Conspiracy Theorists Have Survival Instincts Working Overdrive

Dance Puppet Dance!

This Scientific American article looks into the relationship between our ability/compulsion to find patterns and meaning in everything, and the evolutionary and survival advantage that this affords us, and how some people can’t seem to turn that off.

We all innately look for patterns, connections, and explanations for the things we encounter. Conspiracy theorists seem to have this pattern matching/finding working on over-drive, and can’t turn it off even when there is no evidence backing their conclusions. We all look for patterns in the invisible forces that we perceive to be behind what we observe, but conspiracy theorists take it one step further by thinking that these forces are actually intentional agents of change. They usually think that these agents consipire to control the world, and that this control is exerted from the top down, which of course feeds conveniently into their conspiracy. A more rational person would see them as bottom-to-up events where many insignificant small events randomly intertwine to give us the randomness of what happens in life.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity