When is a Conspiracy?

A polite young person asked recently: “When you were young, were there as many conspiracy theories floating around as there are now?” My first response was: “No, nowhere near as many,” but then I had to qualify it. There was really only one but it was very, very big and could be used to explain everything bad so there wasn’t much room for others. These days, of course, the internet has expanded the available space beyond anything we could have imagined, so there’s scope for more people to spout more extreme rubbish, and far more people to hear it. This raises the critically important question of how we tell the difference between fact and fantasy, of how to sort reliable news from the fake stuff (aka misinformation), because there’s a lot of it about, and a lot hangs on it.

Naturally enough, we’d all like to be able to say we’re 100% correct in sorting genuine news from fake, other people may be fooled but oh no, not yours truly. Psychologists have put a lot of effort into working out the various factors that distinguish between critical thinkers and the gullible but they seem to be falling behind because the amount of rubbish floating around is growing by the day. Worse still, anybody who says anything another person doesn’t like is likely to be accused of being a “conspiracy theorist.” First thing to consider is the obvious question: What’s a conspiracy? The broad definition is:

A conspiracy exists when two or more people meet in secret to formulate a plan by which they can gain a benefit against the public interest and which they could not gain if their plans were known at large.

It has to be a group; meeting in secret; planning something they know they shouldn’t plan; to their advantage; and publicity is fatal to their plans. That separates it from, say, a company planning to release a product that will put other companies out of business, or a political party planning their platform before an election. If that’s all, why are people so hostile to the idea of conspiracies, that simply calling out “That’s just a conspiracy theory” can silence a speaker? The problem is that people don’t distinguish between factual conspiracies, conspiracy theories and conspiracy fictions or fantasies [1].

A factual conspiracy is when people actually do meet to conspire, and there are plenty of examples, including business, finance, politics and just plan nastiness. Conspirators are not just awful people, the ones we like to hate, it’s nice people, pillars of the establishment who go to church and support the local cat haven or train the local football juniors who also plot to rip people’s arms off. The classic economist, Adam Smith said: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” The list of business conspiracies is huge – Volkswagen, Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, Libor, WireCard, Theranos, FTX, Boeing, and a certain DJ Trump convicted of massive tax fraud. These are all factual events, proven in court, so people who say conspiracies don’t exist are saying only that they believe everything they’re told. Proven political conspiracies include the Gulf of Tonkin incident, concocted to justify attacking North Vietnam, the elaborate “weapons of mass destruction” before invading Iraq and the attempts to overturn the 2020 US election.

Next one is a conspiracy theory. A theory is an attempt to explain some observable events by filling in the gaps with suggested mechanisms that can’t yet be established as facts. With a theory, we’re trying to make sense of the parts of the process that we can see by proposals as to what is going on out of sight. The theory of evolution starts with the fact that there are lots of species on earth, and the fossil record shows there were more in the past, so it proposes a series of mechanisms to account for those facts. Before the Madoff scandal was exposed during the GFC, a forensic accountant, Harry Markopoulos, had looked at their figures and decided the results were impossible. He proposed that the unseen mechanism behind their public figures was that they were cheating, but he couldn’t get anybody in authority to listen. In fact, he was right, there had been an extensive conspiracy involving a dozen people over twenty years but he put up with a lot of abuse before he was proven right. In a conspiracy theory, you see the same events as everybody else but you disagree over the hidden mechanism behind those events. Conspiracy theories are fine as long as they remain within the bounds of possibility.

With Covid, the events to be explained were a serious respiratory illness spreading rapidly from the Chinese city of Wuhan causing sudden peaks in deaths as it progressed. From the beginning it looked like a virus. Some said it came as an accident from the city’s wet market where live animals were sold; others said it was a leak from the major virus laboratory located there which the authorities were concealing; others that it was a deliberate release to weaken the West or kill off all the old people; and some insisted the whole thing was a hoax, that there was no virus and no excess deaths. People were proposing different human actions to explain the same set of observations but they didn’t have the information to prove their case so it remained a theory. The essential point is the conspiracy: a group of people acting in secret to advance their cause improperly. With Covid, of course, there were conspiracies within conspiracies.

