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Decoding The Gurus
Decoding The Gurus

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Next Decoding Academia: More on Conspiratorial Ideation

A heads up for the next Decoding Academia we are digging further into the topic of Conspiratorial Ideation and what it is associated with based on a recent meta-analysis (see attached).

If you want to play along please read the paper, although it is a meta-analysis so probably not the most gripping reading.

The title is "The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Correlates" by Shauna M. Bowes, Thomas H. Costello, and Arber Tasimi.

Should be coming before too long!


Next Decoding Academia: More on Conspiratorial Ideation

Comments

Thank you for this recommendation. I listened over the weekend; it makes sense to me that a "grandiose narcissist" may seem like a psychopath since this person does not seem to care what others think about them while the "vulnerable narcissist" does care what others think about them because it shores up their identity as special and keeps the self-loathing at bay. Since psychopathy and narcissism share some traits, like lacking or having low empathy, manipulativeness, and self-centeredness, it may be difficult to parse out which a person could be without a greater degree of information about their behavior over time. And, like you mentioned, they could be both. Since I'm no expert on these subjects, I try to be careful not to say for sure. I do think it is important to be aware of these negative traits in others for self-protection purposes.

Linda Sears

Interested to see what the hosts make of self-reported rationality with the negative correlation, also that there is *nothing* strongly negatively correlated.

billw2011

I'm curious if you've seen this report on narcissism: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2022/11/27/yanss-247-why-narcissism-isnt-excessive-self-love-but-excessive-self-loathing/ YANSS interviews a couple psychologists who came to the conclusion that one of the types of narcissism is actually psychopathology. Or something like that. I suppose you could be both.

Kat

Looking forward to this episode. It is interesting to see what gets defined out of conspiracy. One of the three elements these authors describe as necessary to a conspiracy theory is a “secret” plan. The Tuskegee syphilis study is often cited as a “conspiracy that was true” but by this definition, I don’t know that it would be, considering the researchers in that study were publishing results in medical journals the entire time. Not exactly secret.

Ali B

I also appreciated how the authors gave examples for how people could be drawn into conspiracy theories by a need to assuage anxiety, yet the rabbit hole may only inflame those anxieties, which is quite sad.

Linda Sears

I did my best to read through this. I wanted to know a bit more about how anthropomorphism relates to conspiratorial thinking. My guess is that a person who applies human characteristics to non-human beings/things is more likely to attribute simplistic human motivations to complex processes (political/business/institutional)? I liked the idea of finding correlations between motivations and personality traits and illustrating nuances between the types of threats (epistemic, social, and existential) and the tendency towards conspiritiorial thinking.

Linda Sears


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