Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47113-x

by Anon84 • 2 years ago

67 85 2 years ago

Thank god I figured out HFCS 2-liters in jr high. Never needed another conspiracy to explain everyone else getting progressively wackadoodle.

tomkat0789• 2 years ago

“results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almost three decades, from adolescence into midlife (N = 2215).”

Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning.

The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.

jojobas• 2 years ago

"Randomly following people creates conspiracy paranoia".

crazydoggers• 2 years ago

There’s correlation, but not causation. It’s also possible that people who are already conspiracy minded tend to be lonely because those personality traits are off-putting to others.

rnimmer• 2 years ago

paranoia and conspiratorial thinking does not lend itself to trusting others, so could go either way. e.g. paranoid people do not feel safe getting close with people.

therobots9274• 2 years ago

During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild things. Luckily I met my now fiance and she gradually talked me out of it, but I was very resistant and I got pretty upset sometimes when she challenged me on it. I have a lot more sympathy for people that fall for these things now, otherwise I would be a hypocrite.

macintux• 2 years ago

Kudos for finding your way out. It's very, very easy to rationalize your beliefs once they take hold.

therobots9274• 2 years ago

Thanks but I really just feel bad for people still in the cult. I never posted anything myself so my conscience is clear that I didn’t egg any of them on, but just reading it was enough for me to feel like I was a part of something. Really weird stuff and it’s unfortunate to see people still locked in that mindset, of thinking that any day now huge amounts of wealth will be yours and you won’t have to worry about money again. It’s kind of cruel and I’m lucky that I had a high enough income that my losses in the stock didn’t impact me.

modeless• 2 years ago

Which one?

therobots9274• 2 years ago

That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.

gagagaga7• 2 years ago

I fell into the lableak/fauci covering it up conspiracy theory

b33j0r2• 2 years ago

This doesn't resonate with me, but it strangely does because that timeframe just had these weird artifacts.

I rejected the conspiracy theories and machismo-empowerment waves of 2016 and 2019, and found myself completely isolated. My conservative friends said "join us" and my liberal friends said I wasn't woke. Kinda thought that was a fever that would pass, but besides my closest friends and family, that restaging was surprisingly permanent.

I came into my own back in freshman year of college when I was convinced about 9/11 being fishy by "Loose Change." If true, that's outrageous! So I then kept looking into it and came to understand conspiracy theories and skepticism. It's so sad. All of my friends left and right are conspiracy theorists now, 20 years later. Anti-progress pendulum or something.

therobots9274• 2 years ago

Welcome to the 21st century. It’s only gonna get worse.

ChainOfFools• 2 years ago

A big contributor to the problem is that the word conspiracy has become too broad to be useful as a test or label anymore.

Everything novel in the world arises as a result of a recursively self-propagating memetic function, one that could be characterized in its earliest phases as a conspiracy: namely that one, two, and then a handful of people settle on a common notion about something universal that needs to change, whether it's for the good or the bad of everyone else, and when successful that idea fans out memetically to others so that it accumulates the necessary physical mass and force required to cause real change.

By the time the impact of this force hits people who have no connection or even awareness of the original initiating group, it feels entirely exogenous and a search for the conspirators, those who triggered the initiation of this wave, is an understandable response especially if the change is unwanted.

As a recent example, one of the cleverest bits of social engineering in the Bitcoin project was the possibly intentional disappearance of its pseudonymous founder, conveniently removing the ability of those so exogenously impacted to identify the origin of the change with any particular individual, greatly complicating accusations of conspiracy. A much earlier example, curiously similar in form, is the origin story of the traditional founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, to whom was even ascribed authorship of that movements own founding "white paper," called the Emerald Tablet.

BriggyDwiggs42• 2 years ago

Lack of trust in institutions due to economic hardship imo

riskable• 2 years ago

Are we certain it's not the other way around? Conspiracist world views could also be what leads to loneliness (because nobody wants to hang out with you).

datameta• 2 years ago

Its probably somewhere in the middle - a feedback loop.

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

it’s not that any specific conspiracy theories are wrong just that you had more free time to reflect on things and consider the nature of mankind

dyauspitr3• 2 years ago

I think the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” and thus provide some modicum of validation for their existence. When you’re alone, you can also be as wild and wacky as you want because there’s no one to push back against it.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep”

It’s one deeper. It’s the anxiety of confronting the fact that nobody is in charge, there isn’t a secret cabal pulling the strings, it’s a bunch of competing, chaotic forces that you’re caught—somewhat meaninglessly—in the middle of.

