The previous paragraph may suggest that people who believe in conspiracy theories are insecure, immature individuals, subconsciously yearning for parental approval that was never forthcoming as they grew up. And no doubt some of them are, but then so are countless people who aren’t into conspiracy theories; I’m not going to ramble on for several paragraphs about the risks of making ill-founded connections between two unrelated things and then do exactly that myself. What’s been said is just a way of suggesting means by which the development of the brain may make conspiracy theories more “plausible.”
But one prominent consequence (or it might be a cause) of our tendency to look for patterns is that the brain really doesn’t handle randomness well. The brain seems to struggle with the idea that something can happen for no discernible reason other than chance. It might be yet another consequence of our brains seeking danger everywhere—if there’s no real cause for an occurrence then there’s nothing that can be done about it if it ends up being dangerous, and that’s not tolerable. Or it might be something else entirely. Maybe the brain’s opposition to anything random is just a chance mutation that proved useful. That would be a cruel irony, if nothing else.
Whatever the cause, the rejection of randomness has numerous knock-on consequences, one of which is the reflex assumption that everything that happens does so for a reason, often referred to as “fate.” In reality, some people are just unfortunate, but that’s not an acceptable explanation for the brain, so it has to find one and attach a flimsy rationale. Having a lot of bad luck? Must be that mirror you broke, which contained your soul, which is now fractured. Or maybe it’s that you’re being visited by mischievous fairies; they hate iron, so keep a horseshoe around, that’ll keep them away.
You could argue that conspiracy theorists are convinced that sinister organizations are running the world because that’s better than the alternative! The idea that all of human society is just bumbling along due to haphazard occurrences and luck is, in many ways, more distressing than there being a shadowy elite running things, even if it is for its own ends. Better a drunk pilot at the controls than nobody at all.
In personality studies, this concept is called the “pronounced locus of control” and refers to the extent to which individuals believe they can control the events affecting them.6 The bigger your locus of control, the more “in control” you believe you are (the extent to which you really are in control of events is irrelevant). Exactly why some people feel more in control than others is a poorly understood area; some studies have linked an enlarged hippocampus to a greater locus of control,7 but the stress hormone cortisol can apparently shrink the hippocampus, and people who feel less in control tend to be more easily stressed, so the hippocampus size may be a consequence rather than a cause of the locus of control.8 The brain never makes anything easy for us.
Anyway, a greater locus of control means you may end up feeling you can influence the cause of these occurrences (a cause which doesn’t actually exist, but no matter). If it’s superstition, you throw salt over your shoulder or touch wood or avoid ladders and black cats, and are thus reassured that your actions have prevented catastrophe via means that defy all rational explanation.
Individuals with an even greater locus of control try to undermine the “conspiracy” they see by spreading awareness of it, looking “deeper” into the details (reliability of the source is rarely a concern) and pointing them out to anyone who’ll listen, and declaring all those who don’t to be “mindless sheep” or some variation thereof. Superstitions tend to be more passive; people can just adhere to them and go about their day as normal. Conspiracy theories tend to involve a lot more dedication and effort. When was the last time someone tried to convince you of the hidden truth behind why rabbit’s feet are lucky?
Overall, it seems the brain’s love of patterns and hatred of randomness leads many people to make some pretty extreme conclusions. This wouldn’t really be an issue, but the brain also makes it very hard to convince someone that their deeply held views and conclusions are wrong, no matter how much evidence you have. The superstitious and the conspiracy theorists maintain their bizarre beliefs despite everything the rational world throws at them. And it’s all thanks to our idiot brains.
Or is it? Everything I’ve said here is based on the current understanding provided by neuroscience and psychology, but then that understanding is rather limited. The very subject matter alone is so hard to pin down. What is a superstition, in the psychological sense? What would one look like in the terms of brain activity? Is it a belief ? An idea? We might have advanced to the point where we can scan for activity in the working brain, but just because we can see activity doesn’t mean we understand what it represents, any more than being able to see a piano’s keys means we can play Mozart.
Not that scientists haven’t tried. For example, Marjaana Lindeman and colleagues performed fMRI scans of twelve self-described supernatural believers and eleven skeptics.9 The subjects were told to imagine a critical life situation (such as imminent job loss or relationship breakdown) and were then shown “emotionally charged pictures of lifeless objects and scenery (for example, two red cherries bound together)”—the sort of thing you’d see on motivational posters, like a spectacular mountain top, that sort of thing. Supernatural believers reported seeing hints and signs of how their personal situation would resolve in the image; if imagining a relationship breakdown, they would feel it would be all right because the two cherries bound together signified firm ties and commitment. The skeptics, as you’d expect, didn’t do this.
The interesting element of this study is that viewing the pictures activated the left inferior temporal gyrus in all subjects, a region associated with image processing. In the supernatural believers, much less activity was seen in the right inferior temporal gyrus when compared with the skeptics. This region has been associated with cognitive inhibition, meaning it modulates and reduces other cognitive processes.10 In this case, it may be suppressing the activity that leads to forming illogical patterns and connections, which would explain why some people are quick to believe in irrational or unlikely occurrences while others require serious convincing; if the right inferior temporal gyrus is weak, the more irrational-leaning processes in the brain exert more influence.