{"id":339,"date":"2007-08-14T18:11:52","date_gmt":"2007-08-15T00:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maxalien.com\/purplemass\/?p=339"},"modified":"2007-08-14T18:11:52","modified_gmt":"2007-08-15T00:11:52","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/?p=339","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Schneier: Why people believe conspiracy theories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fascinating New Scientist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/channel\/being-human\/mg19526121.300-the-lure-of-the-conspiracy-theory.html\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> (for subscribers only, but there&#8217;s a copy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.therazor.org\/?p=855\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>) on conspiracy theories, and why we believe them:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called \u201cmajor event &#8211; major cause\u201d reasoning. Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging.<\/p>\n<p>I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. Those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.schneier.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/08\/conspiracy_theo.html\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fascinating New Scientist article (for subscribers only, but there&#8217;s a copy here) on conspiracy theories, and why we believe them: So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called \u201cmajor event &#8211; major cause\u201d reasoning. Essentially, people often [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purplemass.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}