The latest Point of Inquiry podcast features a very interesting interview with Jonathan Kay about his new book Among the Truthers, about conspiracy theory psychology. I was particularly fascinated by this part:
“There is a guy by the name of Phil Mole, really smart guy, he writes for Skeptic magazine, and he’s interviewed a bunch of conspiracy theorists, and he told me that he believes the average conspiracy theorist is much smarter than the average citizen, and the reason he gave is very interesting. It’s that smart people always feel that they have the answers. From the time they were a kid they’ve taught themselves that they’re the smartest person in the room, that they can figure things out, that they don’t need experts to tell them things because they can, you know, surf the internet and draw their own conclusions. And so they have a lot of hubris, they say well you know I’m good at this — you know, I’m a good dentist, or I’m a good stock broker, or I’m a good whatever, so obviously I’m going to be good at piecing together the details of Barack Obama’s birthplace, or I’m going to be good at the details of 9/11, or I’m going to be able to figure out if vaccines are poisoning my kid, whereas folks who maybe aren’t as smart, who’ve gone through life listening to experts, they’re not going to have that same level of hubris. And it’s true, when you talk to conspiracy theorists they’re very cocky. They are people who think they can figure anything out from first principles, which is why often they spend half their life on the internet trying to do their own research on subjects that, frankly, the rest of us just trust experts to do.”
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