Conspiracy Theories

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Speaker 1 Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 And to be fair, it's time to come clean because for the last 10 years now, we have actually been a vehicle for a shady group of evidence-based scientists and thinkers who, without people really noticing, have laid the foundations of our civilization, increased life expectancy beyond our ancestors' wildest dreams, and also paved the ways to the stars.

Speaker 1 So, sorry,

Speaker 3 what's wrong with that?

Speaker 1 That's exactly the kind of thing that I respect to come from a so-called scientist.

Speaker 1 I call you a so-called scientist because you are a scientist. So, anyway, look, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 But I think one of the sad things is that in our hurry as human beings not to die in agony covered in pustules, sometimes we've forgotten some of the other truths, by which I mean lies,

Speaker 1 such as the moon's a spaceship, the Queen is a lizard, and Richard Madeley is actually a CIA spy plane operated by Roy Orbison and the Duchess of Kent.

Speaker 1 There he goes.

Speaker 1 I'm not even sure if you're the original Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 Because a real Brian Cox would have aged, wouldn't he?

Speaker 3 Today we we are looking at conspiracy theories.

Speaker 3 In an age in which we have access to unprecedented amounts of information, in a society which rests firmly on the foundations of science, why are there apparently increasing numbers of people who believe that the moon landings were faked, that vaccines do not work, that the earth is flat and that climate science is a hoax?

Speaker 3 Should we simply dismiss conspiracy theorists as harmless idiots, or do we have to take the rise in conspiracy theories more seriously?

Speaker 1 To enlighten us on this subject, we are joined by three people who claim to be a psychologist, a physicist, and a comedian.

Speaker 4 And they are.

Speaker 10 Hi, I'm Dr. David Robert Grimes.
I'm a cancer researcher, physicist, and science writer. I spend a lot of my time debunking conspiracy theories.

Speaker 10 I've just written a book on critical thinking called The Irrational Ape. And my favourite conspiracy theories are the idea that there's chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay,

Speaker 10 that Finland is a myth,

Speaker 10 and the other one is that I'm part of an Illuminati conspiracy to make conspiracy theorists look silly. For A, they don't need help doing that.

Speaker 10 And B, I'm so incompetent, I once stuck a drum cymbal into my own skull by mistake. So if they are using me as their point man, they're really scraping the barrel.

Speaker 5 Hi everyone, I'm Karen Douglas and I'm a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent.

Speaker 5 I've been studying conspiracy theories for about 10 years or so and my favourite conspiracy theory is the flat earth conspiracy theory only because if you're from Australia, which I am, the country is not supposed to exist.

Speaker 9 Hello, my name is Shazia Meza, and I am a comedian.

Speaker 9 And my utterly preposterous conspiracy theory is that I am Malala.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 9 yeah, it's true, I got shot in the head, and I'm now telling jokes

Speaker 9 scaringly well. And sometimes I'm in baked cakes on Channel 4.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 9 people approach me in airports and congratulate me on what I've done for girls' education.

Speaker 9 Also, there's other conspiracy theories that I like, that Jay-Z is a time-travelling vampire.

Speaker 9 But, you know, being Radio 4, you've probably never heard of Jay-Z.

Speaker 9 He's a rapper.

Speaker 3 For the Radio 4 audience, that's Jay Z.

Speaker 3 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 Can I just say, I loved the gay frog thing, it is great. I read a book all about the different theories about what pop music could do from different kinds of religious fundamentalist groups.

Speaker 1 And apparently, there was a group of Christian fundamentalists who found out that disco music made mice gay and that heavy metal music made pigs deaf. So, you can add that to your list.

Speaker 10 How many animals did they have to do these experiments on?

Speaker 1 Just one pig, imagine if that was just a pig.

Speaker 1 There was no control pig listening to James Last or Mantavani.

Speaker 3 Karen, the Royal Society's motto motto is nullius inverbo, which is on nobody's words.

