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Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. In this interview, I speak…
What 190 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about the nature of reality
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Conspiracy theories not only explain things, but they also explain things in a way that are a lot more interesting and entertaining and purposeful that gives people meaning than that regular life which is usually boring.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
People are unable to keep secrets for long – somebody tells somebody who tells somebody else, before you know it they are writing a tell-all book or going out on TV shows to talk about it! That's how it happens, that is how things are exposed.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
The more people that must be involved, the less likely the theory is to be true. A couple of people could pull it off, hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved, and it's not likely because we would hear about it.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
Education attenuates conspiracism such as those without a high school diploma are twice as likely to believe conspiracy theories than people with a graduate degree. But 1 in 5 people with a graduate degree believe in conspiracy theories, which is 20% – that is a high number.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
There is a rationality to believing in conspiracy theories that purport to identify somebody acting in secret to harm or gain an advantage that's illegal or immoral, over somebody else without their knowledge or consent.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
Enough conspiracy theories are true, it pays to believe more of them are true than actually are, make a type 1 error, false positive, you thought something was real when it wasn't, as opposed to a type 2 error where you failed to recognise a real conspiracy which could be costly.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
Our brains are not so well equipped, we just tend to assume patterns that look connected are causally connected. So a conspiracy theory is just another causal theory – why did these things happen?
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
Education attenuates conspiracism such as those without a high school diploma are twice as likely to believe conspiracy theories than people with a graduate degree. But 1 in 5 people with a graduate degree believe in conspiracy theories, which is 20% – that is a high number. Education does not entirely eliminate it.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
It is very common in politics that each party assume the other party cheated in every election if they lose. It's not that republicans are more suspicious than democrats or vice versa, but their constructive paranoia leads them to believe that the other party is doing something sinister.
— Michael ShermerFounder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator
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