If you're a critical thinker, you can probably also admit that most people -- even most of those who agree with you -- hold only shallow understandings of the positions they purport to hold, and are far moreemo
Vax attacks: How conspiracy theory belief undermines vaccine supportChristina E. Farhart aElla Douglas-Durham bKrissy Lunz Trujillo c dJoseph A. Vitriol e
” Smith says. She points out that Maggiore was evenpromoted by Nate Mendel of the Foo Fighters. “It’s hard to know how many people followed her advice,” Smith emphasizes. “But certainly a lot of people heard it.”
You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don’t want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know i...
There can be a desire to fill holes in one’s understanding of life (or almost any part of life) by accepting something as true. For example, death is often feared, so belief may allow someone to deal with it by accepting a doctrine that promotes life after death. People can also ...
The spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is giving rise to fringe conspiracy theorists that have no basis in reality. In a new piece for NPR, Zach Mack shares his family's journey as his father's far-right views led him down a
For Kate Starbird, the images were frighteningly familiar. ‘QAnon Shaman’ — the online persona of Jacob Anthony Chansley, or Jake Angeli — is a known superspreader of conspiracy theories that her research group has been monitoring for years....
In this chapter, answering this question attempts to determine how people and social groups can learn sustainably, deal better, more peacefully, and more fairly with one another. To do this, they have to learn to clear or even overcome enemy images, put down patterns of defense and rejection...
Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the...
3️⃣Dying platforms?Facebook is full of AI slop. X has “free thinkers” peddling conspiracy theories. Google’s search results are telling us to eat rocks. It feels like the internet has gone bad.There’s a popular theory about why. ...