Assisting Recovery from Conspiracy Theory

Richard Bolstad 2022

Creating the Radio program Twende na Wakati (Change with the Times) in Tanzania

General advice on Influencing People with Conspiracy Theories

Ash Jackson describes how she spent a year in the Australian “Freedom” movement, fighting against the medical narrative about Covid-19 (Dexter and Koob, 2022). She says she was preparing for a military uprising, and was arrested after walking up to a group of police to conduct a “citizen’s arrest” of the officers for “crimes against humanity”. She had gradually gotten into QAnon theories online, and was an avid Donald Trump fan (contrary to her previous life where, as a Trans person she knew his policies were very much opposed to her interests). She was obsessed: “I used to be in my apartment and I’d have the door barricaded with a couch and tables. I’d booby-trapped the windows. It was consuming and eating me away. Totally just destroying my soul and my friendships – I lost a lot of friends.”

For Jackson, her turning point came as she was talking to the police who arrested her, and realizing “These weren’t the Gestapo or anything… I had it all wrong.” She plunged into depression and self-harm, and finally reached out to Conspiracy recovery sites for help. The Reddit internet support page “QAnon Casualties” has 230,000 members.

Do you have friends or family members who are caught in conspiracy theories? The first thing to understand is that you don’t need to try and “rescue them”. Without their permission to talk, and without considerable care, you are almost certain to reinforce their theories by arguing. Jitarth Jadeja, a former conspiracy theorist himself, says that discussing the theories won’t help: “Say ‘it’s fine, I don’t care what you believe, but that doesn’t explain why you haven’t done the dishes or picked up Jamie from soccer the last two Sundays in a row’.” (in Dexter and Koob, 2022). Marianna Spring (2020) emphasizes a 5 point strategy:

  1. Stay calm (realize that being passionate in the discussion will actually activate the conspiracy thinking circuits in the brain, which are self-defense circuits and non-negotiable).
  2. Don’t be dismissive. Try to be empathetic about the feelings (not the theories).
  3. Encourage critical thinking. Conspiracy theorists consider themselves skeptics and experts on their topic. Rather than trying to stop them being skeptical, or ridiculing their claim to superior knowledge, encourage healthier skepticism, for example checking what economic and political gains are being made by those promoting conspiracy theories.
  4. Ask questions as a method of encouraging skepticism.
  5. Don’t expect immediate results. Realize that conspiracy theories create a sense of superiority, and to give them up is to lose self-esteem and risk depression. Conspiracy theories make the world simpler, and what you are advocating will require more complex distinctions, thus risking confusion.

Tanya Basu’s (2020) recommendations are similar, with the addition that “If I am not enjoying the discussion and getting angry, then I simply stop.” It is a sad truth that you will not be able to “convince” many of your closest friends and family members and may be better to alter the relationship so that you don’t invest so much emotional energy in it. Jovan Byford, senior lecturer in Psychology lists the following steps:

  1. Acknowledge the scale of the task. (It may not be possible to make a difference).
  2. Recognize the emotional dimension. (To the person, this is about “good and evil” not just ideas)
  3. Find out what they actually believe. Each individual has different beliefs.
  4. Establish common ground: are they trying to find science, are they concerned about health?
  5. Challenge the facts, value their argument. Looking at historical parallels often helps outframe the current conspiracy.
  6. Be realistic. Even sowing doubt now may help in a year’s time.

Personal stories are more powerful than complex theories in influencing people.

VitalSmarts is a business involved in influencing positive change around the world. The VitalSmarts group started their search for influencing skills with the question: “How do people naturally change their values, beliefs and behaviour?” Their negative conclusion is very simple: people do not usually change as a result of rational arguments – in fact rational argument usually convinces people that their old view was correct. Their positive conclusion is also simple, and consistent with what we find when we ask people to remember great influencers: values or priorities (and thus values-laden behaviours) change when people have profound experiences where they model the new value from someone they can identify with. When they have that experience they need to believe that the change in behaviour will feel good to them (ie it will be valuable), and to believe that it will be possible for them to achieve. That modelling can be done vicariously with stories.