Replacing that with a puppeteer, even a horrible one, is relieving. (The fact that inventing divine origins for natural phenomena—and cruel gods—is so well preserved across cultures extant and historic strikes at this being a need, not a comfort.)

bananabiscuit• 2 years ago

Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative. When you are interacting with people, there is pressure to conform to consensus reality, regardless of the merit of that reality. Anybody who goes against the grain, wether they are wrong, or correct and eventually vindicated, first has to face negative social pressure from their peers.

dyauspitr3• 2 years ago

It comes across to most people as obvious and negative from the get go. They’re not antonyms.

gcau• 2 years ago

Anecdotally in my experience, autistic people are a lot more likely to "not care" about social consequences and also more often think about or believe conspiracy theories. It's also not a bad thing to have some people believing in conspiracies, especially when the media/government decides that any stories about them are crazy conspiracies and everyone believes them.

Jensson• 2 years ago

Herd mentality means you share conspiracy theories with the herd, so they don't get recognized as conspiracy theories. Think Nazi Germany etc, that only gets recognized afterwards.

So you might identify more crazy stuff in autistic people who don't align with the herd, but if you sum up all the crazy stuff the herds thinks that is roughly on a similar level to an average autistic person, just that its all aligned in a thought bubble so people don't see it unless you look outside your bubble.

To illustrate, do you think a devout democrat feels an average autistic person or a republican believe in more dumb stuff? And vice versa. Regardless which of those sides are right it still adds up to a ton of crazy shit for the average herd.

polemic• 2 years ago

That is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

The only difference between a genius observation and a conspiracy theory is whether it turns out to be true or not.

rig666• 2 years ago

This is definitely true. I find there's a certain irony in society that we condemn people who aren't sceptical of anything until they are then we condemn them again.

Some of the worlds greatest thinkers and innovators suffered social execution from their peers and were deeply depressed.

mrtesthah5• 2 years ago

That's not really the mechanism at work here. Lonely people don't turn to conspiracy theorizing because they somehow happen upon "secret knowledge" that, in the absence of any external social pressures, spontaneously becomes apparent to them.

Rather, for these lonely people, conspiracy theories are how they project their own unmet emotional needs outward onto the perceived world around them -- as a coping strategy. They need to feel like they belong and are relevant in the world. This leads them to harbor resentment toward the rest of the world whom they perceive to be in league with an amorphous "them". The conspiracist's belief that he possesses "secret knowledge" about the world fulfills his needs for belonging and relevance by making him feel as if he is part of an in-group superior to the one he perceives to be alienating him[1].

But why do this through "secret knowledge"? Usually this is the conspiracy theorist's way of coping with some inexplicable world-changing event like 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the loss of their chosen political candidate in an election; they need to "know" why immediately, but cannot, and therefore move straight from the "thinking" stage (which requires holding uncertainty and multiple possible explanations) into the "knowing" stage (which is a kind of faith-based certainty about the world)[2][3].

1. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000392.pd...

2. https://overcast.fm/+CuhudQ56w

3. https://psmag.com/social-justice/thinking-vs-knowing-when-fa...

DemocracyFTW22• 2 years ago

Thanks for highlighting the role of "secret knowledge" in fringe theories (I say "fringe" not "conspiracy" b/c when you look at the "lost Atlantis" thing it may be just a story (Plato probably thought so?), or a plot by the establishment to gaslight the sheeple, or else something in between—a "true" story about a forgotten civilization that few know of (well actually no, but anyway) and still fewer believe in, for reasons that don't necessarily constitute a conspiracy).

While I'm at it I might just as well recommend David Miano's YouTube channel World of Antiquity, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU to his video "LIES told by Atlantis proponents" (accidentally had this tab open. Coincidendence!??!! I don't think so!).

BTW another red flag that occurs across all these Ancient and/or Alien Civilization fringe theories is that the argumentation of the believers disparages certain groups of people, mostly non-Europeans—"they could've never achieved this level of precision, they were much too primitive".

move straight from the "thinking" stage [...] into the "knowing" stage

I've seen this time and again, people who talk, argue and act as if it's enough for a thought to cross the mind, and it's already almost taken for granted, accepted as fact.

koonsolo2• 2 years ago

Very insightful comment. Do you also came across info on how to pull these people (mostly older) out of it?

roenxi6• 2 years ago

The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey.

To me, this says that lonely people probably have more time to reflect on the world. For example more social people don't have time to keep track of, say, the financial and electronic tracking systems that have been developed over the last 20 or so years. They really are quite frightening considering what the Nazis achieved in 1940s tech. The next industrial genocide may well be unprecedented. How alert people are to that fact is probably correlated to Q3.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps...

Saving people a click:

1...many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about.

2...politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions.

3...government agencies closely monitor all citizens.

4...events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities.

