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Why more highly educated people are less into conspiracy theories
In this era of “fake news” and rising populism, encountering conspiracy theories is becoming a daily phenomenon. Some people usually shrug them off – they find them too simplistic, biased or far-fetched – but others are taken in. And if a person believes one kind of conspiracy theory, they usually believe others.
在这个“假新闻”和民粹主义兴起的时代,遭遇阴谋论已经成为一种日常现象。有些人通常会耸耸肩——他们发现那些过于简单化、偏见或牵强附会——但其他人却被带入其中了。如果一个人相信某种阴谋论,他们通常会对别人的话信以为真。
Psychologists are very interested in why some people are more inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, especially since the consequences can be harmful: for example, by avoiding getting their kids vaccinated, believers in vaccination conspiracies can harm wider public health; in other cases, a belief in a conspiracy against one’s own ethnic or religious group can foment radicalism.
宗教团体的阴谋可以煽动激进主义。
对于为什么有些人更倾向于相信阴谋论,心理学家们对此很感兴趣,尤其对后果可能有害的阴谋论感兴趣:例如,避免让他们的孩子接种疫苗,信仰接种疫苗阴谋论的信徒会更广泛的危害公众健康;在其他情况下,反对一个人的种族或One of the main differences between conspiracy believers and nonbelievers that’s cropped up in multiple studies is that nonbelievers tend to be more highly educated. For a new study in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Jan-Willem Van Prooijen at VU Amsterdam has conducted two large surveys to try to dig into just what it is about being more educated that seems to inoculate against belief in conspiracy.
出现在多次研究中的,阴谋论信徒或非信徒之间一个主要的差异是,非阴谋论的信仰者往往有更高学历。在一个新的应用认知心理学研究中,Jan Willem van prooijen在阿姆斯特丹先后进行了两次大的调查,试图从中挖掘到底是什么促使了更多的教育貌似对阴谋的新信仰有预防作用。
For the first survey, Van Prooijen recruited over 4000 readers of a popular science journal in the Netherlands, with an average age of 32. He asked them about their formal education level and their belief in various well-known conspiracy theories, such as that the moon landings were hoax; he tested their feelings of powerlessness; their subjective sense of their social class (they located their position on a social ladder); and their belief in simple solutions, such as that “most problems in society are easy to solve”.