What Does This Professor Know About Conspiracy Theorists That We Don’t?

Joseph Uscinski is a wanted man.

At least, he has been since last week, when the presence of a bunch of people wearing “Q” T-shirts at a Trump rally catapulted a bizarre conspiracy theory from the fringes of the internet to the center of the news. (The theory is hard to parse, but suffice it to say that it involves Hillary Clinton, the “deep state,” and child sex trafficking.) Suddenly reporters and news producers wanted to talk about how people come to believe in outlandish stories about powerful people, and how those beliefs seem to be shaping American politics.

So they turned to Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami. A co-author of American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press, 2014), Uscinski has become an explainer of conspiracy theorists — and, occasionally, an object of their suspicion. After all, as someone on Twitter recently pointed out, the professor’s name appeared in an article that somebody emailed to John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in 2014 …

It’s amusing, but also not. Wild-eyed narratives about politicians keeping sex slaves in pizzeria basements are all fun and games until some would-be vigilante shows up with a rifle — which happened in Washington shortly after the 2016 election. At a time when conspiracy theorists feel emboldened by a paranoid president, Uscinski’s work feels both relevant and perilous.

“I get calls on my personal phone, from time to time, with people yelling at me,” he says. “It’s not as bad as some people have had to deal with, but with this one it actually scares me a little bit.”

The Chronicle called him, too — not to yell, just to ask questions. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What makes people believe in conspiracies?

In order for people to buy into any conspiracy theory, they have to have a worldview in which conspiracies take place often and are responsible for events and circumstances. When people have that worldview very strongly, they tend to buy into a lot of conspiracy theories, and if they don’t have it, then they tend to be much more resistant. If you go home for Thanksgiving, after a few bottles of wine you’ll easily be able to tell which of your relatives are more prone to believing and which ones are resistant.

Is the opposite of somebody with a conspiracy mind-set somebody who believes in randomness and chaos?

Not necessarily. It’s just that they don’t believe that events and circumstances are driven by conspiracies. There are big differences between these people in terms of their attitudes and their behaviors. I don’t want it to come off as a dichotomy, with conspiracy nuts on one side and sane people on the other. It’s a continuum, and most people are somewhere in the middle.

We give our survey respondents a list of groups, and we say, “Pick the groups that you think are conspiring against us.” People at the high end of our conspiracy-thinking scale pick, on average, five groups. People at the low end pick one group. So what this tells you is that the people on that high end see a lot of malevolent groups out there working against them.

I’m interested in your perspective on conspiracy theories as a teacher of college students. Conspiracy theories are not superstitious or faith-based; they involve assembling evidence, analyzing it, making connections. Stylistically, it’s not unlike what people learn to do in school. Do you talk to your students about how to tell the difference between critical thinking and conspiracy thinking?

Yeah, I teach a course on conspiracy theories, and one of the exercises is that I have them design their own conspiracy theory. I tell them, “The crazier the better.” Some of them involve, like, “Donald Trump is a robot.” All sorts of weird things. Then they go to the internet and get all the evidence they could, and sort of string it together. And by the time they’re done they have a fairly convincing case.

And then they had to switch with another student, who would then debunk it and tear it to shreds. When the student who made up the conspiracy theory had a chance to respond to the debunker, a lot of times they were offended, even knowing that they made it up.

Genuinely offended? Like, they weren’t play-acting?

There were some who actually got upset. Like, “I’ve put all the evidence together for this, that shows it’s true.” People don’t like being told they’re wrong. And it’s very easy, when you start collecting evidence for something, to just get into the mind-set of, “Oh, this is true.”

I imagine the same thing happens with people who read and believe conspiracy theories, even if they didn’t make them up themselves. It feels personal when somebody tries to debunk them. They might just dig in.

Of course. We’re talking about things that are very important and sacred. We’re talking about how we view truth and power, and how power is used when no one’s looking.

