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  • 2018-08-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Scientific Study Prove That Conspiracists Are The Most Sane of All? (en)
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  • Back in 2014, the decidedly pro-conspiracy website Natural News, whose founder Mike Adams sometimes serves as a guest host for Alex Jones’ Infowars, gleefully exclaimed that science had proved conspiracy theorists are generally more sane than people who hold more conformist views -- as evidenced by their publication of an article headlined Scientific Study Reveals Conspiracy Theorists the Most Sane of All. In point of fact, the study referenced in that article, whose sole dataset comprised comments left by readers of news articles that included the term 9/11 and similar keywords, did not make such a claim. That paper, titled ‘What About Building 7?’ A Social Psychological Study of Online Discussion of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories made a series of qualitative observations based on 2,174 collected comments, as follows: Natural News derived their assertion that conspiracists are more sane from combining the latter observation about tone with their own severely flawed understanding of sampling biases: That inherently flawed interpretation relied on the somewhat terrifying assumption that the views expressed in the comments section of news articles about the September 11th terrorist attacks were a representative cross-section of the population as a whole, a rather harrowing notion. In fact, it should be unsurprising that the majority of the comments collected by the researchers were pro-conspiracy theory, as that is explicitly the kind of comment the researchers searched for: The study did not even capture a representative sample of the comments left on news stories about 9/11, much less the views of the broader population about 9/11. Therefore, the study cannot be used to make the claim that pro-conspiracy commenters are those who are now expressing what is considered conventional wisdom. With regard to the tone of comments, it is unclear where Natural News got the idea that the hostile tone of a comment responding to a 9/11 conspiracy indicates a lack of sanity, but the study at no point makes any claim about comparative sanity levels. The study did conclude, however, that conspiracism is rooted in several higher-order beliefs such as an abiding mistrust of authority, the conviction that nothing is quite as it seems, and the belief that most of what we are told is a lie. The study also noted that their results aligned with previous observations that conspiracy theories rely heavily on ‘errant data’ rather than on crafting coherent alternative explanations. If a hostile tone betrays a lack of sanity, then Natural News — an outlet whose operator created an entire website named Hoggwatch dedicated to harassing Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg — must be in desperate need of some rationality. (en)
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