After the afternoon of December 4, 2016, Edgar Madison Welch, a 28-year-old American citizen, entered a famous pizzeria called "Comet Ping Pong" in Washington, USA, with a heavy military AR rifle in his hands. -15 He fired a bullet to open one of the closed doors, went from the door looking for children bound for the purpose of sexual exploitation he thought they were, and when he did not find anyone, he decided to fire a group of other bullets at one of the walls to make sure that there were no secret rooms in the back, but he Nothing was discovered either.
Welch was not the father of one of the kidnapped girls, nor was he a police officer, and he had no qualities except that he believed in a conspiracy theory that was widely popular at that time, called "Pizzaget", which says that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate in the American elections at the time, leads a secret sect that trades Children, not only for sexual purposes, but also for killing them and drinking their blood within satanic rituals, and that this sect works for the sake of controlling the whole world.
“Conspiracy theorists design the theories to be credible and reliable,” said Dr. Shadi Shahsafari and his companion, Dr. Behman Shahbazi, of the American University of California, in an email interview with Maidan, adding: “People who fall in love with such things are motivated. Theories to act according to them, to secure their freedom, their future and the future of their loved ones. "
This duo, with a multi-domain research team at the same university in a study (1) published in 2020 in the journal PLOS ONE, is trying to answer a question that has become extremely important, now more than ever, which is how contemporary conspiracy theory arises and flourishes in the way that May explain her development of violent behavior at times?
In fact, the theory of "Betzaget" originated and flourished in cyberspace, and then launched into the real world in order to influence people's decisions and their political and social tendencies alike, which enabled this team to monitor its hypothetical paths.
Shahsafari and his colleagues used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyze information circulating online about two conspiracy theories, one fictional "Betzagit", the other real and called "Bridget", and in both cases - whether for the conspiracy theory or the actual news story - The narrative framework arises through the relationships between all the elements of the story, similar to solving a puzzle of pictures that you must collect its small parts.
The "Comet Ping Pong" pizzeria features the restaurant's logo with a star and crescent
"Conspiracy theories, unlike real conspiracies, rely on suspicious connections between different domains to make unconfirmed claims about a bigger story," Shady and Behman said in their interview with Maidan.
You can notice this difference simply, for a real political conspiracy related to allowing the construction of a factory that leaves harmful products in a residential area will require the existence of clear relations between the factory owners and the parliamentarians, for example.
On the other hand, however, one who looks at Pitzagate will find that the scopes of the fabricated conspiracy are very different.
The start was when the personal email account of John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff, was hacked and his messages were passed on to Wikileaks for publication, then social media users searched for evidence of wrongdoing to be used to promote against Clinton's campaign.
A group of users of sites such as "Reddit" and "For Chan" linked the word "pizza", in the letters, to the gender of children, after which Hillary Clinton was forced into the story, as there was another novel alleging that Clinton traveled to a secret island for the sake of Sex tourism on a private plane owned by an American businessman who had previously been accused of soliciting a minor prostitute for sex, after which other posts indicated that a pizza restaurant in Washington, called Comet Ping Pong, was associated with its owner, James Alifantes, with personalities. Prominent democracy, it is the center of child sex operations, and they justified the sincerity of their claim that the man’s name resembles the French phrase “I love children” (J'aime les enfants), and that the restaurant's logo includes a star and crescent (the slogan of the devil worshipers). A group of pizza restaurants make geographically the shape of the Devil's star
According to the study of Shadi Shahsafari, Behman Shahbazi and their companions from the University of California, USA, weak links between disparate domains are the most important features of contemporary conspiracy theory.
Do you notice that?
Not only that, we are talking about the intersection of very different places, characters, and functions, but the researchers on the team tell us in their conversation with "Maidan" that there is always one weak link between every point and point in that story, by destroying the whole plot, in addition to that, the structures The narrative around fabricated conspiracy theories tends to form and settle quickly, while narrative frameworks around actual plots may take years to stabilize. In the case of "Betzajit", all previous steps took only a few days to grow and flourish.
