CONSPIRACY, PARANOIA AND IRONY

On April 2, 2019, Palgrave Communications  published a very interesting paper on conspiracy theories and infectious diseases. Authors investigated the Zika case, although they were not specifically interested in Zika, rather they aimed to explore the overall relation between epidemics and conspiracy theories. Ironically enough, scholars have often explained such an association by recurring  themselves to a conspiracy theory, say, by putting the blame on  misinformation, as misinformation were the main cause of conspiracy theories. In COMPARE Risk Communication, we have contested several times this approach,  that we judged  theoretically superficial and operationally misleading. Misinformation only provides the opportunity for the emerging of deeper forces, driven by the crisis of legitimacy which is affecting scientific expertise, notably in the medical and public health fields. Now, Klofstad and coll. from the University of Miami devoted a large observational study to the issue, and they came to the same conclusion that we have reached: conspiracy thinking is the best predictor whether individuals believe in conspiracy theories.  In other words, the more a person believes in conspiracy theories in various life areas, the more he believes also in conspiracy theories related to epidemics and infectious diseases. These findings have important practical implications, at least two of them are worth mentioning, (1) “researchers interested in stymying the spread of disease related conspiracy theories will need to focus on those with high levels of conspiracy thinking”; and (2) “conspiracy thinking drives people to be rightfully concerned about the virus, but [makes] them less likely to combat Zika’s spread. (…) public health efforts depend on diminishing the effect of these conspiracy theories”. To be sure, the argument that paranoid theories originate from paranoid thinking is a truism. The weakest point of the paper is indeed when  authors want to point out strategies to address conspiracy thinking because they end up suggesting scientific education, which is a bit too vague response, which does not specifically address the driver that they identified.

In fact, one of the  main strategies to contrast conspiracy thinking is irony. We are used to take very seriously conspiracy theories, and we reflect very little on how funny they instead are. The inextricable mix between irony and conspiracy theories, notably in the online world, is well illustrated by the Poe’s law, “after a poster named Nathan Poe who was baffled by creationists and those parodizing them. Poe’s Law is how jokes and memes jump the fence to become full-blown conspiracy theories on today’s internet”. Yet, if jokes may be confused with theories, this means that conspiracy theories are in fact acknowledged jokes.  One should drive paranoid thinkers to discover funny aspects of their theories. To be sure, this is a very difficult and delicate game, but it is fundamental, because it is the only practical method to loosen paranoid defences; if a paranoid comes to discover self-irony, it means that he is calling his thoughts  into question.  This exercise demands a parallel, still more difficult, exercise: if scientists want to teach self-irony, they must first apply it to themselves.