Dr. Joe Pierre

Things do happen for some ultimate reason, whether it's related to supernatural forces or God or something like that, versus more of a belief that things just happen randomly. And so that helps to explain why you might see people looking at the same information but interpreting them very differently and sort of through the lens of their own psychology or their own personal experience.

The way I like to define a conspiracy theory, I like to say that a conspiracy theory rejects the authoritative account of reality in favor of some plot that involves a group of people with a malevolent intent that's deliberately kept secret from the public. So in that sense, there's really two components. It's the rejection of reality.

the conventional wisdom the conventional version of events and then there's an embrace of a more shadowy secret narrative to explain the underlying truth as it were

So I think All of us, to a certain extent, find those kind of narratives appealing. And in some sense, they're often more appealing than the dull narrative that is the real life.

Big headline news, major life events are the kind of thing that spawns conspiracy theories, particularly when those events have a kind of traumatic element to them.

And finally... The diary is a kind of missing smoking gun, right? So what we have is this mysterious diary, which may or may not contain information beyond documentation of the affair with JFK, but may or may not include other information. And that sort of... to a certain extent, supplies the narrative of why she might have been targeted or why she was important.

And so in as much as we don't have that piece of information, again, it just invites this flood of counter information.

So that's sort of an example where we really just don't have a kind of ironclad narrative. There is a lot of ambiguity even in the real life telling of those events.

They know, based on their own experience, they have a sense of what the true narrative is of those events. So to hear people spinning a different tale that contradicts their own experience, you know, that's, again, upsetting or even insulting in a way.

There's something called the white Christmas effect.

If you tell people in advance that they're going to hear a recording of something that sounds like white noise, but embedded within it, you're going to hear the song The White Christmas. And then we play that white noise and we ask you to press a button to identify when you're hearing the song. People will listen to the white noise.

They'll press the button saying that they've heard it, even when the song was not actually embedded into that white noise. It's like, if I... am someone who is interested in conspiracy theories, who's interested in true crime.

And if you ask me to take a look at this case, well then, yeah, I could sift through all the materials that I read and say, yes, absolutely, there's evidence here, here, here, here. Because if my brain is looking for that information, we know that human brains are very good at finding it. And so that's where I think we have to be skeptical when we hear about conspiracy theories.

My name is Joe Pierre. I'm a psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.

There are some what I call cognitive quirks that are more associated with belief in conspiracy theory than not. Some of them include things like the need for certainty or the need for closure, the idea that people don't tolerate ambiguity in narratives and they want to really get a more definitive answer, and that that seems to be associated with belief in conspiracy theory.