Last week on SkepticBlog Michael Shermer wrote a nice post about JFK assassination conspiracies, and not surprisingly a couple of conspiracy advocates showed up in the comments. While reading through their arguments I was struck by how consistent the tactics and tone of conspiracy theorists tends to be. They are heavy on sarcasm, ridicule, and condescension, and like to call anyone who disagrees with them “gullible.”

It also struck me that skeptics can often take a similar tone, and certainly conspiracy theorists (as with deniers) think of themselves as being the true skeptics. But they are skeptics’ evil twins – they use a tone that only the harsher skeptics use, and only when dealing with the truly absurd – those topics that we do not wish to legitimize with serious treatment, but don’t wish to ignore either. Some claims deserve ridicule, and anything less falsely elevates them.

It is true that sometimes skeptics do not properly adjust their tone when dealing with topics that range from the truly absurd to the genuinely controversial. I do think it is counterproductive and unfair to attack a well-meaning and generally scientific individual with whom you happen to disagree about a complex and controversial topic, as if they were a homeopath or creationist. This is a minor problem, for example, with the show Bullshit. Penn and Teller have created a premise for their show that does not lend itself to a nuanced discussion of a scientific controversy – and so they end up giving circumcision and second-hand smoke the same treatment as magnet therapy and feng sui.

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Maybe it was at a party, a family event, or even at work, but you have probably encountered before a person whom we would call a conspiracy theorist. Were you cornered as they became more and more animated, discussing how the shadow world government is slowly preparing for world domination using chemtrails and vaccines? Perhaps you became progressively sheepish as every logical question was met with an even more absurd bit of circular reasoning, accompanied by accusations of being naive, until physical escape was your only option.

This, of course, is an extreme example while conspiracy thinking occurs on a spectrum – we all have a little conspiracy theorist inside of us to some degree. Understanding conspiracy thinking in its subtle and extreme forms seems like an important topic of psychological investigation, and yet there is a paucity of good scientific research. Perhaps this is due to the stigma of conspiracies – academics don’t want to get the stench of conspiracy theories on them.

But there is some interesting research, and recently psychologists Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles reviewed this research in their article The Truth is Out There. This is a keeper – one for the skeptical files, if for nothing else than that they provide a handy list of references on conspiracy research.

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Eric Carlson, a listener of the SGU, is also a self-described 9/11 truther. He has written an extensive, if belated, reply to our discussion of claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists back in September of 2005. For a change of pace I thought I would answer some of his points.

I will start by noting that Eric is quite respectful throughout and does what few people, in my experience, do – he admits legitimate points on the other side, rather than finding some way to dismiss every single point we make, valid or not.  For brevity I will not review the points on which he agrees with us. You can read them for yourself on his blog post. I will simply summarize/quote his points of contention and respond.

His first point has to do with melting steel. We pointed out that, while the temperatures of the fires at the WTC towers were not hot enough to melt steel, they were hot enough to weaken the steel sufficiently to cause the collapse. Eric admits this point, but then counters:

While the Skeptic present a strong argument based on the limited facts they present, they fail to note the existence of Molten Steel in the wreckage.  While the Skeptics may call this point anomaly hunting, the educated Conspiracy Theorists will demand that physical evidence be included in the analysis.

This is an assumed premise followed by a straw man. Eric does something I find extremely common among conspiracy theorists – prematurely assuming facts that have not been established. As they say in court (at least on TV), “Objection, assumes facts not in evidence.”

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Below is an e-mail exchange I had recently with someone who takes offense that we are not more skeptical of the official version of what happened on 9/11. Their letters to me are in italics, and mine follow. It is a fairly good representation of the typical thought processes employed by the conspiracy theorists.

Hi,

See parallels?

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On the SGU boards I was recently asked to comment on some claims made regarding the American Medical Association (AMA). Here is an excerpt:

“In the U.S., science and the American Medical Association (AMA) are not completely congruent in the realm of health care as a result of an effective monopoly with regard to competing practices. This is not to say the AMA recommends non-scientific solutions, but they tend to rule out less profitable ones and they may recommend scientific, but also needlessly dangerous, solutions. Some of that is done by necessity, or at least by the necessity of profit in the private practice of medicine.”

That the AMA exerts a Big Brother degree of control over the practice of medicine is a common misconception. It is especially popular among proponents of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) or just critics of established medicine. Such criticism of mainstream science often takes the form of conspiracy mongering, and conspiracies need a villain – the more powerful and cold-hearted the better.
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Below is an exchange between me and an e-mailer responding to this article I wrote about conspiracy theories. Although the specific topic is about the assassination of JFK, and in particular the head wound, you can see many of the elements common to all conspiracy thinking here. (To help, the e-mailer’s writing is in italics)

Laurie Philips

For a society supposedly formed to promote science and reason, I find your dismissal of the “back and to the left” evidence against Oswald in the JFK assasination astonishing! You seem to refute the idea by suggesting that the “jet” of brain matter coming out of the front would have more momentum than the bullet coming in the back… even though the matter recieves its momentum solely from the bullet! Therefore, the limiting case is no movement at all, where all the bullet’s momentum is transferred to the matter. It certainly could not gain more. What were you smoking when you came up with that one??? Please don’t spread such an obvious falsehood around, somebody might believe you.

There’s all kinds of other evidence, but it’s entirely irrelevant to prove that the official story is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you find a video of Oswald hanging out of the 6th story window with a rifle, firing away… Momentum is always conserved, there must have been a shot from in front of JFK therefore at least another shooter, therefore a conspiracy.
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