, or miracles attributed to saints. I’d characterize this things as conspiratorial because they allude to some sort of grand design or purpose. I wouldn’t say belief in a god is inherently conspiratorial, though.
Have you looked at atheist/agnostic vs levels of belief in a higher power. Guessing a much larger distinction there
Yes!
Get people to believe in things like government as God vs looking at science in addition. We believe until we know!