Conspiracies in Mind
How we create mental patterns that aren't really there.
Posted August 12, 2024 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Conspiracy theories typically get pretty bad press in the modern world.
This is occasionally a mistake. Whenever a few guys get together to knock over a liquor store, it's technically a kind of conspiracy; “conspiracy theories” are therefore not necessarily without merit in every case, especially when they are reasonable theories in criminal investigations. Real conspiracies do exist.
Yet many such theories are, to be as tactful as possible, complete rubbish. The sheer numbers of conflicting conspiracy theories, for example, surrounding the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King are difficult to keep track of, and since none of these theories really agree with each other on substantive points, it's a good bet that at least some of them are wrong.
It gets even worse outside the forensic world. Increasing numbers of people seem to believe that the United States government is conspiring to harbor and conceal space aliens. In a single memorable broadcast week, it was possible to watch documentaries concerning the presence of these secret aliens at an air base in Nevada; in secret tunnels under a volcano in Lassen National Park; at another air base in Ohio; and in secret caves beneath the Antarctic ice. In case that isn’t sufficient, there are claims of a free-range colony of space aliens, without specific government sponsorship, dwelling in caverns beneath Mount Shasta.
No matter how dedicated you are to the concept of Space Aliens, that’s just a few too many Klingons, Reptoids, and Grays on the government payroll; and unless the Corps of Engineers has been especially busy, at least some of these locations, contrary to the relevant theories, must in fact be devoid of otherworldly entities.
So what causes, psychologically, the development of bizarre conspiracy theories? Not the reasonable conspiracy theories by which detectives solve liquor store robberies, but the wild ones, featuring vast numbers of agencies, crime families, and the occasional Otherworldly Being all synergistically focused on slaughtering some poor politician? How do we get there?
One major answer lies in the concept of apophenia, the detection of patterns which simply do not exist among apparently related phenomena. Although sometimes more random, these patterns are frequently based on our prior frameworks for understanding . There is a related perceptual process, pareidolia , in which meaningful images, especially faces, can turn up where they do not in fact exist. A person might see a smiling face in the two fried eggs (for the eyes) and the bent strip of bacon (for the mouth) on a breakfast plate. Others might see an alien spaceship in the planet Venus (the celestial object most mistaken for a UFO/UAP); and if those individuals have prior beliefs in a flying-saucer-infested world, it may not be too difficult for them to believe in platoons of Federal Klingons at Area 51, or in their free-range counterparts under Mount Shasta.
Consider a wonderful if fictional example of this process, one of the clearest I have encountered. It’s drawn from the famous novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. In this novel, a brilliant Holmesian sleuth, the medieval monk William of Baskerville, investigates a seemingly senseless series of murders in a medieval monastery. The first murder was committed on the night of a terrible storm; the second body was found, bizarrely, in a huge vat of pig’s blood; the third murder involved a drowning; and the fourth victim was bludgeoned to death with an armillary sphere, a medieval form of celestial globe.
Now, William and his fellow monks are all focused intensely on religious matters, including the prophecies of the Biblical Book of Revelation. These prophecies include the sounding of Apocalyptic trumpets. The first trumpet heralds terrible storms; the second, oceans of blood; the third, floods of water; and the fourth, the crashing of celestial bodies. So, each of the murders corresponds to one of the phenomena heralded by one of the trumpets of the Apocalypse. William, quite reasonably in view of his cognitive framework , derived from the Book of Revelation, decides he is dealing with a monastic serial murderer whose murders will continue to follow the series of apocalyptic prophecies.
The problem, as William ultimately comes to acknowledge, is that he's wrong. The first murder simply occurs during winter, when storms are common; the body in the vat of blood is thrown there by a monk in a guilty panic about a completely unrelated issue; the death of the monk in water occurs because he dies of poison in a bath; and the death by armillary sphere has nothing to do with celestial apocalypse. It occurs simply because an armillary spear is a big heavy chunk of metal, ideal for use in whacking the victim to death. As William ultimately discovers, the murders are completely unrelated to the Revelation or the Apocalyptic trumpets. The pattern he seems to perceive in these murders, based on his religious cognitive framework, simply doesn't exist except in his own mind. In fact, the murders are ultimately found to have been committed by a monk obsessed with a completely unrelated issue involving a lost classical work.
This is how apophenia can operate. Our preoccupations form our cognitive frameworks, and those frameworks project themselves onto the real world in ways that may not actually reflect reality.
Most of us believe that what we see and think reflects physical reality as it is, but this is not necessarily so. Our own psychology, and the mental proclivities generated within that psychology, can create patterns which really do not exist, but which seem terribly meaningful to us. This apophenic phenomenon occurs in disparate realms, ranging from the investigation of criminal conspiracies to inquiries into flying saucers and the alien beings who putatively drive them.
This is why an understanding of our own psychology is essential if we are to succeed in any given investigation, whatever the field of inquiry. In our next Forensic View , we'll examine this idea in more depth.
Eco, U. (1983). The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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Matthew Sharps, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno. He researches forensic cognitive science among other related areas.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.