5...there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions.

clipsy• 2 years ago

That's a pretty awful poll. 3 is essentially a statement of fact, 5 is describing any "dark money" PAC, and 2 is a healthy skepticism of people who are asking to have enormous power over us.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

I dunno about awful, it is exactly what it says on the tin - do people have a "conspiracy mentality"? It is just easy to misinterpret as a negative when it is not.

jasonlotito2• 2 years ago

Note: That's the final five questions in a 38 question survey with 33 primer questions about specific conspiracy theories. It wasn't just 5 questions.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

Are you sure? The Conspiracy Theory Questionnaire is 38 questions but the CMQ is 5 questions. Today's HN link talked about the CMQ. And figure one lists 5 observed indicators which I took as a hint.

You can grep for "The 38 items administered in this study [dubbed the Conspir-acy Theory Questionnaire (CTQ) by Darwin et al., 2011] con-tained 33 items measuring the belief in specific conspiracy theoriesand five items assessing participants’ general tendency to believe inconspiracies or their conspiracy mentality. We refer to these latterfive items as the CMQ (see Appendix for complete item wording)." in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps... to see the context of what I'm going off.

nsguy4• 2 years ago

There isn't actually such a big difference between flat earthers and other conspiracy theories. The common theme is that it's the opposite of science or the scientific process.

Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is flat. The scientific process, to contrast, would drive you to try and falsify your theory via experimentation, and the flat earth theory is so easily falsifiable.

If you look at vaccines, or climates, or 9/11, or those guys that believe nobody was killed in some massacre, they all use the same sort of logic (or shall we say non-logic). Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.

It's not impossible to have conspiracies in the real world. But I'd say those are rare. The more people are involved the harder it is to keep a secret. There are also situations where the evidence isn't necessarily pointing overwhelmingly one way or another, and there is science that later gets refined or even overturned as more data/knowledge is acquired. Science isn't necessarily absolute truth, it's just the model that best explains the observable phenomena.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone.

Yeah but you're basically describing ideologues here. This is how the vast majority of political activists approach the world where, last time I checked, parties even pretending to do things by scientific consensus are rare and they tend to not, in reality, refer to much science.

If you look at vaccines ... they don't trust experts or scientists.

My mother just caught COVID last week. I was told - by people confidently claiming to speak for experts - that this wouldn't happen after she and the rest of the population were vaccinated because the spread would cease. I personally doubt the experts actually said that because they tend to be accurate in their field of expertise but good luck with that perspective around the time of the vaccine mandates.

I suspect even more than lack of trust that the issue is experts are so rare in politics that people don't recognise them when they do turn up. There are a lot of unexperts playing pretend on such topics and expert opinions are subject to misrepresentation.

linearrust3• 2 years ago

The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?"

Everyone here seems to be missing the 'essence' of the study and article. Do these conspiracy theorists influence global pandemic policy? Do flat earther conspiracy theorist affect global climate change policy?

That's what the article and the 'study' is ultimately implying. That lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers are controlling global policy.

Some think reptilians are controlling the world. Nature and these 'researchers' think that lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world.

krapp2• 2 years ago

No one is claiming that "lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world." But it is obvious that some conspiracy theories such as replacement theory, the trans "groomer" panic and COVID conspiracy theories have become mainstream within certain political demographics. QAnon actively hampers real efforts to combat sex abuse with their phantom fears of leftist sex-slave cabals. People within the Pentagon who believe in alien abductions and Skinwalker Ranch are interfering with legitimate counterintelligence work.

Pretending all conspiracy theorists are just "lonely" and harmless people who have no real effect on the world is simply naive.

Animats3• 2 years ago

It's hard to tell the real conspiracies from the fake ones.

Suggested reading: The Texas GOP 2024 platform.[1]

[1] https://texasgop.org/official-documents/#platform

ikawe• 2 years ago

There’s a lotta links to a lotta documents in this world, and this one is a few dozen pages longer than I can quickly peruse.

Anything in it you want to highlight?

Animats3• 2 years ago

No. I'd prefer that people read what they actually wrote, without emphasis.

buildsjets• 2 years ago

Dale Gribble’s close friends Hank, Bill, and Boomhauer exist as a counterpoint to this argument.

krapp2• 2 years ago

They don't actually exist, they're cartoons. They can't provide a counterpoint to arguments about the real world.

Gwiz462• 2 years ago

Bonus points if they don't ACTUALLY exist in the cartoon.

tasty_freeze• 2 years ago

It was a joke.

linearrust3• 2 years ago

Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic

What? Which ones? Undermined how?

and were used in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, raid on the Capitol.

I thought a major political party was involved. Not 'conspiracy theorists'.

They lie at the core of political and social polarization

Really? Conspiracy theorists lie at the core of political and social polarization?

fueling vaccine skepticism, climate change skepticism

Well then address the skepticism and move on. What's the issue here?

and anti-science movements such as the flat earthers

Flat earthers? Are we really suppose to pretend flat earthers have taken control over?

