Why 9 11 conspiracies are bullshit

Online videos claim holograms were used to project airplanes into the sky. If anything, Americans seem more distrustful of their government than in a long time. An anti-establishment mood pervaded the latest U. It also culminated in the Republican nomination of Donald Trump, a party outsider who has propagated conspiracy theories questioning President Barack Obama's birthplace.

Wood says those suspicious of the government also tend to be more aware of "actual historical conspiracies, where the government did something shady. Research also shows conspiracy theories tend to reach peaks around "times of uncertainty," according to Wood.

And so, alternative explanations filled the vacuum, says Dave Thomas, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, who has debated prominent Truther Richard Gage. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.

According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly square feet of floor area for each floor. There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another.

With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities. Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to seven hours.

Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time.

WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors—along with the building's unusual construction—were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Popular Mechanics. Thomas Nilsson Getty Images. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses.

You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. Instead the focus shifts to the latest "unanswered question". I'm saying that it needs to be investigated. Controlled demolition. Initially many questioned how such huge skyscrapers, which had dominated the Manhattan skyline for so long, could be brought down by an hour or so of fires - alluding to the possibility of some kind of controlled demolition.

But then the official report set out a rational explanation. And it also pointed out that contrary to the conspiracy theory, controlled demolition is always bottom up and not the top down collapse of the Twin Towers. The theory is that tonnes of explosives and an incendiary called thermite were used in a controlled demolition to destroy the building from the bottom up.

But when it is pointed out that thermite has never been used in controlled demolition, the theory once again moves on and claims that new and secret types of explosives and incendiaries were used. Likewise, conspiracy theory belief appears to be more of a negative belief than a positive one—it is more concerned with saying what the cause of a condition or event was not i.

An opportunity to test this idea presents itself in the form of observation of online discourse. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the lack of mainstream public acceptance for their theories, many conspiracists, both prominent and otherwise, appear to see themselves as having a duty to spread their views to the public at large. This is a reasonable reaction: given a belief that people's lives are being manipulated by malevolent forces beyond their control, most would probably agree that trying to spread the word about that fact is a good idea.

This discussion is voluminous and highly visible in many arenas, perhaps none more so than news website comment sections. These comments are often archived along with the associated articles for months or years afterward, which provides an excellent opportunity for archival research to give some insight into the thoughts and beliefs of those writing them e. The present study consists of an examination of a large number of conspiracy theory-related persuasive comments on news stories.

Such analysis of online discourse as a method of examining psychological states has increased in prominence as the Internet has become a more popular place to discuss one's ideas.

The subject and pace of online discussion has been shown to be a more or less reliable barometer of public concern over social issues Roberts et al. Quantitative analysis of online discussion has also been used to gain insight into the social psychology of groups with fringe views Douglas et al.

Qualitative research on online discourse has been more common, including a study demonstrating the evolution of conspiracy theories over time in response to evidence Lewandowsky et al.

In the context of conspiracy theories in particular, there are several advantages to content analysis of online commentary. The self-selective nature of online communication allows for the collection of a great deal of data regarding opinions that may be held by only a minority of people; moreover, the degree of anonymity facilitates the honest expression of opinions that might not be held in high social esteem elsewhere e. There are some caveats associated with analyzing persuasive comments in particular.

While external validity may benefit from observing behavior in a naturalistic setting, there is some degree of uncertainty regarding the internal validity of any conclusions drawn from such methods. Most obviously, there is the issue of to what degree the content of persuasive communications reflects the properties of the author rather than the demands of the situation.

Rather than faithful representations of internal psychological processes, commenters' methods of argumentation might instead reflect strategic considerations regarding the audience, the venue, and the subject matter. While self-presentation is very often a concern in psychological research, even in laboratory settings, such demands may be especially salient in a situation where one's goal is implicitly or even explicitly to persuade others rather than to provide an honest and straightforward account of one's beliefs.

Indeed, some research has shown that people do adapt their persuasive techniques according to their knowledge of the audience and the subject Friestad and Wright, ; Douglas et al. The question of whether we can expect persuasive communication to accurately reflect inner psychological processes is not easily answerable, as the effect of lay persuasive knowledge on generation of persuasive arguments is fairly sparse. While there is a substantial body of research on lay persuasive knowledge, the vast majority of it focuses instead on how such knowledge affects susceptibility to the persuasive messages of others.

However, it is well-established that people tend to rely heavily on projection for predicting others' behavior—that is, they use themselves as a model for prediction. This effect is especially strong when relatively little is known about the target [for a review, see Robbins and Krueger ].

In general, then, it is likely that persuaders use the self as a model for argument generation: in other words, they argue in a way that they would themselves find convincing. This, in turn, suggests that the types of arguments used by persuaders can contain information relevant to understanding how they think about the issue at hand. The tendency to use social projection is especially relevant in online settings. Much online discussion is either fully anonymous or conducted under pseudonyms, greatly limiting the amount of information available about the other party in a discussion.

As such, we assume for the purposes of the present study that people will generally tend to use arguments that they themselves would find most convincing were they the audience rather than the persuader. This, in turn, should reflect the structure of their belief systems—the arguments that people find most convincing are those that match up with how they view the world Darwin et al.

The recency of the materials lowered the probability of comments having been expunged from archives or lost as an unintended consequence of comment software upgrades. Third, just as the Truth Movement has a substantial online presence, so too do its conventionalist opponents in the skeptic movement. We therefore expected that there would be a good deal of debate between the two sides, providing further raw materials for analysis.

Finally, the Truth Movement is a well-established community with a substantial intellectual output, including popular books e. In short, its body of work is varied, voluminous, and well-developed, and should therefore be able to provide a wide range of different arguments for analysis. If our reasoning regarding the influence of projection on persuasive tactics holds, we should see systematic differences in the characteristics of conspiracist and conventionalist arguments.

Specifically, we should be able to replicate earlier results demonstrating that unrelated conspiracy beliefs are intercorrelated e. Examining a long-standing correlate of conspiracy belief, we also investigated the degree to which comments contained explicit expressions of mistrust, predicting that conspiracist comments would be more likely to express mistrust of authorities or other targets than conventionalist comments e.

Further, we examined expressions of powerlessness, and predicted that conspiracist comments would express more concerns about power, as feelings of powerlessness have been shown to correlate reliably with conspiracy theory belief Abalakina-Paap et al.

Replicating the previously established relationships between conspiracy beliefs, trust, and power would increase confidence in the present study's methods and help to justify any novel results derived therefrom. In addition to verifying the utility of this archival approach by replicating previous results, we made several novel predictions. First, if we are correct in our contention that much of the conspiracist worldview is based on a generalized rejection of official explanations rather than on positing particular alternative narratives, conspiracist comments should focus on refuting conventional explanations more than on presenting or supporting specific conspiracy theories.

Therefore, conspiracist comments, relative to conventionalist comments, should be more likely to derogate rival explanations and less likely to promote their own. If this is true, people should be unwilling to apply the term to themselves and should object when others do so.

While this might seem an obvious prediction—and indeed many authors take it as a given that the term is stigmatized—to our knowledge there have not yet been any empirical investigations of this contention. In particular, Bratich has highlighted the hostility of intellectual orthodoxy toward conspiracist explanations for events and the labelling of conspiracists as paranoid or otherwise mentally ill c.

Hofstadter, ; Kalichman et al. Therefore, we examined the hostility of each persuasive comment, whether characterized by outright insults, threats, dismissive sarcasm, accusations of complicity, or other hostile or insulting content.

The raw data consisted of the comment sections of various online news articles. Specifically, since only persuasive comments were of interest, only comments containing original content that could be considered persuasive, or written with the intent to persuade, were extracted. Our analyses, for the most part, are predicated upon the idea that people will tend to project in order to construct persuasive arguments; non-persuasive comments, therefore, are written without regard to their perceived efficacy in convincing the other party or neutral parties , as that is not their aim.

To operationalize this constraint we adhered to four criteria. The author of each comment was recorded, along with the Web address of the parent news article and whether the comment was a direct reply to another, previously posted comment. Once the comments were collected, they were coded according to the hypotheses of interest. The tone of the comment conspiracist or conventionalist was of interest to all analyses, so this was the first content variable coded.

What a conspiracy. Man, that tin foil hat has got to be tight today. Thousands of conspirators would be needed to pull off even a fraction of what you claim. And every one of them has been silent for almost 10 years now. Since the first hypothesis concerned the number of unrelated conspiracy theories mentioned favorably and unfavorably in the comment, we coded two separate variables for each comment: one comprised the number of other conspiracy theories mentioned favorably, and the other comprised the number of other conspiracy theories mentioned unfavorably.

The next hypotheses concerned trust and powerlessness. We therefore coded whether each comment contained expressions of mistrust, whether broadly or narrowly targeted e. Our primary hypothesis, and the one most relevant to the issue of conspiracist belief systems, concerned whether the comments contained positive or negative arguments.

As such we coded for two separate binary-valued variables: first, whether the comment contained advocacy of the person's favored interpretation e. The final hypothesis concerned the degree to which persuasive conspiracist and conventionalist comments were hostile. As such, we coded the hostility of each comment toward those who hold opposing views on a scale of one not at all hostile to five extremely hostile.

They even managed to remove all of the books from the library on the first floor undamaged after the partial collapse. As far as I can tell the WTC buildings are still the only large steel framed high-rise buildings to suffer total collapse due to fire, your poorly researched comment doesn't disprove the statement anyway. This comment, from a Daily Mail article, was part of a lengthy discussion regarding the plausibility of the WTC buildings collapsing due to fires and structural damage, as posited in the conventional explanation.

This comment was made in response to a conventionalist who claimed that there is precedent for similar collapses and that the official explanation is therefore plausible.