It’s been a wild month for conspiracy theories in America. When President Joe Biden announced he would step down as the Democratic presidential nominee, fringe conjectures have spread regarding his whereabouts. Specifically, many were speculating whether or not he’s alive, though his first public appearance since contracting COVID on July 17 should hopefully answer that question.
Just a week before, when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire at a former President Trump campaign rally, many people also gravitated toward conspiracy theories to make sense of what happened. People on both sides of the political spectrum latched on to various strains of viral misinformation.
Some on the left believed the assassination attempt was staged in order to garner sympathy for the former president. Others on the right blamed the assassination attempt on the Democrats. The degree of factual content inherent in these conspiracy theories isn’t as relevant as the fact that they keep sprouting and many believe them at face value.
It's part of a much larger trend in America, but also across the globe. In 2022, researchers found that beliefs in conspiracy theories have increased over the last 50 years in seven different nations. In a time of chaos and uncertainty with an unprecedented presidential race, mental health experts say part of the appeal is that conspiracy theories are being used as a coping mechanism in chaotic times.
“Believing in conspiracy theories is a way for people to try to calm their nervous system during times of upheaval or uncertainty,” Rachel Bernstein, a licensed marriage and family therapist and host of the Indoctrination Podcast, told Salon. “It's a way to have an answer and to explain the unexplainable, and to ascribe meaning to an event that seems mysterious or unbelievable.”
When the human brain perceives a threat, or something stressful, it activates the nervous system and sends it into a fight-or-flight response. When this happens, a person might feel like they are under attack constantly. A person’s heart rate will increase and oxygen flows faster. Psychologist Dr. Carla Manly told Salon believing in conspiracy theories “satisfies” the human need for certainty and can temporarily soothe an overactive nervous system.
“Human beings do not like uncertainty, it increases our stress response, and that's where the coping mechanism comes in,” Manly said. “As humans, we prefer to have a certain answer — and in politics, as with many other elements of life, certainty isn't really present.”
Hence, the prevalence of conspiracy theories in today’s political climate and in crisis-times of the past. Indeed, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, conspiracy theories swirled and still cloud the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. For people who need to have a sense of certainty, Manly said, conspiracy theories help them confirm their political and social biases as well.
“It feels satisfying,” she said. “It feels safe, and reassuring.”
But Bernstein warned it’s just a band-aid fix kind of coping mechanism. In other words, it can provide people with a short-term relief, but not a long-term one.
“The inherent issue in it, though, is that it doesn't ultimately lessen anxiety but rather often gets people quite riled up, feeling they need to protect themselves more, spread the word to others for their protection, look out for other perceived dangers to protect themselves,” Bernstein said. “And not rest for a moment while looking for new information about conspiracy theories in the hope of finding evidence to prove the theories are correct.”
Bernstein added that specifically after the assassination attempt of Trump, the world was drawn in by conspiracy theories on both sides because there was also something “exciting” and “dramatic” about them which allowed the conspiracy theories to serve as a “distraction” when news in the world was “troubling.”
“It gave people on both sides of the aisle a perception of having a mystery to solve, a way to be drawn in, distracted, so they were, to a certain degree, protected from looking at what just happened and feeling the weight of it,” Bernstein said. “And seeing that it is a concerning event and a concerning trend, no matter who you were planning to vote for in the election.”
Bernstein alluded to an important point: believing in conspiracy theories can create a sense of belonging. Cult mediation specialist, Patrick Ryan, told Salon in a phone interview it reinforces a feeling of “being special” and feeling connected to “a piece of knowledge” that other people don’t have, which can be especially effective in unstable times.
“When you're in times of uncertainty and you don't know what's going on, people default to their sort of tribes,” Ryan said. “People gravitate toward these kinds of tribal, simplistic understandings of complex issues.”
Manly added that conspiracy theories enable people to “create a community of shared beliefs.”
“For many people who are isolated, they really like having people come together and say, ‘Yes, it was all rigged; there was no assassination attempt,’” she said. “Now we have community, you have this shared collective of people that you don't likely really know, because many of them are online, but you feel as if you're not isolated and as if you’ve created community — another coping mechanism.”
A 2022 paper published in the scientific journal PNAS proposed that one major driver of conspiratorial beliefs is stress. In the paper, the authors argued that stress amplifies dichotomous thinking — essentially a black and white worldview. Something is either right or wrong, good or bad, with no room for nuance. Notably, the authors suggested an interesting solution: improving basic social services to ease societal stress, which could effectively decrease conspiratorial thinking in society. "Measures reducing social stress, including economic policies such as universal base income, may be the most effective ways to counteract this vicious cycle," the authors wrote.
Balancing nuance, Manly added, is hard — but it is also one way out of conspiratorial thinking. In part because believing a conspiracy theory inadvertently can be isolating itself, despite creating a false sense of security that is “based in fear.”
Manly said she usually proposes that clients ask themselves: “How can I get out of this firmly entrenched belief over here, that is maybe isolating me or causing me angst, and get into a place where I'm able to still hold on to my beliefs, whatever they are, but also allow other people to have theirs in a very open way?”