In fact, one of the main features of conspiracy theories is the idea of "collecting points", where you find an obsession with some people relating everything together, and you usually hear from the pioneers of conspiracy theories saying, "There is nothing that happens by chance", and that you can connect different points With each other, each of them may actually be real, but the links between them are very weak, at that point the internal contradictions of this type of conspiracy arise, which the average person usually ignores because he is captivated by the story presented before him, which is usually very interesting.
Therefore, you will find that one of them may be convinced that there is a sect made up of hundreds of thousands to millions of individuals, including pilots, astronauts and workers in all governments and airlines, all agree on one secret, which is that the Earth is flat, but this person will not bother himself to ask: Is Can statistically be one secret that hundreds of thousands of individuals hide?
This type of bias is really interesting, and for a more in-depth examination of it, the editor of "Medan" turned to Dr. Joshua Hart, an assistant professor of psychology from Union University of America, who is interested in studying conspiracy theories from a psychological point of view. People tend to be more suspicious, less confident, and need a greater sense of exclusivity, with a tendency to view the world as an inherently dangerous place, and they are also likely to discover unreal patterns as meaningful. ”
A woman wears shirt promoting a conspiracy theory promoted by QAnon.
Hart and his team conducted a survey (2) of more than 1,200 American adults. They were asked to answer a series of questions related to their personality traits, party biases, and demographic backgrounds. They were also asked whether they agreed with general conspiratorial statements, such as the existence of unknown secret groups that really control them. Global politics, groups of scholars manipulate, fabricate, or suppress evidence in order to deceive the public.
Hart said in his interview with "Maidan": "Previous research has shown that people are attracted to conspiracy theories that confirm or prove their political point of view," affirming: "We are all more likely to believe what we think is true, especially when our identity is at stake and emotions are charged." Despite this, his research findings indicate that a constellation of personality traits collectively referred to as the 'Schizotypy' is found in believers in conspiracy theories.
Dissociative personality disorder is not a pathological diagnosis, but rather is defined as “the tendency of some normal people, more than others, to judge illogical statements as profound and with purpose.” Remember that we are talking here about those who tend to infer meanings and motives from things that happen by chance or Randomly, if you show them a video of a set of randomly moving triangles, they often come up with a story related to those triangles, as if it were acting on purpose.
Osborne Dryendall agrees with that view in one aspect, but is trying to broaden it a little bit to include more people.
Driendall works as a professor of philosophy and the study of religions at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, specializing in the study of conspiracy theory, and he believes that everyone believes in at least one conspiracy theory, and at that point Driendall does not differentiate between real and fabricated conspiracy theories, but rather sees that the greater the number of conspiracy theories in In general, the number of believers in the idea of the conspiracy itself will increase accordingly.
"You might think that the referee is targeting your soccer team, especially when one of your team players is injured in the penalty area and does not count a penalty kick," said "Driendall" in a statement to us in "Maidan", adding that it may develop because you think that a lot of Referees are working against your team, especially if you think you see a clear pattern, such as telling yourself that your team has never, or rarely, received a penalty.
In this case, you are also in the captivity of a conspiracy theory, and in a study that Drendall and his colleagues recently published (3) in the journal Personality and Endeavor Differences, there are several reasons that accelerate people falling into the captivity of conspiracy theories. They are usually those with less education, and they mostly belong to political or religious groups that are extremist or tend to be extremist, as well as conspiracy theories have wider opportunities to spread in non-democratic countries.
In addition, Driendall and his cohorts put forth other, more specific reasons, consistent with Joshua Hall's view. For example, it appears that believers in conspiracy theories are more inclined toward seeing associations or relationships between unrelated things, as well as leaning toward narcissistic (self-wrapped) and persecutory thinking (which Someone is believed to follow him or try to undermine him), besides, they have more confidence in their intuition than logic and data.
Perhaps it is this special category of believers in conspiracies that believes in more than one conspiracy theory even if it is contradictory, for example you find that someone believes that a kind of aliens rules the world, and at the same time believes that there is a sect made up of 1% of people (the world's rich) They control the Earth, he will tell you about the relationship of that to the worship of Satan and then at the same time tell you that Gog and Magog are Europe and America and their inhabitants, this kind of contradiction becomes clearer the more the theory is stranger, and the more extremist its theorists.
