The CIA created lesbianism. The Walt Disney Co. was secretly manufacturing cigars on the side. A Batman movie predicted multiple violent mass shootings.
Spend five minutes on the internet and you can find a conspiracy theory to fit any warped frame of reference on the planet. But the more interesting question is why we're all so desperate to believe that aliens are behind the JFK assassination.
That's exactly what University of Miami political science Professor Joe Uscinsky has been trying to solve for the past four years, and in a new book out this month, he offers his not-so-conspiratorial theory on the psychology behind the tin-foil-hat crowd.
"[They're] really driven by our predispositions," he argues. "When people believe in conspiracy theories, those theories are aimed at the people they don't like already."
Together with coauthor Joe Parent, another UM political scientist, the academic examined contemporary suspicions and also pored over newspaper editorials dating back more than a century for a longer-range understanding. Their work is the basis for American Conspiracy Theories, published by Oxford University Press last week.
"What we tried to do was take a huge sample of conspiracy theories over time," Uscinsky tells Riptide. "By doing that, we were able to get a bigger, broader picture of why people buy into them."
The answer: It's human nature. Virtually everyone believes at least one conspiracy theory, the professor said, and the theories have been equally rampant throughout the decades. "Everybody gets to accuse everybody, and at some point, they get accused themselves," he said.
But despite their prevalence, Uscinsky said the theories don't actually influence people's opinions or stir mistrust; rather, they typically reflect the mistrust people already have. For example, take the Kennedy assassination: "The Republicans think that [Lyndon] Johnson did it. The Democrats believe that the military industrial complex did it or the CIA did it. Everybody can blame their own villain."
The most popular contemporary theories, the Birther and Truther movements, also fit into this paradigm: The 30 percent of people who believe Barack Obama was born outside the United States reflects the percentage of the conservatives predisposed to believe such theories; a roughly equal number of liberals believe George W. Bush was involved in 9/11. "So if you say, 'Obama was born in another country,' " he explained, "it's, you distrust Obama, and you buy into theories that show you why."
Not that any analysis will deter the conspiratorial from believing. Among the professors' favorite contemporary theories: that Hollywood was somehow behind both the Aurora, Colorado, and Sandy Hook, Connecticut, shootings, because of a scene in The Dark Knight Rises — the same movie showing during the Aurora shooting — where a police chief seems to point at a map with places named both 'Aurora' and 'Sandy Hook.'
"There are lots of things named Aurora," Uscinsky said. "It's completely a coincidence."