Speaker 3 Which means scepticism is obviously a fundamental part of science, but what is the difference between a conspiracy theory and just sort of a reasonable scepticism?

Speaker 5 Well, a conspiracy theory is usually defined as a secret plot by powerful people who are working in secret to achieve some kind of sinister goal.

Speaker 5 So you've already got quite a lot of things going on there. And typically, with a conspiracy theory, there is not a lot of evidence.

Speaker 5 It's okay to be skeptical, it's okay to question, you can't accept all the information that you get all of the time.

Speaker 5 But with conspiracy theories, it tends to be information, layers and layers added on all the time, little bits peeled away, but constantly more layers being added, so that it's very, very difficult to kind of ever prove or disprove a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 5 So it's gone beyond healthy skepticism and it's become something a little less rational.

Speaker 3 David,

Speaker 1 you're a physicist, but you now have spent a lot of time looking at conspiracy theories. Why did you move from physics into the world of conspiracy theories?

Speaker 10 What started happening to me was I started writing about things like vaccination policy and things like climate change.

Speaker 10 And I started off on the ignorant assumption this is an information deficit problem, that you would go to people and say, oh, people will be really happy if you just give them the information.

Speaker 10 And then you get your first screed of hate mail and people

Speaker 10 really angry at you and you suddenly realize that this is a much more deeper fascinating problem and it really derails scientific discussion if you're doing something on vaccination and someone keeps insisting that no no no it's all a cover-up it is very hard to get them back on board and that kind of fascinated me because in with scientific conspiracy theories if you can call them that that's an oxymoron i know but if you can if you can take some that is about science it's an idea that scientists would have to be complicit getting scientists to agree is like herding cats Like, this idea that we could do this en masse is brilliant.

Speaker 10 So, I got really interested in trying to play devil's advocate and show that this was a terrible idea, and that just made them hate me a lot more. I got an angry email from David Icke once.

Speaker 10 I mean, it's very, very hurtful.

Speaker 3 But you came in from quite a serious angle because it was public health policy that you've been involved in.

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah. I mean, it really has a massive effect.
I mean, I don't want to

Speaker 10 make everyone miserable, but this year, the WHO said vaccine hesitancy was a top 10 threat to public health. We are looking at outbreaks of once nigh unconquered diseases.

Speaker 10 And this dark renaissance is largely driven by the fact that anti-vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories are now propagated across social media. And we like to think that

Speaker 10 we're really savvy and that we can tell falsehoods from facts. We are useless at it.
All the studies done on it show that even informed audiences are really bad at it. And we're on the back foot.

Speaker 10 And I think this is why probably we're doing the show on it tonight. Because we are on the back foot and it's really starting to bite us.

Speaker 1 And is that in terms of vaccines? I mean, for a lot of people listening to this, they probably think MMR would be the one that had the most kind of rumors and then conspiracy theories around it.

Speaker 1 But is it true that around the world it's different vaccines? It kind of often depends on kind of culture and certain kind of different ideologies.

Speaker 10 100%. One of the bigger ones, obviously, MMR is infamous here due to the Wakefield debacle.
But in other countries, it can be things like the HPV vaccine.

Speaker 10 In Japan, conspiracy theories about the HPV vaccine, which by the way prevents about 5% of all cancers worldwide, if properly administered, led uptake to fall from 70% to less than 1% within a year.

Speaker 10 In Denmark, it went from 79% to 17% within a year. And in Ireland, it went from 87% to 50% within a year.
And thanks to a sustained effort.

Speaker 10 from patient advocates and scientists and physicians, we've gone back up to the high 70s. But again, it turns on the culture and the society.

Speaker 10 The myths, however, are the exact same. That's fascinating.

Speaker 10 The vaccine might be different, but the claims made about them are unimaginative. They are recycled zombie myths that stagger on, even though they should have died years ago.

