Conspiracy theories are easier to maintain from a distance

I have always scratched my head over conspiracy theories.  It is hard enough to get a group of reasonably intelligent people organized to run their own fantasy football league.  It would require true organizational geniuses to have carried out truly big conspiracies like the alleged conspiracy to kill JFK without somebody finding out about it at some point.  But many of the characters who are supposed to be deeply involved in these conspiracy theories hardly seem like organizational geniuses.  Yet, conspiracy theories abound.

Some research by Marlone Henderson in the October, 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin helps to explain why. 

He capitalizes on an observation I have talked about before in this blog that people think about things more abstractly when they are far away in space or time than when they are close in space or time.  In order for a group to be united to a common purpose, they all have to have the same goal.  If you think about a group close up, then you can start to think about all of the different people involved, and it is easy to realize that lots of the group members are going to have somewhat different motivations.  But if you think of the group from a distance, then these individual differences in motivation get fuzzy.  Instead, you tend to focus abstractly on the group’s mission. 

To test this prospect, Henderson asked participants to think about a group consisting of a variety of different types of people.  They had come together to work on a project.  Some of the participants in the study were told that the group was meeting in New York (where the study was conducted).  Other participants were told that the group was meeting in San Francisco.  The participants were asked to judge how united the group was toward their common project.  The group that was far away was judged consistently to be more united in their efforts than was the group that was meeting close by.  That is, people really did consider groups that are far away to be more coherent than groups that are close by.

And that is one psychological mechanism that can support conspiracy theories.  You would be hard-pressed to believe that you or your friends, or people you have met could carry out a diabolical plan without someone messing it up or letting a key piece of information slip out.  But at the same time, it seems easier to swallow that a shadowy group operating far away can somehow keep focused on a common goal and then vanish without a trace.

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar…Right?

The purpose of money is to provide a uniform method for valuing things.  It doesn’t matter whether I have a crisp new $1 bill in my pocket, an old dollar bill, four quarters, or even a check made out to me for a $1.  They all have the same value.  This currency system allows us great freedom to buy and sell things and services.

Despite the great flexibility that money permits us, people have trouble treating every dollar the same as every other dollar.  Here are two examples.

First, sociologist Viviana Zelizer in her fantastic book The Social Meaning of Money has done an extensive analysis of the way that people use money.  One thing that becomes clear quickly is that people really do create different types of money to help them organize their lives.  As a simple example, people treat birthday money differently than other money.  For example, if a relative gives you $25 for your birthday, you are likely to spend it on something nice for yourself rather than on bills, even though the gift money is part of your total pile of money once it has been given to you.  That is, we keep the money psychologically separate. 

One way to see this idea of different types of money is in gambling behavior.  There is a phenomenon that arises in research on gambling called the “house money effect.”  Basically, people get more risky in their bets when gambling after they have won a bit.  The idea is that the money that they have won isn’t really theirs.  They are gambling with the house’s money.  Somehow, that money is less valuable, and so people are more willing to risk it. 

The second example ties the value of money to our motivational system as well.  A study by Adam Alter and Danny Oppenheimer in the October, 2008 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, looked at how the ease of thinking about money influences the value of money.  This ease of thinking is usually called fluency.  Alter and Oppenheimer suggested that being more fluent with a type of money would make that money seem more valuable.

To test this idea, they did a number of studies in which they contrasted the value of a familiar form of money with an unfamiliar form of money.  For example, in one study, the familiar form of money was a one-dollar bill.  The unfamiliar form of money was a Sacagawea dollar.  They gave people a list of inexpensive items (like paper clips and Hershey’s kisses) and asked how many of them they thought they could buy for a dollar.  People suggested that they would be able to buy far more of the items with the familiar one-dollar bill than with the unfamiliar Sacagawea dollar.  This result suggests that people found the familiar form of money more valuable than the unfamiliar form of money.

Findings like these suggest that the psychology of money is far more complex than the economics of money.  For economists, every dollar is the same as every other dollar.  For people, though, some dollars have different uses than others.  Perhaps more importantly, some dollars have more value than others.  

There are important implications for research like this.  Politicians tend to assume that the free-hand of the market will work to ensure that businesses run efficiently.  However, this belief makes many assumptions.  Among these assumptions are that there are no systematic biases in people’s economic behavior that will distort the way markets operate.  These results suggest that there are systematic biases in the way people treat money all the way down to the level of the value of a single dollar.

If you’re not in a group, you better have a plan.

Much of your life is spent doing routine things.  On weekdays, you have a set of actions you take out of habit to wake up, get ready to leave your house, go to work or school and so on through the day.  You also have some strategies for helping you to remember things that vary from day to day.  You may have a to-do list or an agenda.  You might place little post-it notes around your home or office to remind you to do things.

But how do you make sure that you do things that are really rare?  By definition, you have no routines for those.

A study by David Nickerson and Todd Rogers in the February, 2010 issue of Psychological Science examined this question by looking at voting behavior.

There is research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues that it can often be helpful to envision a specific plan (which he calls an implementation intention) when you need to perform an action that is out of the ordinary.  Voting can be a pain, for example.  If election day is during the week (as it often is), you have to arrange your day to get to a polling station at a time when you can afford to wait if there is a line.  That requires thinking carefully about your schedule for that day and choosing a time of day that makes sense to go. 

Do these plans actually help you?

Nickerson and Rogers built a study into calls made to nearly 300,000 voters in the Democratic Presidential Primary election in Pennsylvania 2008.  They selected only registered voters who rarely vote in the primary elections.  Some voters were just called and reminded to vote.  A standard “Get out the vote” call.  Some were called and asked to predict whether they thought they would vote in the upcoming primary.  A third group was asked to think specifically about how they would get to the polls on election day in order to vote.  That is, they had to form an implementation intention.  Later, the voting records were checked to determine the proportion of people receiving each type of call who actually voted.

The results were interesting.

People who lived in a family with 2 or more registered voters in the house were completely unaffected by the type of call they received.  They were just as likely to vote whether they got a call or not and the type of call they received did not matter.

The results were quite different for people who were the only registered voter in their home.  These people were much more likely to vote if they were asked to form a specific plan than if they were just reminded to vote or asked to predict whether they would vote. 

What does this mean?  Obviously, performing actions that go beyond the ordinary is difficult.  In this primary election, only about 45% of registered Democrats actually voted, so most people either were not interested or could not find a way to get to the polls. 

If you live with a group, then it is easier for everyone in the group to talk about their plans.  It is also easier get support from others to help you satisfy your goals.  For example, all of you might go to the polls together.

When you are the only one responsible for an action, though, you don’t have other people to discuss your plans with.  You also don’t have social support for carrying out an action.  So, being forced to think through the details of a plan is particularly important when you are acting alone.

There are two important conclusions to draw from this research.

First, if you know you are going to have to do something out of the ordinary (like voting or perhaps starting a new exercise program), you should try to enlist a few others to help you out.  It is easier to generate intentions and stick to them when you are in a group.

Second, if you can’t enlist a group, then make sure you really think through the details of a plan to carry out an action.  That detailed plan will help you to overcome the variety of obstacles that often keep you from succeeding when you have to go beyond the ordinary actions of the day.