No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round - say, pictures taken from space - are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. Rather than treating conspiracy belief as pathological, we take the perspective that is an extreme outcome of common cognitive processes.Ĭommunity of knowledge Confirmation bias Conspiracy theories Explanatory coherence False belief Flat Earth Illusion of explanatory depth.But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that the Earth is flat, has given rise to a modern ground of flat Earth adherents. As a case study, we describe observations the first author made while attending the Flat Earth International Conference, a meeting of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. We review recent research on conspiracy theories and explain how conspiratorial thinking emerges from the interaction of individual and group processes. At the level of the community of knowledge, we explore how conspiracy communities facilitate false belief by promoting a contagious sense of understanding, and how community norms catalyze the biased assimilation of evidence. At the level of cognitive processes, we identify explanatory coherence and faulty belief updating as critical ideas. We propose a three-tiered framework for the study of conspiracy theories: (1) cognitive processes, (2) the individual, and (3) social processes and communities of knowledge. Conspiratorial thinking has been with humanity for a long time but has recently grown as a source of societal concern and as a subject of research in the cognitive and social sciences.
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