Speaker 3 Cameron,

Speaker 3 what's the motivation?

Speaker 3 Because we're going to discuss lots of conspiracy theories tonight, and some are kind of light-hearted, but this is an extremely serious problem.

Speaker 3 What's the motivation, or what do we know of the motivation, behind such a conspiracy?

Speaker 3 That vaccination is bad.

Speaker 3 What are people seeing there that they think the problem is?

Speaker 5 Well, in terms of the psychology of conspiracy theories, you find that people who are lower in critical and analytic thinking tend to be more attracted to conspiracy theories.

Speaker 5 People don't feel very powerful. They want to kind of regain a sense of power.
Conspiracy theories might make them feel that this is possible.

Speaker 5 And in terms of social kind of motives, people who are more narcissistic, you know, that kind of thing, they need to feel unique, they need to feel that they have possession of powerful knowledge that other people don't have, tend to be more driven toward conspiracy explanations than mainstream explanations as well.

Speaker 1 Shazi, thinking of critical thinking, you studied biochemistry.

Speaker 1 Do you feel that that, did that give you studying science?

Speaker 1 Do you feel that you have a, when you sometimes do see certain kind of conspiracy theories or ideas that do seem to have a hint of the strange about them, do you feel more armed?

Speaker 1 Do you think you have a better way of dealing with them?

Speaker 9 Well, my degree was in biochemistry, but I couldn't tell you anything about it.

Speaker 9 You know, if I was in the lab and I blew something up, I thought I was doing really well because I thought at least there's a reaction, you know.

Speaker 3 But biochemistry, that means you were blowing living things up.

Speaker 4 She thought it made the fox gay.

Speaker 9 I mean, I shouldn't say that I blow things up because it doesn't go well with me.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 4 stop accusing me, please, Brian.

Speaker 9 But I have to say on behalf of all my people, because I am the leader of them, that

Speaker 9 you know, I did a degree in biochemistry, but it wasn't for bad things. I was honestly, I became a science,

Speaker 9 I was a science teacher afterwards, so I put it to good use, and I never harmed anybody. And I don't know who did 9-11.

Speaker 9 But they're looking at me like, I bet you do, I bet you do.

Speaker 9 No, honestly, we don't have one big brown WhatsApp group group where we all know what's going on.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 it's gone all awkward in radio for tonight, hasn't it?

Speaker 9 But yes, it's true, I did biochemistry. And the thing is, but the thing is, I also believe in God.

Speaker 9 And people say to me, you know, you're so intelligent and you did biochemistry. How can you also believe in God?

Speaker 9 But you know, the thing with science is that, yeah, I know about the facts and I've studied biochemistry and I've done experiments and stuff, but sometimes when you also believe in God Sometimes faith is greater than the things that you see or you know or that you have been taught Because that's what faith is it's believing in the unseen believing in the unknown something greater than yourself So sometimes you think oh, you know what?

Speaker 9 I know what I know, but I also have faith and my conscience my instinct coincidence things like that make more sense to me than what I know and so sometimes although you know we have these conspiracy theories, and some are based on fact and some are not, sometimes people just believe what they believe, and what they believe inside is far greater than what you present them with.

Speaker 3 Is that

Speaker 3 a valid or a

Speaker 3 comparison that bears scrutiny?

Speaker 3 Is there an element of belief in conspiracy theories in the same way that we believe in many things, for example, as you said, a religious belief? Is there any correlation between those things?

Speaker 3 Are they si similar? Are they different?

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 there is actually.

Speaker 5 A lot of studies have shown not a really large correlation, but a reasonably, I guess, small to medium correlation between religious belief and belief in conspiracy theories as measured just I guess on

Speaker 5 scales of agreement. How much do you agree with this conspiracy, that conspiracy, another conspiracy theory?

Speaker 5 And also, superstitious belief as well. So

Speaker 5 belief in luck, chance, you know, all those sorts of things. Astrology.
Yes, astrology. Those kinds of beliefs are also associated with belief in conspiracy theories as well.

