[FRIAM] apophenia!

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Something's Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3176533

> Finally, there may be a set of cognitive tendencies that combine with or augment the
> association between broader or more motivation- and emotion-based personality traits on
> conspiracy beliefs. In other words, conspiracy mentality may in part reflect particular
> information-processing dispositions. For example, people who are prone to detecting agency—
> intention—behind events and actions should be more likely to entertain the possibility of
> conspiracy, and research supports this hypothesis (Douglas, Sutton, Callan, Dawtry, & Harvey,
> 2016; van der Tempel & Alcock, 2015). Along similar lines, individuals’ eagerness to seek or
> find meaning or patterns in ambiguous or random information might predispose conspiratorial
> thinking. Evidence for this can be seen in research showing that people higher in bullshit
> receptivity—a tendency to perceive profundity in nonsensical but superficially meaningful
> ideas—are more likely to engage in conspiratorial ideation (as well as to hold paranormal beliefs;
> Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2015). The same is true of people who are less
> likely to engage in analytical thinking (Swami, Voracek, Steiger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014) or
> more likely to rely on heuristics (Moulding et al., 2016). Given associations between agency
> detection and supernatural beliefs (van Elk, 2013), it also seems possible that religious
> worldviews would be associated with conspiracy beliefs (i.e., because agency detection may be a
> common cognitive mechanism underlying both).


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