This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.
Over the years since, I’ve often wondered: Could I have helped more? Are there things I could have done differently to talk them back down and help them see sense?
I should have spoken to Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Foolproof, a book about misinformation and how we make ourselves less susceptible to it.
As part of MIT Technology Review’s package on conspiracies, I gave him a call to ask: What would he advise if one of our family members or friends showed signs of having fallen down the rabbit hole?
Step 1:
Start with “pre-bunking”
The best way to avoid the conspiracy theory vortex is, of course, not to set foot in there in the first place. That’s the idea behind “pre-bunking,” an approach to dealing with conspiracies that works a lot like vaccination (the irony) against disease. By getting “inoculated” with knowledge about how conspiracy theories work, we become better prepared to spot the real thing when we come across it.
The concept stems from work in the 1960s by the social psychologist William McGuire, who was looking for ways to protect US soldiers from being indoctrinated by enemies. He came up with the idea of a “vaccine for brainwash.”
“Conspiracy theorists tend to negatively react to debunking and fact-checking … they become more aggressive and sort of double down in their beliefs,” says van der Linden. “But with the pre-bunking approach, they seem to be open to entertaining it.”