Conspiracy Theories and Fake News: 5 Surprising Pitfalls That Trap Everyone, Revealed After Reading Over 50 Specialized Books

Why do we believe in "impossible stories"?

Shocking yet somewhat suspicious news items that appear on your social media timeline, such as "politicians and celebrities are all rubber people wearing rubber masks." You may have seen such information and wondered, "Who on earth would believe such a story?" Many people believe that they would "never be fooled."

However, if that is the case, why are conspiracy theories and fake news so rampant in society?

In this article, I have condensed the conclusions drawn from reading and analyzing over 50 books and reports by experts in fields such as political science, sociology, computational social science, and journalism studies. What emerged were five surprising and counterintuitive "truths" about why ordinary, and sometimes even intelligent, people are drawn into irrational discourse, rather than "special someone" being the ones who are fooled.

1. Surprising Truth #1: In fact, the more "politically knowledgeable" you are, the more susceptible you are to conspiracy theories

The assumption that those who fall for conspiracy theories are "informationally illiterate" is nothing more than a comfortable myth. Surprisingly, the reality shown by empirical research is the opposite.

According to survey experiments by political scientist Masaki Hata and others, it has been found that people who are highly interested in politics and confident that they "know the correct information" are actually more likely to accept conspiracy theories.

Why does such a paradoxical situation occur? The causes lie mainly in three psychological mechanisms.

• Confirmation bias: The vast knowledge they possess tends to be used not for objective factual analysis, but to reinforce the beliefs and worldviews they already hold. They tend to collect only information that is convenient for them and ignore information that contradicts it. This confirmation bias is not a flaw unique to the politically knowledgeable. Rather, as will be described later, it is a fundamental characteristic of human thinking that can be amplified in everyone due to the modern information environment.

• Need for uniqueness: The feeling that "I possess 'special knowledge' that the mediocre masses do not know" brings a strong sense of self-affirmation. Conspiracy theories provide the perfect "story" to satisfy this desire.

• Overconfidence: Because they strongly believe in their own correctness, they tend to neglect critical verification of information that aligns with their worldview.

This fact fundamentally shakes our naive trust that "if people just have knowledge, they can become rational." Knowledge can sometimes be a weapon to justify the stories we want to believe, rather than a tool for seeking the truth.

2. Surprising Truth #2: Trying to refute with "facts" is counterproductive

Have you ever tried to persuade family or friends who believe in conspiracy theories with correct data and facts? If so, that effort may have made the other person even more stubborn. It is not because your persuasion was poor. That approach itself is, in many cases, counterproductive.

If your mother back home became a conspiracy theorist, what would you do? You might try hard to persuade or refute her. However, that attempt would likely be counterproductive.

For those who believe in them, conspiracy theories are not just "incorrect information." They are a "worldview" for understanding the complexity and absurdity of the world, and they have become a part of their identity.

Therefore, the act of presenting facts from the outside to deny those beliefs is perceived not as a mere correction of information, but as an attack on their very identity. When attacked, people cling even more tightly to their beliefs for self-defense. This is a psychological phenomenon known as the backfire effect.

Winning an argument by "refuting" the other person, rather than bridging the gap, risks making them see you as an "enemy who does not understand the truth" and can even definitively destroy the relationship. If refutation by facts fails because beliefs are tied to identity, what deep psychology does that identity satisfy? The answer lies not in logic, but in the craving for "stories" that we all possess.

3. Surprising Truth #3: People don't believe because they are "stupid." They believe because they seek a "story"

It is easy to dismiss conspiracy theorists as "intellectually inferior," but that misses the essence of the problem. The fundamental reason people are drawn to conspiracy theories is not a lack of intelligence, but because humans are beings that instinctively seek 'meaning' and 'narratives'.

Our minds are not strong enough to endure chaotic disorder or tragedies without reason. The reality that horrific disasters or incidents "just happened by chance" is too cruel and unacceptable. In that case, the explanation that "an evil secret society was pulling the strings behind the scenes," while terrifying, provides the world with some form of order and causality, making it psychologically far more stable.

Conspiracy theories replace complex reality with a simple, comprehensive narrative of "good us vs. evil them." For example, the narrative that "the dark government is the one truly controlling the world, and we are the 'warriors of light' standing up against it" provides a clear enemy and a heroic role for oneself. This narrative fills the sense of powerlessness and alienation felt in the real world.

