Rob Brotherton > Quotes

“With rare exception, almost every study that has looked at the relationships between beliefs in different conspiracy theories has found these kinds of correlations. Americans who believe that their government is hiding aliens at Area 51 are more likely to think vaccines are unsafe. Londoners who suspect a conspiracy was behind the July 7, 2005, bombings on the London Underground are more likely to suspect that the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the result of conspiracy by the U.S. government. Austrians who believe there was a conspiracy behind a well-known crime, the kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch, are more likely to believe that AIDS was manufactured by the U.S. government. Germans who believe the Apollo moon landings were faked are more likely to believe that the New World Order is planning to take over. Visitors of climate science blogs who think climate change is a hoax are more likely to think that Princess Diana got whacked by the British royal family.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“Consider again the research showing that, in the United States, racial minorities are generally more accepting of conspiracy theories as compared to Caucasians.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“According to the BBC, more than sixty polio workers, or their drivers or guards, have been murdered in Pakistan since 2012. (The CIA, it’s worth pointing out, inadvertently fanned the flames of distrust by setting up a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad in 2011, as part of an effort to confirm Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts by having vaccine workers surreptitiously collect DNA samples from Bin Laden’s family members. When the stunningly misguided plan came to light, it put every vaccine worker in the country under suspicion.)”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“If things happen to us because of pure chance, we have little hope of comprehending, predicting, and controlling our fate. Believing that someone somewhere is in control—even if they don’t have your best interests at heart—is preferable to thinking that the course of your life is dictated by nothing more than chance.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“(Those who believed conspiracy theories were more likely, however, to believe that election results are rigged.)”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“you think you understand how a bicycle works, when all you really understand is how to work a bicycle.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“As philosopher Brian Keeley has pointed out, by weaving every niggling anomaly into a grand unifying theory, conspiracy theories can look stronger than the official stories by sheer virtue of completeness. Conspiracy theories “always explain more than competing theories, because by invoking a conspiracy, they can explain both the data of the received account and the errant data that the received theory fails to explain.” But this apparent virtue, Keeley argues, is an illusion. You can find anomalies everywhere if you look hard enough. Our understanding of complex events will always contain errors, contradictions, and gaps. History is messy, people are fallible. “Given the imperfect nature of our human understanding of the world, we should expect that even the best possible theory would not explain all the available data,” Keeley concludes.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“these are conclusions lying in wait for friendly ‘facts.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“not only did foil fail to block radio waves, it actually amplified certain frequencies—notably frequency bands allocated to the U.S. government for GPS communications.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“If there is a lesson to be learned from the story of the Umbrella Man, it is that sometimes the truth is stranger than anything we can imagine.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“conspiracy theories don’t merely aim to describe something that has happened; they purport to reveal hitherto undiscovered plots in the hopes of persuading the as yet unalerted masses.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“To admit that we know less than we think we do, and that we may be more in the dark tomorrow than we were today,” ought to be considered a virtue, they wrote. “Perhaps we should occasionally stop and say to ourselves, ‘You know, maybe I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories