My friend keeps sending me unsolicited conspiracy theory material. Should I ask them to stop? | Leading questions
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Loosening the grip of a conspiracy theory is a complex task, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Aim at changing the relationship with your friend, not their mind. My friend has started sending me lots of links and articles on UAPs [unidentified anomalous phenomena, also known as UFOs]. I’ve tried to gently assert that I don’t find the sources reliable or credible and that I do not believe respectable news outlets are conspiring to conceal the truth, but they still persist. Should I ask them to stop? I think these conspiracy theories are really harmful.
Eleanor says: One question is: can you stop your friend believing these conspiracy theories? Regrettably, almost certainly not, at least not without a huge investment of time and patience. People are free to think whatever they want and some of us put that freedom to the weirdest uses. At least we can be thankful the conspiracies your friend has latched on to are about objects in the sky and not, say, which reptilian species is secretly controlling things.
A different question is: can you change the norms of the relationship so you don’t have to engage with this? Happily, that’s a different mission. Be careful not to confuse these questions or the strategies they recommend. The former requires a great deal of gentleness, buy-in, time and empathy. There’s a lot of interesting and important research being done on why people find conspiracy theories gripping. Often these beliefs don’t behave like regular beliefs; they don’t arrive by evidence, don’t leave by it, and it often seems to be a kind of play or entertainment more than a bona fide commitment to truth. This makes slowly loosening the grip of a conspiracy theory a much more complex task than old-fashioned cognitive persuasion: you have to give a bunch of respect, time and emotional scaffolding.
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