Wednesday 26 May 2010

Conspiracy theories and development

A recent talk this week at the LSE on climate change denial and conspiracy theories by Stephan Lewandowsky has had me thinking about conspiracy theories more generally. The speaker made a rather striking claim that 'the capitalist individualist economy' encourages this kind of thinking, a claim which I find (without any evidence) to be absurd. I've never heard more conspiracy theories than I did in Egypt, and today in the NYT this article reports on the phenomenon in Pakistan. Are these kinds of widespread (mis)beliefs the result of analytical illiteracy, poor journalism, authoritarian government, or something else? Are they damaging economically or politically? Is this a reasonable topic for more research?
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1 comment:

  1. Guo1 June 2010 at 04:04

    I'm not so sure how studying conspiracy theories would fit into economics (information asymmetries?), but we had an interesting paper from cultural anthropology on conspiracy theories in development which was quite fun to read: http://web.uvic.ca/pacificasia/faculty/files/ButtLipstickGirls.pdf

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