The human mind, unable to bear reality, constantly requires the buffer of "meaning" and seeks out "narratives."

From this perspective, people who believe in conspiracy theories do not appear simply foolish, but rather as people seeking a coherent narrative as a desperate attempt to understand a chaotic reality. However, this desire for a "narrative" is not necessarily satisfied only in the political realm. Sometimes, our lifestyle choices themselves can become an entrance to the grand narrative of conspiracy theories in unexpected ways.

4. Surprising Truth #4: "Organic" and "Natural" can become unexpected "gateways"

Health consciousness, organic food, natural parenting—these are widely accepted as positive lifestyles in modern society. However, this value system of "valuing natural things" can sometimes become an unexpected "gateway" to anti-scientific conspiracy theories. This phenomenon is known as "conspirituality."

Its ideological path traces back to the anti-establishment and anti-modernist ideas held by 19th-century occultism (theosophy) and the 1960s counterculture. This connects with modern wellness culture and becomes radicalized through the following stages.

1. First, a simple dualism is formed: "Natural things are good, and artificial things are evil/corrupt."

2. This principle is applied to the medical field, fostering distrust that "Big Pharma's drugs and vaccines are artificial and dangerous." A devotion to natural remedies and alternative medicine begins.

3. Once distrust of "mainstream authority" such as medicine and science takes root, that distrust easily expands to other fields. One becomes highly receptive to other conspiratorial narratives, such as the idea that the government, major media, and other powerful institutions are deceiving the public.

In this flow, words with scientific-sounding resonance like "quantum mechanics" or "vibrations" are often stripped of their original meanings and misused as decorations to lend authority to unscientific claims.

Choosing organic food is a matter of personal values. However, the very mode of thinking that seeks "hidden truths" outside the mainstream can become a dangerous bridge from healthy lifestyle choices to believing in global conspiracies. So far, we have looked at how individual psychology, identity, and lifestyle open the door to conspiracy theories. But what if the world of information we live in itself were structurally designed to favor "lies"? The final truth confronts us with a larger reality: the problem does not lie solely within us as individuals.

5. Surprising Truth #5: The world of information is inherently designed to make "lies" spread easily

Before lamenting "why only misinformation spreads," we must face the harsh reality. That is the fact that the modern information ecosystem is structurally designed so that "lies" spread more easily than "truth." This is not just a matter of individual character, but a problem of the system.

Large-scale data analysis conducted in the field of computational social science has led to a shocking conclusion.

Misinformation spreads further, deeper, faster, and more broadly than facts

What is creating this inconvenient truth is a "negative synergy" where the following three mechanisms primarily interact with each other.

1. Cognitive bias (the specifications of our brains): The human brain is designed to pay attention to information that is new, surprising, and emotionally stirring. Fake news is designed precisely to exploit this characteristic. This is deeply related to the "confirmation bias" seen in Chapter 1, and the "mind that seeks narratives" touched upon in Chapter 3. Our brains are designed to prioritize information that resonates emotionally and fits existing beliefs over information that is logically correct.

2. Information environment (the specifications of algorithms): Social media platforms are optimized to maximize "engagement (people's reactions)" rather than the accuracy of information. As a result, extreme and sensational content is amplified by algorithms, forming "echo chambers" where only the same opinions resonate, or "filter bubbles" where one can only see the information they want to see.

3. Cognitive Limits (Our Processing Capacity): Every day, we are exposed to a flood of information that far exceeds what we can process. Under these conditions of the "attention economy", we lose the luxury of deeply examining each piece of information and tend to rely on mental shortcuts, jumping at intuitive and easy-to-understand information.

We are in the midst of a systemic problem where it is not just individual failure, but a complicit relationship between our own brain characteristics and technology that creates an environment favorable to lies.

Conclusion: The question to ask is not "who gets deceived," but "why do we believe?"

The tendency to be drawn to conspiracy theories and fake news is not a flaw of a few special people. It is a manifestation of human traits that we all possess—the desire for meaning, the craving for narrative, and the wish to simplify complex reality. And those traits are being amplified by modern information technology like never before.

That is why the question we must ask must shift from judging others by asking "who gets deceived?" to self-reflection by asking "why do we end up believing?"

After reading this article, if you were to re-examine the background of just one "story" among the "truths" you took for granted, what would it be?

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