Psychology

Who shot the president?

Mar 20th 2003
From The Economist print edition

A possible explanation for conspiracy theories

ACCORDING to many otherwise rational people, the moon landings were faked. They point to signs of a flag fluttering in the wind in one of the photographs. It has even been suggested that the space shuttle Columbia was deliberately destroyed to prevent the launch of a probe that would prove that people never landed there. But why bother visiting the moon when there are already aliens living on Earth. The website of a group called Adult Children of Alien Abductees the internet's leading exoterranDNA support group estimates that the exoterran community is nearly 4% of Earth's life forms.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Patrick Leman of Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London, has presented the results of his research into conspiracy theories to the annual meeting of the British Psychological Society, which was held last week in Bournemouth. He thinks the reason people believe in conspiracy theories is that humans have an innate tendency to try to link major events with major causes.

To test this idea Dr Leman presented 64 students with clippings of articles that looked as though they had been taken from a newspaper. In fact, the articles had been made up. They were about the president of a fictional country, and they came in four versions, of which each student saw but one. In the first version, the president was shot and killed. In the second, he was shot but survived. In the third, the shot missed, but he died shortly afterwards from an unrelated cause. In the fourth, the shot missed and he lived. The students were asked to rate the likely truth of six statements on the subject of whether the assassin was a gunman acting alone, or whether there was a conspiracy at work. They were also asked to rate the accuracy of the facts in the article.

Some of the results were unsurprising. For example, subjects with high general levels of belief in conspiracy theories were much more doubting of the facts in the articles. That fits with what is already known; that people who like conspiracy theories tend to bat away any evidence that contradicts their point of view.

More surprisingly, Dr Leman found that if the fictional president died after the shooting, readers were much more likely to believe that the gunman was part of a conspiracy. This was true even though the other facts in the story were unchanged, and even if the death was due to an unrelated cause, such as a heart attack. This curious observation is the basis of Dr Leman's hypothesis that there is some underlying process in human psychology that assumes that the bigger the effect is, the bigger the cause must have been.

Which leaves the question of who really did shoot the president? Zoran Djindjic of Serbia (actually that country's prime minister, not its president) was gunned down in Belgrade on March 12th. The Serbian government says it believes the assassination was arranged by a criminal group of underworld gangsters linked to allies of the former president, Slobodan Milosevic. That sounds pretty conspiratorial. But really keen conspiracy theorists are advised to consider the possibility that it was, in fact, all down to a gunman on a grassy knoll.

Personal note from nixon_tokyo:

A total of 12 astronauts have walked on the moon. They were all part of NASA Apollo missions.

20 Jul 1969 Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin
19 Nov 1969 Charles (Pete) Conrad, Alan Bean
05 Feb 1971 Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell
30 Jul 1971 James Irwin, David Scott
21-23 Apr 1972 Charles Duke, John Young
11-13 Dec 1972 Harrison Schmitt, Eugene Cernan

Here is my take on the whole Moon Conspiracy.
There are 12 astronauts we claimed to have walked on the moon. In order for the U.S. to pull off such a grand conspiracy they would have to convince these 12 men by way of brainwash that they were there or sway them into lying to the public for the betterment of the country; to promote American Patriotism. More importantly, the U.S. would have to convince its allies (and foes, at the time totalitarian Russia in particular) to go along with this absurd American imperial conspiracy to legitimize our existence for whatever reason (Hey, I don't know just trying to understand the mindset of the opposing view). Okay, for the sake of argument let us just agree that Russia, China, the United States, and various other countries convinced thousands of government employees to produce this grandiose display of technological wizardry to fool the American population in believing the United States placed 12 sets of feet on the glowing planet. Who, what, where, why? Sorry, I'm missing something. The Soviet Union is no longer our cold-war enemy, correct? Thousands of classified and unclassified documents have been found, surfaced, stolen, and/or shared. No person from any of the numerous intelligent agency that had anything to do with either the Russian or American space program has come forward with damning evidence claiming the government still owes them large sums of hard cold cash for their sworn silence in the great historical cover-up. I must have a screw loose and unable to plainly see what the conspiracy folks so easily comprehend with unabated faith. Maybe I lack some basic common logical or maybe the fact that I am but a mere homosapien mortal and others are highly intelligent alien life forms from another planet. Hence, possess intelligence far beyond my limited earthly knowledge of how special Alien Powers can place thousand of government employees into a deep trance, while this plot of deception is concocted. Damn, my ignorance. Has anyone seen my Cracker Jack's special decoder ring?