Here’s an example from their book “Influencer” (Grenny et alia, 2013). David Poindexter is the founder of Population Communications International, which focuses on research on the use of entertainment to deliver pro-social messages aimed at improving the quality of life of audiences in the United States and abroad. During the decade of the 1970s, Poindexter was successful in mobilizing the producers and creators of numerous prime-time U.S. television shows, such as Maude, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and others, to incorporate discussions of family planning (birth control) and ending sexual stereotyping into the context of these shows. Starting in 1993, he and Martha Swai ran a radio drama called Twende na Wakati (Change with the Times) in Tanzania. The program dealt with AIDS transmission.

In Africa, AIDS prevention has faced a number of conspiracy theories – that AIDS is not caused by a virus but by western immunizations, that there are magical cures being suppressed by western medical authorities, that AIDS is a western plot to exterminate Africans, that AIDS is biological warfare, that AIDS is caused by anti-viral medicine and not by HIV, that HIV cannot be transmitted sexually, and in South Africa that AIDS is an Apartheid plot etc. (Sivelä, 2015). Here is an example, from a High School Student: “There in Germany, Hitler was killing people, so the Americans went to him and said that what he was doing was right, and wanted to know how he did it. So, he [Hitler] advised them to infect people with HIV. Hitler was killing all the Jews in Germany so that only the Germans would be left there. And so the Americans decided that if they infect us with HIV, then we will die and they will have our land to themselves (Nyaniso, 17, Masiphumelele, February 2011).”

In the west David Icke explains “HIV does not cause AIDS. HIV does not cause anything. A staggering statement given the hype and acceptance by the scientific establishment and through them the public, that the HIV virus is the only cause of AIDS. HIV is a weak virus and does not dismantle the immune system. Nor is AIDS passed on sexually…. AZT [An anti-HIV treatment] is the killer.” (Icke, 2010). David Poindexter and Martha Swai decided to challenge this kind of conspiracy theory, not with mere facts, but with an emotion-laden radio drama.

Poindexter and Swai designed their radio drama to explore the AIDS situation in a story about a Tanzanian family. Polling showed that the main male character in their story, Mkwaju, was initially an attractive macho role model to male listeners. He was abusive to his wife, drank excessively, and had sex with prostitutes regularly. However, opinions shifted over the course of the program. As he died of AIDS, his wife, Tenu, made the decision to leave him, and set up her own successful business. By 1997 listenership of this program increased to an average of 66% country-wide, or almost two thirds of the adult population. 82% of listeners said they adopted a method of HIV/AIDS prevention as a direct result of listening to the programme; 25% of new family planning adopters in Tanzania cited Twende Na Wakati as the reason. The Dodoma area of Tanzania was excluded from radio transmission for this program in the years 1993-1995, as an experimental control. The ongoing tragedy in the Dodoma (where AIDS related behaviour did not change) resulted in this controlled part of the experiment being ended after two years in order to share the benefits the rest of the country received (Singhal and Rogers, 1999, p 131-134, and p 152-171).

How do metaphorical stories create this kind of influence? Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson at Princeton University (2010) first demonstrated that when one person tells a story and another person listens, the two people show synchronised brain activity. This rapport does not occur where mere facts are transmitted, and is probably due to the activation of sensory imagery evoked by the story in both teller and listener. They summarise “Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.”

This confirms that in order to understand the story, the person imagines it in sensory detail, and thus synchronises with the story-teller, experiencing the emotional responses that the teller evokes as well. This is a very old understanding of course. When asked “Why do you speak to them in parables?” Jesus of Nazareth is said to have answered by quoting a Jewish prophet, saying that his aim was that people needed to be led through stories so “they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.” (Christian Bible, Mathew, 13.15  More literally put in older translations, “so that those with eyes should see, those with ears should hear, and those with a heart turn to me and be healed.”)

This research and the examples above emphasise that to be successful storytelling needs to meet the following criteria:

  • Establish rapport first (eg note the way people identified with Mkwaju in Tanzania).
  • Tell stories with engaging sensory details, including emotion.
  • Tell stories which reach a positive conclusion (eg the success of Tenu in Tanzania).
  • Tell stories which make it clear what specific behaviour needs to happen and shows how it is possible.

