exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Prompted by "Petra" , who has embraced at leat two mad notions, one about the World Trade Centre disaster and another about the Great Fire of London, I thought I would post a thread about the motivation of such people. There was an interesting article on this in Psychology Today a couple of years ago. A key paragraph reads:
.......studies show that some people are especially prone to these beliefs, even without the motivating uncertainty of a global health crisis. [This was written during the Covid crisis] Researchers have found that this “conspiracy mentality” correlates with particular personality traits, including low levels of trust and an increased need for closure, along with feelings of powerlessness, low self-esteem, paranoid thinking, and a need to feel unique.
Here is the full article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202011/the-mind-conspiracy-theorist
Aside from certain intrinsic character traits that predispose them, people can resort to conspiracy theories to gain a way of managing situations they feel they can"t cope with, by purporting to identify a simple cause in the form of an enemy and, importantly, assigning blame.
Reading this made me realise suddenly the appeal of politicians like Trump. (See also Hofstadter's famous article from the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics )
.......studies show that some people are especially prone to these beliefs, even without the motivating uncertainty of a global health crisis. [This was written during the Covid crisis] Researchers have found that this “conspiracy mentality” correlates with particular personality traits, including low levels of trust and an increased need for closure, along with feelings of powerlessness, low self-esteem, paranoid thinking, and a need to feel unique.
Here is the full article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202011/the-mind-conspiracy-theorist
Aside from certain intrinsic character traits that predispose them, people can resort to conspiracy theories to gain a way of managing situations they feel they can"t cope with, by purporting to identify a simple cause in the form of an enemy and, importantly, assigning blame.
Reading this made me realise suddenly the appeal of politicians like Trump. (See also Hofstadter's famous article from the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics )
