By now most people have heard that on Saturday there was a failed assassination attempt on candidate Trump at a rally. While it has only been a few days, preliminary investigation has found that 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, using a AR style rifle purchased legally by his father, acted alone in attempting to kill the former president. Again preliminarily, Crooks fits the typical profile of someone who would do this (young white male, loner, fond of guns) although his ideology is not clear at this time, and may be complicated. He is a registered Republican but has donated to liberal groups.

This is a huge event, which may alter the course of the campaign (although I am not convinced, given how galvanized public opinion is at this point). It was also an extremely close call, and we can’t help considering how world history can turn over a fraction of an inch. It’s unsettling. How people react in the moment says a lot about their psychology and the broader culture. Unsurprisingly, many people immediately reached for a conspiracy theory to help make sense of these events. Even among people I know personally, who are generally savvy and not conspiracy theorists, the possibility was immediately raised.

The conspiracy theories come into basic flavors – on the left the possibility was raised that this was a false flag operation in order to help Trump’s campaign. On the right, there were accusations that Biden was somehow responsible for the shooting, or even directly ordered it. Some comments are just political opportunism and spin, but the reaction goes way beyond that to blatant conspiracy theories, which exploded on the internet within minutes of the event.

It is a great example of motivated reasoning and the pitfalls of conspiracy thinking, so at least can serve as a teachable moment. First, at least anecdotally it is pretty blatant that these casual conspiracy theories align with the politics of the one proposing the conspiracy. In this sense, they essentially amount to wishful thinking. With blood still on his face, Trump was immediately seizing the event for its obvious political opportunity. The wishful thinking comes in when one imagines that it can all be taken away, and even reversed, if it is discovered that Trump staged the whole thing. On the other side, a desire for the event to have maximal impact, even be a death blow to Biden, leads to thinking that the assassination attempt can be tied to him. In either case, people then search for reasons to support their emotionally generated conspiracy theory.

This is definitely a core lesson from events like these – we immediately grasp for the most emotionally appealing explanation, then make a concerted efforted to support (rather than refute) that notion. That is motivated reasoning in a nutshell.

This is where conspiracy thinking comes in. As I have written many times previously, there are some common intellectual elements to conspiracy thinking. One is a search for any apparent anomalies, then declaring those apparent anomalies as evidence for a conspiracy. There are two logical problems with this approach. The first is that what counts as an “anomaly” can be subjective. The second is that anomalies can happen for many reasons, and they don’t necessarily point to a specific explanation. Often far simpler explanations are ignored or rejected in favor of the far-fetched.

In this case both sides have cited the failure of the Secret Service (SS) to prevent the shooting. How was the shooter able to place themselves on a nearby rooftop with a good site of Trump? This is a genuinely good question, and seems to have been a real SS failure. A good rule of thumb is that simple incompetence should generally be favored over more complicated explanations (an application of Occam’s Razor). While this was clearly a failure (and should be investigated with appropriate consequences) is it really an anomaly? The last time a US president was shot in an attempted assassination was Reagan in 1981, 43 years ago. We can look at that record and conclude that it is fairly impressive, and also note that a rare failure (while not acceptable) is not such an anomaly that it deserves a special explanation, like an inside job. Interestingly, both sides use the SS failure to argue for their conspiracy – Trump had the SS let it happen to stage the event, or Biden had the SS let it happen to assassinate Trump.

Others point to the fact that the SS allowed Trump to stand up and delay extraction to give his already famous raised fist. But even though SS agents are highly trained, how often are they actually in this situation (I would wager that this was a first for every agent involved) and how would they react to a personality like Tump wanting to do his thing?

What people generally do not do, and not just in the context of conspiracy thinking, is try to come up with reasons why their preferred conspiracy theory is not true. They don’t consider how hard it would be to pull something like that off. The SS is not composed of people who can be easily ordered to engage in a coverup. The risk of exposure is also far greater than the rewards, which are uncertain. Trump feels he is doing well, and cruising for victory, so why try a risky gambit? If Trump were actually assassinated, that would also inflame the right with both predictable and unpredictable consequences.

I acknowledge it’s reasonable to briefly entertain many possibilities when a dramatic event like this occurs. We seek understanding and the illusion of control that it provides. But such notions should be entertained privately and quickly dispensed with. Today, however, wild emotional speculation is immediately shared on social media. It is supported by a distrust of authority, and sensibilities about what is plausible and common that have been shaped by cinema, not reality.

Such conspiracy theories don’t have a good historical track record, but that doesn’t seem to have much effect on people’s behavior. It should. If the method you are using is wrong again and again, you should adjust your methods. It is reasonable to defer coming to any conclusion until more time has passed and there has been more investigation, to hit the pause button on making pronouncements that are likely not to age well. At the same time, we should recognize that a good default position is the one favored by Occam’s Razor. Almost by definition, those are the explanations most likely to be correct in the end. In this case, simple failure, opportunism, and chaos are enough to explain everything that happened.  Further, apparent lone wolf operations generally turn out to be lone wolf operations. Absolutely, we need to carefully investigate this and all similar events, and even consider unlikely scenarios. That is due diligence. But we shouldn’t leap over highly plausible and extremely likely explanations and settle quickly on the far fetched simply because it’s emotionally appealing.

Far fetched but emotionally appealing explanations rarely turn out to be true (except in the movies).