Humility: We are all just a few steps from conspiracy theories

Stories about yourself may be the most powerful. Here’s a story about how I was tricked by “fake news” during the war in Ukraine.

Were you fooled by this image below, posted just hours after Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine on February 24, 2022? On Facebook, I had been passionately posting articles in support of peace in Ukraine, since Putin’s attack began. Then, within a couple of days of the attack beginning, I posted this picture below. 17 of my friends reposted it after me. At the time, I felt uneasy about it: I knew that this is on the edge of “Whataboutism” (a cognitive fallacy when you suggest that we can’t criticise X because “What about Y”). I also knew that there are some hidden false comparisons in the image: the airstrikes in Syria that it says “What about…” are actually part of a war where the main airstrikes are also Russian strikes, but it doesn’t mention that. The airstrikes are not all of the same type or frequency at all. Air strikes in Somalia were happening one every few months, and in Ukraine they were happening every few minutes. Airstrikes in Yemen were being done by both sides in a brutal series of civil war counterattacks, whereas in Ukraine one sovereign country was simply invading another. And most of all, we don’t have to keep apologising for opposing the current events. I had posted many times criticising Saudi Arabia’s brutal war on Yemen, and the USA’s complicity in it (especially as the Saudis were the Trump family’s personal friends). But I don’t need to feel guilty about not referring to it every time I talk about Ukraine. It’s not “racist” to oppose a war in Europe.

My posting this meme was, however, a kind of “guilt response”. I guess I wanted people to know that I was open minded, and that I knew that Russia was not the only country that committed war crimes. Then, several days later, I discovered something surprising. This map was put out by Russia Today (RT) the Russian state media through a subsidiary in Berlin that allows it to evade detection by fake news sites. It was only when I read David Gilbert’s article on March 5, 2022 that I realised that I had been fooled. It was an important lesson. Only then, I actually looked up the facts, checking on sites like Wikipedia just how many air strikes had really happened on the days leading up to 24 February in each of these places, and who did them. In my desire to appear “balanced” in my viewpoint, I had neglected to check with reality. How fake news works is especially by appealing to concerns we already have (about previous US support of war crimes, and about Eurocentrism in this case).

I took down my original post, and replaced it with another, explaining what I had learned. But the bigger thing I learned was not about airstrikes in february 2022: it was about my own ability to be fooled. We need to approach those who are fooled into conspiracy theories with a sense of humility. We can all be fooled.

The process of getting caught in a conspiracy theory is just a sequence of mistakes like this one, made without ever checking the reality. And let’s face it, the reality of HIV infection or Covid-19 spread is complex. I had trained as a nurse, and I specialised and worked in Community Mental Health, doing contact tracing for sexually transmitted diseases and preparing for world-wide pandemics. In those cases, I had years of paramedical training to prepare me to parse the news about the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Most people do not, and unfortunately, they often assume that no specialist knowledge is needed. Once they are really convinced that the conspiracy is happening, they suspect that specialist knowledge is actually part of the conspiracy itself. Below you can see the sequence that leads from a simple concern with personal health to a QAnon obsession (QAnon is discussed in one of my other articles about Conspiracy Theory – see below for links).

The Line of Demarcation

Mick West points out that all conspiracy theorists and all human beings have “a line of demarcation” between what they consider to be scientifically verifiable reality and what they think is nonsense, and indeed nonsense that deliberately obscures or ridicules the whole notion of truth. That is to say that a person who believes that vaccines are more dangerous than the actual diseases they protect against may none-the-less be offended by your lumping them in with people who believe in shape changing reptilian aliens, a theory that they may well suspect is deliberately designed to make fun of, and thus dismiss their valid scientific objections. You also have a line of demarcation. Maybe you believe that President Bush deliberately planned the invasion of Iraq knowing that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (I think that is likely, for example), but you draw the line at claiming that he also planned the 911 attack as a precursor excuse (many conspiracy theorists believe that is true). West explains “Helping people out of the rabbit hole can equate to simply moving that line gradually down the extremeness spectrum. But to move their line you’ve got to understand exactly where that line of demarcation lies.” (West, 2018, p. 41).