But the biggest problem, according to Shadi and Behman, in their interview with "Maidan", is that many conspiracy theories "revolve around topics that have a personal impact on the believer." This applies to almost all conspiracy theories, including those related to the harmful effects of 5G technology. Through the "Betzaget" theory that leads people to fear for their children, to the theory of harmful vaccines, and ending with even the most naive conspiracy theories such as Flat Earth, because if you ponder a little, you will find that by extension the belief that someone is planning something to control you - and people - On a very large scale, how would you act if you had this scary feeling?
Usually, believers merge with a conspiracy theory like a flat Earth in society normally, and their theories - with friends, for example - come in the form of a mixed debate, perhaps with laughter, but on social media, they become kings of controversy and pioneers to extract links between things that seem normal or coincidental, However, it sometimes happens - and more recently - that conspiracy theorists turn to acts that may be violent.
The case of Welch is one of the examples, but it is not the only example. Consider, for example, the case of Anthony Warner, who blew himself up in Nashville, sending messages to his friends before the bombing claiming that aliens control the world, or the case of the man who stabbed his brother with a sword in Seattle in 2019 After he sent a message to one of his friends in which he said: “God told me that he was a lizard,” referring to a well-known conspiracy theory claiming that the world is ruled by a group of lizards.
The latter case is, of course, an extreme and very rare case, but what about the demolition and burning of 5G towers in several countries around the world during the spread of a large wave of conspiracy theories that say that the towers kill people?
What about the rioters who supported US President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential elections by storming the US Capitol?
They belong to a group that believes in conspiracy theories, which appeared several years ago, called "Kyo Anon".
“Once ordinary people accept the basic principles of conspiracy theory, they come to the conclusion that violent means of political participation are a reasonable outcome,” says Dr. Roland Imhof, professor of social and legal psychology at the University of Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, in a statement obtained by Maidan. .
In several experiments conducted by Imhoff (4), two groups of people were tasked with imagining their presence in a certain type of society, the first was in a society focused on conspiracy, proposing that a secret sect with wide authority controls the fate of millions, while the second group merged into a normal scenario that governments The media is transparent and trustworthy.
After that, each person was asked to answer a set of follow-up questions about the political procedures he wished to engage in, starting with "standard" procedures such as voting, participating in political seminars, or contacting the media or politicians to present their opinion on a TV program, all the way to To "non-standard" actions, such as destroying property, harming others, or other illegal behavior, the result was a tendency from the first group towards non-standard actions.
A previous study from the University of Kent (5), issued in 2019, confirmed that believers in conspiracy theory may be more inclined to engage in "minor" crimes, compared to others.
However, the main problem facing the scope of research on conspiracy theory remains that all of this is relatively new. Conspiracy theories have begun to focus more precisely with their spread electronically from 2016 to now, so there is still a lot to discover.
At the end of his conversation with "Maidan", both Shady and Behman say: "When our world becomes more virtual, people upload their ideas, opinions, discussions and reviews to the Internet, and while searching for answers, some want a unified theory that supports their views of the world, and conspiracy theories often work." To bridge this gap, "This is the problem facing our digital world then, everything is on the Internet, a huge amount of data, both truthful and false, and what you need to believe in a conspiracy theory is just linking a group of disparate events, then create your stories, and go to the world. .
Of course, at that point it cannot be neglected to indicate that we are currently living in an era that many researchers have called the "Post-truth" era. The matter is not related only to contemporary political culture. False news has become a basic feature of the era in which we live. In it, things like lying, deception and deception have become more like a daily habit or a digital lifestyle, and in the midst of this state of chaos we do not have any reference except the ability to raise the voice, or sharpen feelings to their fullest, only to win personal battles, and here you find Conspiracy theories have millions of followers.
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Sources
An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web
Something's going on here: Psychological predictors of belief in conspiracy theories.
Predictors of belief in conspiracy theory: The role of individual differences in schizotypal traits, paranormal beliefs, social dominance orientation, right wing authoritarianism and conspiracy mentality
Resolving the Puzzle of Conspiracy Worldview and Political Activism: Belief in Secret Plots Decreases Normative but Increases Nonnormative Political Engagement
Belief in conspiracy theories and intentions to engage in everyday crime