Here’s the thing. Conspiracy theorists have a reputation that, “Oh, we can’t argue with them, they never change their mind.” But everybody’s like that. I mean, go have a conversation with a Jew and convert them to be a Catholic. Go have a conversation with a Democrat and convert them to a Republican. It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to change people’s minds on things with an argument. Because a lot of these views are deep-seated. They’re ingrained in us.

Is there a role for teachers, and especially professors, to play in challenging conspiracy thinking, other than to teach students about how it works, one classroom at a time?

That’s something that scholars are working on. I know that there are some countries, like France, that are concerned about the amount of conspiracy theories in the country, particularly following the terrorist attacks that they’ve endured, and they’ve invested some money into coming up with educational programs. In terms of what we should do in the United States, I just don’t know yet.

I do know that when I teach my classes, a lot of the kids take the course because they like conspiracy theories. They’re attracted to the title of the course, and they come in expecting to hunt down the true assassin of JFK. That’s not what we’re going to do; we’re going to find out why they believe what they believe. And then by the end many of them are just like, “You know, a lot of the beliefs I felt were just baloney. There was nothing supporting them but cobwebs and lies.”

Here’s another important thing about the people with this conspiracy-thinking worldview: On average, they tend to be less wealthy and less educated. So the people who are really strongly into this thinking, I’m probably not going to run into them on a college campus.

What is the relationship between education and conspiracy thinking generally? Are people with more education less likely to believe in conspiracies?

Yes. It’s a correlation. But we don’t know what the what the causal mechanism is.

Do you have any theories?

It could be the case that people who are very conspiratorial aren’t going to attend mainstream educational institutions. It’s just not for them. It could also be the case that the conspiracy theorists come to school, but then they don’t wind up doing very well. It could be the case that some come in and they actually have their minds changed. But until we do more longer-term studies on this, we’re just not going to fully know.

If you ever want to experience conspiracy thinking, go get in a taxi. I do it here in the U.S., I do it in the U.K. — as soon as I tell them “conspiracy theories,” they have something to tell me. It’s amazing how taxi drivers have inside information about what the CIA is up to.

Taxi drivers aside, does your work bring you into contact with a lot of people who are gung-ho about conspiracy theories?

I do respond on Twitter, when I can, to the conspiracy theorists. And I’ve appeared on Coast to Coast AM, which is the big conspiracy-paranormal radio show that runs like midnight to 3 a.m. or something like that.

Tell me more about that.

I was there to talk about my book, and I talked about why people believe what they believe. And people called in with all their experiences, which … to me a lot of them seemed highly delusional.

How do you handle communicating with those people?

One thing I live by is, you know, you try to be nice to people. So people say, “Oh, I was at a gas station in 1996, and a man came up to me, and at that point I knew 9/11 was going to happen.” Well, OK. I’ve done shows where sometimes the host is like an alien believer or a 9/11-truther, so occasionally you have to find ways to find common ground with these people so I can get my message out.

When you encounter this stuff in the wild — whether it’s at a gas station or at a family barbecue — do you try to intervene?

So I have a family member who believes in the Q conspiracy theory, which is the idea that there’s a Trump supporter embedded in the"deep state,” supposedly in the Department of Energy, with top-secret clearance, and this person has been leaving clues online that supposedly tell about the Satanic child-sex ring that Hillary Clinton is running and how all of this corruption within the deep state and the Democratic Party is going to be brought down by Donald Trump very soon.

In order for people to believe this they have to have a confluence of worldviews to accept it. And one is, they have to be Trump supporters, they have to have a strong conspiracy mind-set, and most likely they’re evangelical.

And is that true of this family member?

Yes.

If it’s a friend or family member you’re talking to, presumably there’s a foundation of trust there that you can start from that you wouldn’t have with some random person on Twitter.

When someone buys into something like that that’s so extreme, it’s not so much about the theory. The details could change, and they would still buy in. It’s about all the underlying dispositions that allow them to buy into it. And that’s the real problem. So the fact that we disagree on Q isn’t really the problem. It’s that we have a set of completely different worldviews underneath that, which are probably incompatible.

And that’s hard to resolve over dinner conversation.

Yes. It’s better just to avoid it.

Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.