Speaker 3 I mean, you wrote the irrational ape.

Speaker 3 So it raises the question, I suppose, whether humans are... predisposed to believe things.
I suppose that's one of the most basic questions that we're discussing tonight.

Speaker 10 I think to pick up on what Carol was saying, the philosopher W. V.
Quine talked about our web of belief. And this is the idea that we don't hold our beliefs in isolation.
They're all interconnected.

Speaker 10 So if I can accept one thing, let's say I assume that climate change is a hoax, well, then I have to alter my beliefs on scientists, and are they telling us the truth, and governments, and everything else.

Speaker 10 So everything affects that. And if you create a hole in that web big enough to drive a truck through, it's not surprising that you tend to take other things on board.

Speaker 10 We see, for example, that if people who accept one conspiracy theory are incredibly likely to accept multiple ones. So I think that you can't look at your beliefs in isolation.

Speaker 10 We are not inherently rational beings. We like to pride ourselves that we are, but it's not intuitive to us.
And we do have something, and I'm a huge fan of Karen's work.

Speaker 10 In fact, the academic hi-fi that we've actually cited each other, but now I'm finally getting to meet her. So I'm going to butcher some of her work right now.

Speaker 10 And she can now correct me. But one of the things that I think is fascinating about this is that we all have this propensity towards motivated reasoning.
Like, we hold a belief.

Speaker 10 and we want it to be true. And when we're presented with conflicting information, we have two options.
We either adjust our belief or we deny it.

Speaker 10 And one of your papers, which is absolutely brilliant, was the one on conspiracy theorists who were given like contradictory conspiracy theories.

Speaker 10 One which Princess Diana had faked her own death, another one that she had been killed by the queen.

Speaker 10 And people that believed in conspiracy theories could actually hold both of these things simultaneously.

Speaker 10 But it shows you that people want to believe.

Speaker 10 And I think that's, there's a little narcissism in it, too, because I'm sure you get the emails that I do. If you don't know anything, a conspiracy theory makes you feel powerful.

Speaker 10 It makes you feel like you know stuff.

Speaker 10 You can sit there and not believe in climate change and argue with people that know their stuff and have done PhDs and higher research degrees, and you still think you know more than them.

Speaker 10 And that must be a social factor that makes you feel good about yourself.

Speaker 9 But you know, with conspiracy theories, like they are, they often start off really big, like 9-11, Brexit, Bakoff. And

Speaker 9 you know, like they start off really big, so people believe there must be a big explanation for this. They can't be something simple.

Speaker 9 So that's that's why people believe in these conspiracy theories, because they think there must be a big answer to something that was so big.

Speaker 3 True?

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's definitely true. People just don't seem to be satisfied with a mundane, everyday kind of explanation, like a car crash or, you know, someone just died or whatever.

Speaker 5 It's just boring, right? So a large event requires a large explanation. And yeah, there's studies that support that.
particular hypothesis.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it makes sense of what happened.

Speaker 1 Well, it means it's also just one thing, as opposed to all the random, as you you were saying, as opposed to all the random things, you go, oh, we're being controlled.

Speaker 1 It's like when Neil Armstrong died, and I was just tweeting about the fact that I wondered how long it would be before someone was kind of going, oh, they've killed him now because he was just about to reveal the truth.

Speaker 4 You know, it's weird, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Why would an old man die?

Speaker 4 I can't wait, you know, that.

Speaker 1 And someone immediately went, you're late. Two minutes after that, they started saying, oh, that's why they've killed him.
That's why they've killed the old man who's been ill for a while.

Speaker 1 They've killed him because he's about to say, we didn't actually go there.

Speaker 9 Do you think that that will happen to Prince Andrew?

Speaker 1 But do you know what? It's going to be so fun to see what makes the edit after it's gone to the radio.

Speaker 1 Ombudsman, I'm very excited by this because we don't know, this doesn't go out for a month, we don't know what's going to happen in between.

Speaker 4 Let's see how your powers of prescience have. But I know that there's an interesting.

Speaker 3 We've been talking about this word belief. And in this context, I suppose, conspiracy theories,

Speaker 3 we're saying

Speaker 3 it's a bad thing. It's a negative thing.
You just believe stuff. But there's also, of course, belief, as you mentioned, that belief

Speaker 3 is a part of our society and a part of what it means to be human. So, how do we separate those two versions of belief? Or can we separate those two versions of belief?

Speaker 10 I think that the real problem with conspiracy theorists is that when you show them information that undermines their hypothesis, they refuse to take that on board.

Speaker 10 In fact, they'll bend reality around it, like some kind of a warping effect on reality space-time.

Speaker 10 And one of the things, that's a real problem, because we can't live in a world where we can't agree on basic facts. So we can all hold our beliefs.

Speaker 10 And I mean, you can talk about Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria and these things that you can have religious belief and it doesn't really impact, apart from your own faith, your day-to-day interpretation of the world for the most part.

Speaker 10 But if you believe that, say, 9-11 was an inside job, that entirely shapes how you're going to interpret everything else.

Speaker 10 And if someone gives you evidence that undermines that and you refuse to accept that evidence, I think the old Paul Simon line, all lies in jest till the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, that's a serious problem.

Speaker 10 And the more we curate our own news sources, the more that we go online and we decide we don't have to read the whole newspaper, we just cherry-pick the articles that tell us what we want to hear, the bigger problem that's going to become and the more polarized we become.

Speaker 9 Beliefs can be contagious, you know,

Speaker 9 because, you know, one person believes something and then they can talk to other people about it. And because of social media, somebody can just put something out there on Twitter.

Speaker 9 And it can be another way of thinking for other people. And they'll go, oh, I never thought of that.
Yeah, maybe 9-11 was an inside job. Nobody's put that theory forward before.

Speaker 9 And so a belief can be contagious. It can help other people think another way,

Speaker 9 even if it's right or wrong.

Speaker 1 But isn't part of the problem is because there is now so much information that the idea, like, you know, I believe in things you've told me.

Speaker 1 I've never actually seen you do the double-slit experiment, this whole thing of behaving as a wave and a particle. Really? What's he really trying to get out of me? 999, HarperCollins.

Speaker 1 But it's kind of that thing where

Speaker 1 I do, but that's the thing, isn't it? Which is nearly everything.

Speaker 1 Because we have such a huge body of information, such an enormous amount of communication with such a large number of people, that you do have, it's about whittling down why would I trust that opinion and why do I not trust that opinion.

Speaker 5 But then a lot of people will go online and they'll be looking for a specific type of information as well.

Speaker 5 So if you're inclined toward a particular conspiracy theory, if you've read it before and think, well, that's interesting, then you'll go and search for that information, but you won't look for information that refutes that conspiracy theory.

Speaker 5 So then you'll end up in a little information bubble, echo chamber, whatever it is,

Speaker 5 where you only consume information that confirms your conspiracy theory and you won't be able to reach outside.

Speaker 5 I'm not saying that that doesn't happen for people who don't believe the conspiracy theory either. I think we all live in our echo chambers for on various issues.

Speaker 5 But I think that because there is so much information out there, people who are inclined toward a conspiracy theory can very, very easily find it and then reinforce it.

Speaker 5 And the attitudes become more stronger, more polarised. Small communities of people become large communities of people, and then

Speaker 5 you have a movement.

Speaker 3 What makes a good one?

Speaker 1 That's the one that I wanted to know.

Speaker 1 With both of us, when we were traveling around on tour at one point, that was when flat Earth seemed to suddenly become, and because we're travelling around as well, you suddenly go, flat Earth.

Speaker 1 How has that become in the 21st century something which is not just discussed, which seems like it must have started as a prank, that's all you can believe. Yeah, but it's a

Speaker 3 successful one. Yeah.
So, what makes a successful and persistent conspiracy theory?

Speaker 5 Yeah, the internet.

Speaker 5 Flat Earth, I don't know. I don't really know the answer to that quick question.
To be honest, this is something I would really, really like to do.

Speaker 5 I think that there are some, must be some features features of conspiracy theories that mean that they stand the test of time while others kind of

Speaker 5 just die away. I don't know what the answer to that is, and I don't know why the flat earth conspiracy theory is suddenly a thing again.
I was looking at the website today, and I still just cannot get

Speaker 3 around this.

Speaker 9 I've seen pictures of the earth and their round.

Speaker 1 But you see, that's the thing. This is a bit like David was saying, because when you do start the argument, it turns out you have to then decide a lot of other things aren't true.

Speaker 1 No one's been into space, you know, because all of those images are also not true. Shadows are somehow a lie.
Somehow,

Speaker 1 you know, all of these, and it has to build, I mean, I know, in fact, David, you wrote about this in your book. We're going back a long time.
There was a,

Speaker 1 I don't think it was a boom of flat Earth belief, but Alfred Russell Wallace, the great scientist and, you know, co-founder really of the idea of natural selection,

Speaker 1 he got caught up in a flat Earth debate, didn't he?

Speaker 10 He did, and he made the classic dumb era, never pick, choose your battles. It's a very important thing when you're going to argue with something,

Speaker 10 be it flat earth or Brexit, choose your battles, because some people aren't going to listen to you. And Alfred Wussell Wallace did this the really bad way.

Speaker 10 He answered an ad that said a flat earther wanted to basically,

Speaker 10 you know,

Speaker 10 prove to me that the world is rounded. And he went and did this, and he did it the same way you do it now.
He showed deflection curvature and all that kind of stuff. He never got his money.

Speaker 10 In fact, he got death threats. And he had to eventually

Speaker 10 get this guy put in jail who went after him. He learned a very important lesson.

Speaker 10 There's a level of delusion underneath some of these beliefs as well. And one of the really tragic examples, I guess, that we have now is the targeted individuals community.

Speaker 10 And this is a self-reinforcing echo chambers. Targeted individuals believe that they are being stalked by the government.
They're being gang stalked.

Speaker 10 And years ago, if you said that in public, people would think you had a delusional disorder, because you probably did.

Speaker 10 Now they find communities of similar-minded people, and they all get together and they say, Don't speak to anyone else, just speak with us. And in doing so, they reinforce their belief.

Speaker 10 And that has led to tragic consequences. The Navy yard shooting in Washington was a guy who thought he was a targeted individual trying to communicate with other people.

Speaker 10 When we're in echo chambers, we reinforce really bad beliefs as well.

Speaker 3 It's also not logical, because why would all the people who think the government's time

Speaker 3 get together at a conference and advertise?

Speaker 10 But it's illusory, it's the phenomenon of illusory truth as well.

Speaker 10 And we are all susceptible to this, by the way. If you hear repeated falsehoods, you might think that you're very discerning.

Speaker 10 But that actually, there's research that indicates that affects your belief itself. You start affording it more weight because you've heard it from repeated sources.

Speaker 10 Napoleon famously said that there is only one figure in all of rhetoric worth a damn, and that was repetition. And there's a degree of truth in that.

Speaker 10 If you repeat something awful enough, even if you know it's false, you start ascribing it more truth value. So YouTube, yes, is the problem.

Speaker 9 But that's what's happened with Trump. He just keeps repeating lies and people.

Speaker 3 Big lie theory.

Speaker 3 In psychological terms, so you mentioned already that there are particular character types that can be identified that make a person more susceptible to a conspiracy theory. In that case,

Speaker 3 is there a way

Speaker 3 we can

Speaker 3 is there a way that education, for example, can make people less susceptible to conspiracy theories, or is it actually just a character type that finds it rather more difficult to I suppose, as David said, difficult to change their mind when confronted with evidence?

Speaker 3 Is that inherent or is it about education?

Speaker 5 Well, I think there's a bit of both going on there, to be honest.

Speaker 5 I think a lot of psychological research would suggest that there are certain personality characteristics and certain demographic factors as well which attract people toward conspiracy theories.

Speaker 5 But education is actually one of the most consistent predictors of belief in conspiracy theories.

Speaker 5 More educated people are much less likely to take on new conspiracy theories, believe old conspiracy theories, anything.

Speaker 3 And what's the measure there that you're using? Just qualifications, degree, and things like that.

Speaker 5 Usually just level of education from no formal education to

Speaker 3 PhD.

Speaker 10 You do have huge exemptions from that, though.

Speaker 10 For example, anti-vaccine beliefs tend to correlate strongly with being middle class, because only a middle-class person would be arrogant enough to think more than they know.

Speaker 10 Then all doctors are lying to them and they know more because they went to their chakra person two weeks ago.

Speaker 10 But, like, I mean, that is, yeah, that's absolutely a huge factor.

Speaker 3 That's what we mean by demographic. So, so, yeah.
So, this is interesting, isn't it? Because I'm aware that

Speaker 3 discussions such as this can sound rather smug, for example, because it's people saying, well, those people are silly and they believe silly.

Speaker 10 They're a very smuggler.

Speaker 3 But, in fact, as you say, it is interesting that

Speaker 3 the so-called middle class, I suppose you mean sort of professional, relatively close to the masses.

Speaker 4 For the Radio 4 audience,

Speaker 3 in a sense, the Radio 4 audience, what you're saying is statistically, more people that are sincere Radio 4 may well be anti-vaxxers because they fall into that particular demographic.

Speaker 10 If you look at the outbreak

Speaker 10 in America, you have

Speaker 10 upper-class communities having measles outbreaks because

Speaker 10 they decided to get exemptions from vaccine systems and they could afford to go to the doctors to get these certificates. They are the ones that perpetuate the most anti-vaccine misinformation online.

Speaker 10 So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to, obviously, education is a massive factor, but there's also arrogance as well that has to be factored into that, too.

Speaker 5 I was just going to say the correlation between education and conspiracy belief is stable, but it's relatively small.

Speaker 5 And so, there are loads of other factors, including demographic factors like age and income, which of course is correlated with education. But there's a lot of things going on there.

Speaker 3 In terms of age, by the way.

Speaker 4 So age. What's the college?

Speaker 3 Oh, sorry, Robin, Alaska.

Speaker 3 He's actually younger than me, Robin.

Speaker 1 Welcome to this remake of Steptoe and Son by Eliophyte University.

Speaker 4 Is there a portrait within aging side?

Speaker 5 Older people tend to believe conspiracy theories less.

Speaker 5 There are some very small pockets of research that have attempted to intervene on conspiracy beliefs.

Speaker 5 We've done some research ourselves where we've tried to give people the kind of correct information about the anti-vax movement, actually, and find that if you give people this information after they've already learned about the conspiracy theory, then their attitudes don't change and they still believe the conspiracy theory.

Speaker 5 But if you, I guess, inoculate them beforehand with the correct information and then give them the conspiracy theory,

Speaker 5 it's much less powerful.

Speaker 5 But practically, that's not very easy to do because as we know when something bad happens a conspiracy theory is often just there on Twitter within two minutes and there've been another couple of strategies as well like

Speaker 5 using humor and ridicule

Speaker 5 even works in some yeah

Speaker 5 doesn't sound very nice but you know it's been found to work

Speaker 10 so you can ridicule but you have to pick your target so for vaccine hesitancy for example the vast majority of parents that don't vaccinate their children are actually not anti-vaxxers.

