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 moreemotionally attachedto their positions than they arelogically securein them. This ...
Vax attacks: How conspiracy theory belief undermines vaccine supportChristina E. Farhart aElla Douglas-Durham bKrissy Lunz Trujillo c dJoseph A. Vitriol e
The new guard has also been comfortable reviving the oldest debunked ideas. Both Rogan and Kennedy, for instance, have claimed that poppers could be the cause of AIDS. “A hundred percent of the people who died in the first thousand [with] AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers, ...
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...
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....
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
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...
people outraged by the conspiracy helped to promote it—in some cases far more than the supporters of the story. and algorithms—apparently absent the necessary “sentiment sensitivity” that is needed to tell the context of a piece of content and assess whether it is being shared posit...
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...