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fubarobfusco comments on What causes people to believe in conspiracy theories? - Less Wrong
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"Conspiracy theory" doesn't really seem to me to be a topic of belief, but rather a way of responding to events. It seems to involve looking at a negative outcome and thinking of whom to blame for it, and how to make that blame stick, rather than trying to actually come up with truth-tracking explanations.
Interestingly two of Servant's examples aren't so much about finding an out-group to blame as deflecting blame from an in-group.
After his death, JFK became a martyr for a lot of people on the anti-war left. As such his having been assassinated by a communist sympathizer and former defector to the USSR was rather inconvenient.
In the case of 9/11 especially in a number of the countries mentioned, the need to deflect blame is even more obvious.
Why do you think so many Germans (25%!) think the US Government is responsible for the 9/11 attacks?
Outside the U.S., and even in some circles inside the U.S., anti-Americanism is a popular and cheap status-signaling attitude. (Moldbug wrote a good analysis of the phenomenon a while ago.) Clearly, in more sophisticated circles it usually has subtler forms, but among the common folk it often has rather crude expressions such as this one.
Similarity to the Reichstag Fire and the subsequent Enabling Act perhaps? The Reichstag fire probably wasn't laid by the Nazis themselves either, but since they enormously profited from it politically many people believed (and I guess still believe) that they did it.
Spot-on with the conspiracy theorists I deal with most in real life, as parent of an autistic: anti-vaccination-ers.
Raising children does funny things to human cognition (for good evolutionary reasons). Raising a disabled child is even tougher psychologically, and finding someone to blame (in their case, amoral-profit-seeking Big Pharma and regulatory capture) provides psychological comfort.
I see this less as blame deflection (since there is no official narrative to refute) and more of a frustrated pattern matching mechanism. The rise in autism rates is baffling and demands an explanation, and people who are close to the issue are going to seize on one just to protect their own psyche from relentless and fruitless questioning.
How does this account for Moon Landing conspiracy theories?
Good point: the class of "X didn't really happen" conspiracy theories doesn't seem to fit the above pattern "Find someone to blame for negative outcome Y".
Well ... maybe it does. I'm not sure if I'm not just playing with definitions here to defend my previous claim, but I'll run with it ...
The conspiracy theories that assert that "X didn't really happen" are of the form Y = "The mainstream has been convinced of false claim X". In other words, the conspiracy theory attempts to explain not merely why X is false, but why the mainstream believes X is true ... and to attribute blame for this presumably negative state of affairs.
Moon-landing deniers don't merely assert that "the moon landing didn't happen", but rather "the government, Hollywood, etc. conspired to convince the public of the false claim that the moon landing did happen".
Similarly, conspiracy-minded creationists do not merely assert "evolution is false", but rather "the Darwinist atheist science teachers tricked people into thinking that evolution is true." Holocaust deniers do not merely assert "the Holocaust didn't happen", but "the Jews tricked the world into believing the Holocaust happened."
Notably, these conspiracy theories do not merely claim that X is false, but that X is an intentional hoax by some party, who is to be blamed.
Anyway, I may just be inventing terms to justify my previous overbroad claim. But here's a test: if we look at other "X didn't really happen" conspiracy theories, the above leads us to expect to find them blaming some particular party for convincing the public of X, in order to accomplish some conspiratorial goal.
Some sort of intentional deception is pretty much the only way you can explain the existence of lots of strong evidence that X happened if you wish to argue that it didn't, so I think the blame angle on those may just be out of necessity to make the whole theory hang together.
It also doesn't really fit the 'see a negative outcome, find someone to blame' because they didn't see a negative outcome, they invented one.
I'm not criticising your hypothesis, I think it works quite well to explain a lot of cases, but I think there must be something else that you're missing.
This can just as well be "X did happen, but the mainstream has been convinced it did not." The theory that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed near Roswell, New Mexico comes to mind.
Or creationism can be seen as a combination: "Genesis 1-2 (X1) literally happened, but the atheist scientists invented evolution (X2) and tricked people into believing it."