Finally, we have conspiracy fictions or fantasies, which is where the proposed mechanism consists of a conspiracy for which there is no evidence at all, only the claim that somebody has conspired to produce the results. In the Madoff case, Markopoulos had huge piles of data proving his case but nobody would look at it, they sent him away as a conspiracy fantasist (in fact, the SEC were trying to protect the market as a special form of conspiracy; more later). Conspiracy fantasists don’t accept that random events exist. To them, anything bad is caused by people acting malevolently. They look at unrelated events and see patterns that are simply not there (known as pareidolia, e.g people who see patterns in stars, palmar creases, tea leaves and chickens’ entrails). They are hostile to the standard explanation; they dismiss rebutting information as part of the conspiracy; they constantly shift their ground when shown to be wrong; and are incapable of drawing a line between reasonable proposals and either nonsense or frank insanity (e.g. malevolent lizard people taking over Washington). Above all, they never admit they are wrong. The clearest example is the Q-Anon movement in the US, where every conceivable bit of madness is taken as “proven fact,” amplified and spread around [2] (don’t bother trying to make sense of it; apart from hating, there is no sense).

In daily life, and especially in politics, it’s important to know who’s telling the truth and who’s just repeating nonsense, so psychologists have tried to sort out the various factors that incline people to believe in conspiracies. They look at it from two points of view: What are the personality factors that predispose to conspiratorial thinking, and what motivational factors push somebody to believe? Karen Douglas and her group at the University of Kent, UK, listed three sorts of motives:

1. Epistemic motives: to form a reliable, certain, and stable view of the world;

2. Existential motives: to feel safe and in control, particularly in the face of threat; and

3. Social motives: to reinforce a superior, albeit fragile, image of oneself and one’s ingroup.

After that, it gets confusing so it may be easier just to look at social vs psychological factors [3]. Socially, who is likely to believe that the cause of some event is a conspiracy? Men are more likely than women; younger people more than older (but that seems to be changing); unemployed more than employed; solitary more than social; right wing more than left; poorly educated more than educated; and people at the extremes of wealth rather than those in the middle. The poor and the wealthy are more likely to hold baseless conspiracy ideas than the boring middle class [4].

As for psychological factors, lower intelligence is a weak factor as some very bright people are totally involved in conspiracy theories, but they all prefer their intuition to anybody else’s facts. The strongest predictors are personality-based, meaning a mistrustful and cynical person who sees ulterior motives everywhere; a person with low self-esteem; who is easily hurt by and/or resentful of criticism or correction; socially submissive with generally poor social skills, especially jealousy; who feels left out and socially ignored or under-rated; and very often, sexually inadequate. However, the strongest factor of all is self-righteousness, the idea that I can’t possibly be wrong, or if I believe it, it must be true and anybody who disagrees is stupid or malevolent. People turn to conspiracies when events challenge their basic beliefs and they don’t want to adjust to deal with the new reality [5]. This is rife among politicians (Margaret Thatcher was a prime example), more or less the essential personality factor for getting to the top. Also among high-flying professors. None of these features guarantees a conspiratorial person but they add up.

Ordinary people with these factors are attracted to groups of like-minded individuals where they can talk about their ideas without the risk of being laughed out of the group. Socially, they form the foot soldiers of conspiracy movements such as Q-Anon or racist groups, but the leaders are different. Their leaders are usually intelligent; verbally very fluent (unlike their awkward, mumbling followers); often well-read in abstruse fields which they love to quote at people; socially dominant/aggressive; self-centred; grandiose and intensely self-righteous; highly intolerant of criticism or questioning; litigation-minded; sexually aggressive; and they can justify anything they do because they’re never wrong, it’s always somebody else’s fault. In old terms, that’s essentially the description of a creative psychopath.

The final point about conspiracies is that it’s not a conspiracy if the society says it isn’t. It doesn’t matter how crazy it is or how divorced from facts, if the society says this is what everybody has to believe, then that’s it, e.g. when everybody believed in witchcraft. At the beginning of this column, I said there was one very big conspiracy when I was growing up, which was used to explain everything: the “communist menace.” Even well into the 1970s, we were constantly reminded of the dire threat the dreaded red (and yellow) hordes posed to our blameless lifestyles, to look for the reds under out beds and never to believe a word coming from the USSR or China. It was incessant, in the newspapers, on radio and (when I moved to the city at 18) on TV. We’re perfect, the story went, they’re evil incarnate and their only goal in life is to crush us and drag us down to their level.

People who believed in this cosmic-level conspiracy weren’t mad, they just accepted what they were told and didn’t question it. They were lazy, in other words, it was comfortable and socially-convenient to go along with it whereas for anybody who questioned it, such as those ghastly long-haired university students, life suddenly got uncomfortable. But the important point is that education is significant: people can be trained to question things, never to take things at face value but to check the background facts and to reserve judgement on what they’re told. People can either be taught to believe a conspiracy, or they can be trained to see through it by questioning their own beliefs. It’s not exactly new, Martin Luther specialised in it.

That’s society at large, what about smaller societies, subcultures or even local groups? That’s easier, the person who feels the need to question the belief system will quickly get marching orders, or just walks away and looks for something better. This can be a serious problem in exclusive groups such as religious cults, where people are forced to choose between adhering to the group’s beliefs or losing contact with their families. Much more common is when a person wishes to join a group and, before being admitted, must go through a period of training in the group’s belief system, often with tests along the way. It makes no difference whether the group is religious, political, commercial, a professional association or even just a sports club, intending members are told: “This is what you have to believe. Get with it or get out.”

At this point, the distinction between a group who firmly believe a particular conspiracy fantasy and a cult becomes very blurry but if the whole society is a cult, what then? How can there be progress without questioning it? In 1484, the Church issued a papal bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, which imposed the cult of witchcraft on the whole of Europe. Everybody had to believe in witches; those who questioned it were obviously agents of the devil or witches themselves and met a fiery end. It was the same in the communist parties of the USSR, China and Eastern Europe but that topic is too big for today. My concern is mainstream psychiatry, which meets many of the criteria for a conspiracy, if not a cult. People who want to enter the profession must go through a long period of training which, in my recollection, was overtly punitive of any attempt to question the basic beliefs.

Today, psychiatrists are required to believe that they have a science of mental disorder, the point of which is not to explain anything but to stop questions or criticism. Essentially, they can say what they like about mental matters and, if questioned, they need only point to their biomedical or biopsychosocial models, which are taken to settle the matter, as in 1484 when the Pope pointed to Exodus 22:18, which says: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” However, as we know, no psychiatrist, living or dead, nor any psychologist, nor neuroscientist, nor philosopher or dreamer has ever put on paper anything that could qualify as such a model. There is an now integrative model of body and mind [6] but they’re not referring to it when they say things like:

This ‘bio-psycho-social’ model is a holistic approach that recognises the impact of social adversity and physical health on mental well-being, or

... the biopsychosocial model (is) ...the predominant theoretical framework underpinning contemporary psychiatry ... a relevant and useful component of training and practice ....or

It’s ridiculous to say there is no biomedical model. You may think they are wrong, but there are many biomedical models of psychiatric phenomena …

However, when asked to provide documentary evidence of their alleged models, they suddenly go quiet. The reason is that they all know these things don’t exist and want to keep it quiet, or are too lazy to bother checking the details and hope the professors are telling the truth. This meets criteria for a conspiracy. The only question left is whether, 40 years ago, they realised they didn’t have an intellectual leg to stand on and decided they needed to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes, for which biomedical or biopsychosocial models sounded like just what the doctor ordered. I don’t think they did. What we’re seeing is what Harry Markopoulos ran into, 20 years ago: a conspiracy of the like-minded. This is where nothing much is said but they all know what to say to outsiders who get nosy. In order to maintain their hegemony, they know intuitively to close ranks, to present a united but entirely blank front to the public which they know will repel critics and reassure the anxious.

Conspiracies of the like-minded are very real but, of course, there is never any evidence of a secret meeting where the plan was hatched. That’s what “like-minded” means. The Old Boys and Old Girls have built their careers on the illusion of intellectual competence, so they’re not suddenly going to say: “Actually, all that stuff about models is crap, we don’t have one.” Similarly, newcomers to the profession learn very quickly what to say if they want to get ahead. And so the story about psychiatry’s “scientific models” rolls along from one generation to the next, just as the witch story rolled along for several hundred years. But change may be coming, ready or not. We’ll talk about it next week.

References:

1. Douglas KM, Sutton RM (2023). What Are Conspiracy Theories? A Definitional Approach to Their Correlates, Consequences, and Communication. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 74:271–98, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031329

2. Bloom M, Moskalenko S (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles. Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford, CA: Redwood Press.

3. Douglas KM, Sutton RM, Cichocka A. 2017. The psychology of conspiracy theories. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 26(6):538–42.

4. Kyrychenko Y et al (2025). Profiling misinformation susceptibility. Personality & Ind Diff. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2025.113177

5. Bowes SM, Costello TH, Tasimi A (2023). The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Correlates. Psychol. Bull. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000392

6. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge.

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