Whether it’s the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Oregon, Charleston, Aurora or Newtown there always seems to be a corner of the internet that believes these are hoaxes, false flag events and other conspiracies concocted by a devious government.
Last Friday, an attorney for one of the San Bernardino attackers’ family referenced conspiracy theories surrounding the Newtown tragedy to question whether the San Bernardino shooting happened as law enforcement officials suggest.
“There was a lot of questions drawn with regard to Sandy Hook and whether or not that was a real incident or not,” David Chesley, an attorney for the family of Syed Farook, said in a video posted by the Daily Mail.
“There’s a lot of motivation at this time to emphasize or create incidents that will cause gun control or prejudice or hatred towards the Muslim community,” Chesley told reporters in the video. He later reiterated his comments in an interview with CNN.
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But why do people believe these tragic events, where so many people are killed, are part of greater conspiratorial plots?
“There are a lot of reasons,” said Joseph Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at University of Miami, who also co-authored the book American Conspiracy Theories. “Just as some people are conservative and have a conservative worldview or liberal and have a liberal worldview; there are people who have a very conspiratorial worldview; where they see all events, circumstances as potentially the product of a conspiracy.”
One reason is that conspiracy theories which often abound on blogs and social media tend to proliferate among people who are looking for conspiracies.
Michael Wood, a psychology lecturer at the University of Winchester, said with a lot of mass shootings people who have a conspiratorial worldview will default to look for information to support their beliefs. He added that in many cases people have intuitive ideas about how something should look.
“When the news reporter in Virginia was shot on camera a lot people were looking at the video and saying ‘oh that looks fake,’” said Wood. “It doesn’t fit with peoples intuitive ideas of what happens.”
On August 26, 2015, news reporter Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward, employees of a CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Va., were shot to death while conducting a live television interview. The shooter, Vester Lee Flanagan, recorded the incident on a cellphone and shows Parker trying to escape the attack.
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After the Dec. 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn., at Sandy Hook Elementary in which 20 children and six adults were killed, conspiracy theorists alleged that the attack was part of plot to restrict people from owning guns — a sentiment that has echoed in every mass shooting that’s followed.
“Almost anything that’s going to capture headlines is going to bring out people who have a conspiratorial world view and those people are going to say ‘hey, this might be a conspiracy,’” Uscinski said.
Are there crisis actors?
Another common thread in several mass shooting hoaxes is the idea of “crisis actors,” where professional actors are used by government agencies or the mainstream media to depict the suffering of victims in staged shootings or orchestrated terrorist events.
Uscinski says the origin of the term leads back to James Tracy, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, who attracted media attention for blog posts claiming that the coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre of December 2012 had been misleading. Tracy claimed that people interviewed by the press were these “crisis actors” used in portraying the official story.
“Generally what we find is that conspiracies match people’s ideologies,” he said. “After any event you’ll see lots of different strains of conspiracy theories come out. And people tend to believe in one set that match their ideas.”
While there are companies that employ actors to role-play disaster events for educational purposes, conspiracy theorists have perpetuated a myth that the same “crisis actors” were seen at Newtown, Boston, Oregon and even at the scene of the Paris attacks.
“A psychological phenomenon called compensatory control”
A study from researchers at the VU University Amsterdam published in August found another common trait among people drawn to conspiracies is a lack of control in their lives.
During uncertain times following terrorist attacks, naturals disaster or mass shootings people will search for answers.
“Threats to control have been found to increase belief in conspiracy theories,” wrote Jan-Willem van Prooijen, one of the authors of the study. “In a large-scale U.S. sample, we find that a societal threat to control, that citizens actually experienced belief in a range of common conspiracy theories.”
Wood says a number of things happen psychologically when people feel like they have lost control of a situation that can lead to a tendency to believe in conspiracies.
“They become more vigilant for patterns, is one fairly consistent finding … They’ll believe more conspiracy theories and they’ll get more superstitious,” said Wood. “This is a psychological phenomenon called compensatory control. Where once you’ve lost a feeling of control you feel like you have to get it back and you grasp at straws for it.”
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