No specifics given. It's almost like this study and article was created solely for political purposes.

What's the point of this 'study' and article? Don't question authority?

What's a bigger conspiracy theory than 'lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers influence global pandemic contaiment efforts'?

Does anyone seriously believe lonely conspiracy theorists influence anything? That's a sillier conspiracy than reptilian aliens influencing world affairs.

ralph84• 2 years ago

Yes. The whole point of lumping flat earthers together with people who question powerful people making decisions behind closed doors is so that people stop questioning the powerful people.

adleyjulian2• 2 years ago

What? Which ones? Undermined how?

There's a long list of conspiracy theories about the vaccines. There are chips in there to track people, they're actually sterilizing people for population control, it's the mark of the beast, it's made with aborted fetuses, etc. This impacted vaccination rates. I can't think of any that would have actually increased rates, maybe something about the rich hoarding the vaccines, but that's a stretch.

Also, they measured conspiracy mindset with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which has general questions like "I think there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions".

They found that lonely teens, that then got lonelier overtime, had a higher rate of a conspiracy mentality in their 40s. It's hardly surprising but they also controlled for depression and anxiety, and found that loneliness still had a positive correlation with the mentality. I found that part interesting.

npunt• 2 years ago

Loneliness and social media are are potent mix of self-reinforcing behavior.

Loneliness creates the conditions for greater social media use because social media is a pseudo-satisfier for real human connections.

Meanwhile, short form social media like twitter & tiktok mimics a schizophrenia-like experience of hearing many unrelated voices in quick succession. Social media use is also habitual and addictive, meaning you're not entirely in control as you keep scrolling for hours on end.

It's not a stretch to imagine that one consequence of this situation is to start seeing connections where there are none, which at the extremes is the root of conspiracy thinking. Making connections is also a form of regaining control, and when played out on social media is a way to feel like you're connected with others and part of something of consequence. Of course outside of devices, this conspiratorial slide further isolates you from society, and so the self-reinforcing spiral continues.

mrtesthah5• 2 years ago

Social media exposure also facilitates the Illusory Truth effect, in which a lie repeated many times becomes perceived as truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

Guthur• 2 years ago

So there is no such thing as individuals conspiring to achieve a goal; colonisation wasn't a thing, national socialism was just some random frat parties, communism was just a book club.

The problem is assuming that everything is a conspiracy just as much as nothing is a conspiracy.

vitehozonage• 2 years ago

This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Spurious Correlations

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

mrtesthah5• 2 years ago

Would you mind citing any specific passage that you perceive to be "incredibly politicized"? Can you cite one of these "political judgments" from the paper?

tim3332• 2 years ago

I thought the first example they gave:

Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic

was maybe ironic. Listening to the people at the start who said it was likely a lab screw up rather than dismissing them as conspiracy theorists might have led to better efforts to contain it.

(for those interested here's the then head of the US CDC talking about being blocked from going over to help contain it and similar things https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119)

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Why does a submission like this get flagged. One can only guess. Maybe HN users with flagging privileges do not like the conclusions of paper published or summarised in Nature so they flag it in an attmept to stop others from discussing the submission.

DemocracyFTW22• 2 years ago

The submission has actually been flagged by undercover FBI sock puppets who want to disappear this kind of content. At least this thought just crossed my mind, so it has to be true. It's an attmept to stop us from discssing the matter. They could've just deleted this entire thread but obviously that would have been too obvious, so they do it the sneaky way. /s

incomingpain• 2 years ago

Looking at comments:

"Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative."

"This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all."

"The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO."

"The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. "

Yep, all 4 i agree with. They all have similar foundations of complaint. That the quality of this study is nowhere near good. Therefore flaggable.

This isn't really a scientific study, it's a political statement. They went in looking for a conclusion and fit their data to it.

greentxt3• 2 years ago

Right. But it's good to know Nature isn't good anymore. Maybe it never was? I always held it in pretty high regard.

mistermann3• 2 years ago

Why does a submission like this get flagged.

To minimize chances of it being used as ammunition in the future perhaps....that would be a pretty specialized motivation though.

sudshekhar• 2 years ago

The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO.

The range of arguments which may be called "conspiracy theories" is far and wide. And the truth about many theories only becomes clear after a lot of time.

What the author might have discovered instead is the tendency of lonely people to seek new belief systems starkly in contrast to the group they feel alienated from.

Molitor5901• 2 years ago

The study parameters could use some improvement. People who are lonely have smaller worlds, and less access to social information. It's only a conspiracy worldview according to the observer, but to that lonely person, it's what they know. Something feels disrespectful about the analysis in this study but I can't put my finger on it.

greentxt3• 2 years ago

Meta. Nature jumped the shark. That's sad, but important information.

Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

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