Lecturer: Krzysztof Dolega
Fields: Epistemology, Social Psychology, Sociology
Content
Do you believe that the moon landing was fabricated by NASA to win the space race? Did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy involve people beyond the lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald? After all, the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, which conducted non-consensual mind-control experiments with psychedelic drugs on unsuspecting subjects, stands as a verified instance of a government conspiracy. What makes the other cases different? Turning to more contemporary issues, are you sure that the U.S. government has not purposefully ignored prior knowledge of the events leading up to September 11th to justify subsequent military actions? How much truth is there to the allegations against pharmaceutical companies suggesting intentional suppression of cures for diseases to maintain profit from ongoing treatments? And finally, did you know that the US army conducted a disinformation campaign in the Philippines in order to undermine the public trust in the Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccine?
As these examples illustrate, conspiracy theories and conspiratorial beliefs span a broad spectrum of contents, and one may wonder what combines them as a single object of research. In this course we will investigate the research on and prominent debates around such narratives.
Lecture 1 will focus on the history of the concept and prominent philosophical debates surrounding it.
Lecture 2 will look at the empirical research done on conspiracy theories/beliefs and whether they constitute a separate phenomenon.
Lecture 3 will turn to proposals about how we can respond to and mitigate the spread of such narratives in our society.
Literature
- Pigden, C. (1995). Popper revisited, or what is wrong with conspiracy theories? Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25(1), 3–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/004839319502500101
- Keeley, B. L. (1999). Of conspiracy theories. The Journal of Philosophy, 96(3), 109–126. https://doi.org/10.2307/2564659
- Levy, N. (2007). Radically socialized knowledge and conspiracy theories. Episteme, 4(2), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.3366/epi.2007.4.2.181
- Sunstein, C. R., & Vermeule, A. (2009). Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures. Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(2), 202–227. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2008.00325.x
- Wood, M. J., Douglas, K. M., & Sutton, R. M. (2012). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(6), 767–773. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550611434786
- Douglas, K. M., Sutton, R. M., & Cichocka, A. (2017). The psychology of conspiracy theories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 538–542. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417718261
- van Prooijen, J.-W., & van Vugt, M. (2018). Conspiracy theories: Evolved functions and psychological mechanisms. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(6), 770–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618774270
- Bowes, S. M., Costello, T. H., & Tasimi, A. (2023). The conspiratorial mind: A meta-analytic review of motivational and personological correlates. Psychological Bulletin, 149(5–6), 259–293. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000392
Lecturer
Krzysztof (Krys) Dolega is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science working at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he also did his doctoral research under the supervision of Tobias Schlicht and Daniel Dennett. As a postdoc in Bochum’s Situated Cognition Research Group, he worked on the psychology and epistemology of conspiracy theories on a Volkswagen Foundation grant titled “Why do people believe weird things: Bayesian brain, conspiracy theories, and epistemic vices.” He then moved to the Université Libre de Bruxelles as a postdoc on Axel Cleeremans’ ERC-funded EXPERIENCE project, studying the nature and role of valence, value, and reward in conscious experience.
Affiliation: Ruhr-University Bochum
Homepage: krysdolega.xyz