White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume, trans. Over the course of this all-too-short book, Brotherton illustrates how incomplete, contradictory, coincidental, and incongruent information can allow people to see conspiracies and connections where there are none, due in part to the theories’ plausibility and humans’ innate desire for order, as well as a given individual’s understanding of how the world works. The concept has been around at least since Nero’s alleged fiddling while Rome burned (as it turns out, he was out of town at the time and immediately sought to provide food and shelter for victims upon his return). Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton (Bloomsbury/Sigma) - Observing that conspiracy theories can be fluid in nature (“One person’s conspiracy theory is the next person’s conspiracy fact”), Brotherton, a former lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, nimbly sidesteps the rabbit hole of proving or disproving specific conspiracies by focusing on the phenomenon as a whole.
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