Speaker 10 They're victims of anti-vaxxers.

Speaker 10 Vaccine hesitancy is a spectrum. And if you hear scary stories, we have the availability heuristic.
We remember scary stories. And in remembering them, they affect our choices.

Speaker 10 So there's only a very small vocal core of anti-vaccine activists that can make other people not vaccinate. Now, they are the ones that deserve ridicule.

Speaker 10 not necessarily the parents who don't vaccinate. You can reach them.
Although there was a study done in California in 2014 that found that

Speaker 10 you could reach some parents who were hesitant, but the more you tried to reach anti-vaxxers, the hardcore, mendicious kind of cohort of that, the more firmly entrenched in their beliefs they became.

Speaker 10 You actually, they call that the backfire effect sometimes. And it's a really bizarre thing.

Speaker 10 So you're wasting your efforts trying on that core, but there's much better places that we can concentrate our efforts. We'll never stop conspiracy theories.

Speaker 10 We can just maybe, like a prophylactic against them, we can kind of have like a skepticism condom that people can't get infected with these weird beliefs, but it has to happen before.

Speaker 10 You're absolutely right. It has to happen before rather than after.

Speaker 1 What um Shair, do you do you think there are ways of arming yourself when you are, you know, in this world that we're saying where you've just got so many different points of information coming at you?

Speaker 1 Do you think there are a set of rules where you think, hang on a minute, let's just have a look at this. How can I decide the veracity of this piece of information?

Speaker 9 Well, like David said, it depends on intelligence and education and imagination and all those things that come from being an intelligent person, really, that come from education.

Speaker 9 I mean, otherwise, you just believe everything that everybody tells you. I mean, when I was a teacher, obviously, I encouraged critical thinking, but some of the kids, they just didn't want to think.

Speaker 9 So if they don't want to think that way, you can't force them to think that way. It has to come from them.

Speaker 1 Well, we have a question to the audience. What is the strangest thing that you have ever believed?

Speaker 1 Brian Cox ages like normal humans. That's from Rebecca.

Speaker 1 You called him human, though. Ah, your first conspiracy theory error.

Speaker 1 He is a replicant.

Speaker 9 Has Brian ever had Botox?

Speaker 1 No, we just swapped the heads.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he comes out from Aldehyde. I shake it, I wipe it down with an old J-cloth, pick the little bits of blue thread off, and then we put him out.

Speaker 4 He goes, I'm a real boy.

Speaker 3 Here's one

Speaker 3 related: there are some people who can't sweat.

Speaker 1 One sock of every pair turns into a coat hanger between the washing machine and the wardrobe.

Speaker 3 It says, I used to believe that div B equals zero. Well, it does.

Speaker 3 So there are no magnetic monopoles. That's what it's one of Maxwell's equations.
It's correct. That's the joke.

Speaker 1 According to my granddad, there are special trees for planting along bus routes that grow with the shape for the buses to fit through.

Speaker 4 I like that.

Speaker 1 My dad told me the hazard warning button in his car was an ejector seat, and I believed him for years because of his fanciful yet convincing account of when he used it.

Speaker 1 I love that. What brilliant dads you've got.

Speaker 4 These are, what have you got, Brian?

Speaker 3 You've got any more?

Speaker 1 You've done with that?

Speaker 3 I've just got one more. Stupidity travels faster than the speed of light.

Speaker 1 So thank you very much to Karen Douglas, David Robert Grimes, and Shazi Mirza. Next week, we are investigating coral reefs.

Speaker 1 Don't forget, by the way, if any of the conspiracy theories we've discussed today have affected you,

Speaker 1 well, that's kind of how we want you to feel, but we have set up a helpline. We're not going to give you the number because we'll call you because we know who you are.

Speaker 4 Good night.

Speaker 10 BBC Sounds Music, Radio, Podcasts.

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