re: Conservatives More Likely To Believe Conspiracy Theories

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I think the RW media ecosystem is more PT-Barnum like (he sewed the top half of a monkey to the back half of a fish one time and sold admission to his museum for people to see the "Fiji Mermaid" and when people called him on it, he basically justified it (paraphrasing) as "you were entertained and didn't really care if it was real in the first place"). I think the ecosystem is a bit like that now.

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That’s a weird way to describe a group of media sources that correctly reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop story while others said it was Russian collusion along with the fake Russian dossier story.

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Liberals more likely to call facts they dont like "conspiracy theories"

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Left wingers are addicted to oppressor fantasies because of this guy, who never really worked and lived off women/trust fund kids.



The king of conspiracy theories himself.

One thing that's recently been helpful to me is to come across the work of some people doing computational folkoristics (as funny as that sounds).

When they analyze the stories circulating in anti-vaccine communities, they find that they have very stable narrative structures - heroes, villains, secret knowledge, but are missing the crucial element of the vaccine-preventable diseases themselves.

Their folklore turns out to be almost entirely human and institutional - doctors, pharma, regulators, parents, whistleblowers - but almost no measles, polio, or other actual diseases. That absence makes sense if stories are filling gaps where direct sensory experience fails. if you’ve never seen polio, it can’t anchor a story that provides wholeness.

The interesting implication for me was that that narrative ecosystems select for stories that work. Malevolent actors are narratively legible. Statistical risk and absent catastrophes aren’t.

Which helps explain why debunking often feels off-target. We’re offering facts, but the other side is reasoning inside a story world where the wrong characters are on stage.

LINK

AKA, conservatives are more likely to question the party line or the pre-crafted narrative

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TigerDoc

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My man. Maybe you shouldn’t be posting in a thread about believing conspiracies. Hope all is well.

All is never well.

All media participates in sensationalism. I hate that Fox News has a big red graphic with a loud alarm sound that proclaims “BREAKING NEWS” as if there is a national emergency. In the same way when I see msnbc host saying that Donald Trump and the republicans are going to put black people back in chains, that’s pure crap.

yeah, our eyeballs are $ to them and well-reported info more facts and nuance and less speculation is expensive and less profitable. We end up getting the informational equivalent of what big food gives us.

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yeah, our eyeballs are $ to them and well-reported info more facts and nuance and less speculation is expensive and less profitable. We end up getting the informational equivalent of what big food gives us.

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Exactly. I see it on both sides. What makes it even worse is that when an actual story that seems outside of the norm and would call into question the various systems that we have entrusted as the gatekeepers of truth and justice, we immediately dismiss it because of the sensationalism that both sides use.

Didn’t this board have a massive Q thread? Kind of proving the study’s point…