How conspiracy theories bypass people’s rationality
Important concepts here related to developing products:
- Why, when interviewing, you cannot ask people what they want
- Why people often make what seem like irrational product decisions
- How value proposition can influence decision making by focusing on their needs
Part of the answer lies in a quality that psychologists refer to as fluency. Information that is interesting and attention-grabbing is easier to mentally process than information that is boring (such as realistic yet not particularly exciting information revealing that, on most days, politicians simply work on new legislation in their offices). Greater ease of processing, or fluency, has been found to promote truth judgments. This fluency heuristic likely exists because, in daily life, information that ‘feels right’ in this way is often true (eg, birds fly; fish swim). But the side-effect is that, when false information is easy to process, people more readily infer that the information is correct.
https://psyche.co/ideas/how-conspiracy-theories-bypass-peoples-rationality