Basic principles for Discussions

West recommends a three step process of building rapport at the start of talking with a person holding conspiracy theories:

  1. Re-express their position even “better” than they did. This is the opposite of belittling it: show that you know this would be really important if it was true.
  2. Emphasise likely points of agreement between the two of you. You may not believe that vaccines are more harmful than diseases, but you may agree that Pharmaceutical companies have done some shockingly immoral things, such as covering up the damage from Thalidomide. Tell them how strongly you agree with that.
  3. Acknowledge anything new in what they have said, that you have learned from listening to them, so they know you are not just listening, but also are willing to improve your own understanding.

In terms of directly trying to influence the conspiracy belief system, West then suggests that you have choices about whether to spotlight a specific piece of evidence or influence the entire story. Spotlight: In his example, the belief in chemtrails is often based on online images of ballast water, which is carried by large planes when they are not filled with freight. Proving specifically that these specific photos show this water and not barrels of poison, may be more useful than trying to deny the whole chemtrail theory. Showing how an anti-vaccination claim has altered the meaning of specific statistics would be a spotlight. You are not planning to dislodge the whole theory, but to ask them to reconsider one piece of evidence amongst what they believe are many pieces. Floodlight: In this case you aim to the world their conspiracy theory fits in. How many people are involved in working with airplanes and how is the industry supervised? How are vaccination injury statistics collected and what training and work supervision requirements do nurses collecting the statistics have. The aim is to show that the whole system of belief is unrealistic. Telling stories generally is a floodlight approach, of course.

Remember

In summary then, to really influence someone, restate their beliefs and values, use stories, attention to their emotional needs and respect for their own value of scepticism. However, in the end, like someone working with an addict, you need to be willing to let go and accept that they need to find their own time to get out. That’s hard, but there is no simpler way.

To remember the key points here, Think of your conversation as creating a RAMP back to sanity.

  • R Rapport: Restate their feelings and values, Ratify areas of agreement, Reinforce skepticism.
  • A Assess: Assess their line of demarcation, logical fallacies and biases.
  • M Metaphorical stories and Main mistaken facts.
  • P Patience, Politeness, and be Prepared for the possibility that change may not happen.

Other articles about Conspiracy theory:

References:

  • Basu, T. 2020. “How to talk to conspiracy theorists and still be kind” July 15, 2020, MIT technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/15/1004950/how-to-talk-to-conspiracy-theorists-and-still-be-kind/
  • Byford, J. 2021 “I’ve been talking to conspiracy theorists for 20 years – here are my six rules of engagement” July 22, 2021, The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ive-been-talking-to-conspiracy-theorists-for-20-years-here-are-my-six-rules-of-engagement-143132
  • Dexter, R. and Fox Koob, S. 2022, “Falling into the ‘freedom’ movement… and getting out.” Feb 13, 2022, The Age https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/falling-into-the-freedom-movement-and-getting-out-20220104-p59lsl.html
  • Gilbert, D. 2022. “Millions of Leftists Are Reposting Kremlin Misinformation by Mistake”. Vice News March 5, 2022. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdb5z/redfish-media-russia-propaganda-misinformation
  • Grenny, J. Patterson, K., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., and Switzler, A. 2013. Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, McGraw-Hill, New York
  • Icke, D., 2010. “AIDS: The Great Con Trick” Truth11, January 14, 2010 https://truth11.com/2010/01/14/aids-the-great-medical-con-explained-by-david-icke/
  • Sivelä JS. 2015 “Silence, blame and AIDS conspiracy theories among the Xhosa people in two townships in Cape Town”. Afr J AIDS Res. 2015;14(1):43-50. doi: 10.2989/16085906.2015.1016984. PMID: 25920982.
  • Singhal, A. & Rogers, E. (1999). Entertainment-Education: A Communication Strategy for Social Change. 10.4324/9781410607119.
  • Spring, M. 2020. “How should you talk to friends and relatives who believe conspiracy theories?” BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-55350794
  • Stephens, G.J., Silbert, L.J. and Hasson, U. 2010. “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 18, 2010
  • West, M. 2018, Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect, Skyhorse: New York.