Tom Genoni
Author of The Outer Edge
Works by Tom Genoni
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Then, I read this from CNN's Fareed Zakaria (one of the few reasons I miss cable):
"High Time for Conspiracy Theories"
Global crises are fertile ground for conspiracy theories, Budapest-based social psychologist
Péter Krekó writes for Eurozine and the pandemic is no different.
Amid moments of upheaval, “a sense of losing control, the information and knowledge vacuum, and anxiety triggered by negative events” drive the tendency, Krekó writes, pointing to events like 9/11, the London bombings, Princess Diana’s death, and US forces’ killing of Osama bin Laden. “When people feel they cannot influence happenings that pose a threat to their daily lives, they may try to recreate an illusion of control by overzealously seeking explanations. … Extraordinary events require extraordinary interpretations that reach beyond traditional and official narratives. Further, in historical times riddled with frustration and uncertainty, the need to identify an enemy or culprit can be overwhelming.”
This is a baker's dozen of articles from the CSICOP journal Skeptical Inquirer from the '80s. I actually subscribed back then and some I believe I recall reading, such as "The Moon was Full and Nothing Happened" and a pair of astrology debunking articles. It is refreshing to see basic science and math in a clear sense of bunk. The further archive research in sussing out the details of fake Majestic 12 and simple surveys and behavioral experiments exposing cold reading techniques employed by psychics is also engaging. At this point, it feels like - where were the engaged investigative journalists or at least responsible reporters? These feels even more underscored in the studies of "spontaneous human combustion", faked Bigfoot evidence, and especially in the sensational photographed poltergeist activity of Tina Resch. It appears even after a significant period of time those originally on the scene, professional or bystander, find something mysterious just too good a story to fact check. This predilection for illusion over the landing on Earth via "disillusionment" seems to be an enigma even CSICOP dare not address.
This book is an anthology of reprints, mostly from Skeptical Inquirer, which are fun to read, but usually contain nothing revelatory to the average skeptic. However, the article by Ray Hyman entitled "Cold Readings: How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them" (reprinted from Zetetic) was extremely interesting and contained a lot of information new to me. While I've known for a while that cold readings start with generalizations and that the client supplies the specific details, show more I've never understood why people fall for this or how the readers themselves can think that they're special. This article reviews a large number of social psychology studies about people's reactions to texts with very little information content. It turns out that our brains automatically try to make meaning out of random statements, so not only do we accept general statements as being about us specifically, the reader sees that connections are made and experiences positive feedback about their abilities, even if they didn't think they had any to begin with! If you're interested in why people believe weird things and haven't read about the social psychological aspects before, I highly recommend this article. show less
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