When it comes to conspiracy theories, intuition and stress conspire against you
Conspiracy theories are dusted amid the violent videos, racist comments, and death threats that Facebook moderators face every day. That putrid flood of information can be traumatic, as The Verge’s Casey Newton found when he reported on the working conditions endured by moderators in Phoenix, Arizona. Some of the workers bombarded with conspiracy theories told Newton that they were starting to believe the ideas they were seeing.
What makes people start believing that the Earth is flat, or that 9/11 wasn’t a terrorist attack? And, in this case, did the stressful working conditions have anything to do with it? To answer some of those questions, we turned to Mike Wood. Wood, a psychologist at the University of Winchester, studies...