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It’s A Conspiracy!
The Psychology Behind The Success of “Plandemic” and Others
Going viral during the virus — no small feat, beating the disease at its own game. Yet the roundly discredited and debunked Plandemic video spread like a contagion, even as YouTube and Facebook attempted to ban it and warn viewers off of its false claims. People posted, reposted and shared the video, and bought the main speaker’s books, sending them up the Amazon charts. Yet, easy fact-checking proved the video’s maker and star doctor were playing fast and loose with the truth.
That didn’t matter. Still doesn’t to some. Some have already stopped reading this article, to avoid being required to consider that this thing they believed in was falsified.
What makes us so gullible? Why do we buy into Conspiracy Theories, like those proffered by Plandemic?
Science suggests we may be predisposed towards believing in conspiracies, especially in times like these.
We have a need to process information and come to an understanding of situations, to explain the causes of things, which in Psychology is called epistemic motivation. A 2017 science journal article summarizing the work done so far on the Psychology of Conspiracy Theories points out that “belief in conspiracy theories is stronger… when events are especially large…
