Article Title: The Vices of Conspiracy Thinking

Article Summary

In the article at hand, the author takes us into the workings of the minds of conspiracy theorists and their followers, offering tips on how to curb tendencies of belief in those theories. While believers may bedazzle us normal humans by the amount of information they seem to have at their disposal, they are only trapped in a maze of confirmation bias. They are seeking out only things that corroborate their points of view, and accumulating more such material over a period of time. Along with this, they are also refuting whatever counter evidence is provided them, and this is the more damaging ideological trait of theirs. When they deny the legitimacy of counter theories, stating that powerful forces are what circulate them to hide real facts, they are arguing along a line that says nothing in the world in known, or for granted. The government may hide the most basic or the most gigantic truths about things according to them, and from then on, there is an intellectual spiral into nihilism. We can help by intervening when people aren’t full-blown believers in conspiracy theories, writes the author, and we can do that best by sharing thoughts and ideas with them, and alerting them to the lacunae in their psyches.