Why We Believe in Conspiracies

Ironically in the "Scientific America Magazine that came in the mail yesterday (June 2009 pg 36), there is an article called "Agenticity" by Michael Shermer. Michael Shermer asks the question why do we believe in "souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, alien, intelligent designers" AND "Government Conspirators".

He answers the question in two parts, first explaining the meaning of his coined term "patternicity", he defines it as "the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise". He does state that there are some patterns that are real, such as those found in science of course, (And in my own opinion, the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy)

"The problem" he says "is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns." On the positive side of the coin, because of this animal instinct we have survived the ages. "But" he goes on to say, we do something other animals do not do...we have the capacity to be aware of such mental states of desires and intentions in both ourselves and others--we infer 'agenticity': the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents."

"There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them" He goes on. The article is in the June 2009 issue and you can also visit www.skeptic.com. Michael is also the author of the book "Why People Believe Weird Things". I'm going to have to read that one.

Peace
Liz