All Too Human

How an interlocking set of ordinary human cognitive biases can give rise to enduring conspiracy theories

One of the few factual conspiracy theories of history. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

It will be decades before sufficient time has passed for a truly dispassionate account of the events that comprise the SARS-CoV2 period, which for the sake of brevity will in the remainder of this article be referred to as the SC2P. There are so many vested interests and the generic narrative is so well established that as we proceed through 2023 it’s very much a question of opinion rather than of empirically-demonstrated facts. Two things we can all generally agree on, however are the following: (i) the reaction of governments was unlike anything seen in modern history outside of wartime, and (ii) SC2P has given rise to a series of conspiracy theories that have gained greater-than-normal traction among the general population.

This article will attempt to provide a reasoned and factual account of how these two phenomena arose and, crucially, how they were unintentionally linked and thus to a degree mutually reinforcing.

In order to understand the dynamics of SC2P, we need to understand the way in which the human brain works. Like all brains, ours is a pattern recognition machine evolved to enable us to cope with challenges that were reasonably consistent across our long evolutionary history…