"With this, there were enough kernels of truth that the lies between the gaps seem not as wide on the Internet as they do in reality," he said. Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, also said conspiracy theories are often attempts to find someone to blame for complex situations.
He added that such theories are an attempt to use stories, rather than facts, to understand an emotional situation.
"This is a wholly different way of going about explaining things, or coming to terms with things, than trying to use empirical facts," he said. "It's closer at once to an explanation and a vehicle to express emotion."
Joshua Hart, an associate professor of psychology at Union College who has studied what leads people to believe in conspiracy theories, said
President Donald Trump's dislike of China has fueled the theory by making it a partisan matter."The allure of a conspiracy theory is that it points to a kind of
tractable source or culprit for the problem so that you can wrap your head around the idea of identifying the perpetrators and stopping them," Hart said.Hart cited a sense of powerlessness Americans felt after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. After the attacks, he said the false suggestion that they may have been an "inside job" was comforting to some because it meant Americans could "police ourselves," while what happened in terrorist training camps abroad could not be controlled.
In addition to the anxiety created by the pandemic, the buy-in of some prominent political and media personalities has elevated these theories, according to University of Miami Associate Professor of Political Science Joseph E. Uscinski, who specializes in the study of conspiracy theories.
"Every pandemic winds up with conspiracy theories, whether it was the Ebola outbreak of six years ago or SARS or AIDS, there's conspiracy theories about pretty much everything," Uscinski said.
"But because of how big and acute this one is, combined with the fact that many of our political and media elites are trafficking in these theories has made them a little more popular than some previous similar theories have been."
Uscinski cited a claim made by U.S. Senator Thomas B. "Tom" Cotton '99 (R-Ark.) on FOX News in February that the virus could have been manufactured in a Wuhan lab, as well as claims by Trump and radio host Rush H. Limbaugh that the effects of the virus are being exaggerated.
"When we poll on this, we find that Republicans are more likely to believe in some of these theories than Democrats, and it's likely because Republican leaders and conservative media personalities are pushing these theories," Uscinski said.
Uscinski added that although many modern conspiracy theories including those connecting Lieber to the virus do spread through social media, his research has not found evidence that more people believe in theories today than before the internet.
"In this country's history, you didn't need an internet for, you know, witch trials and red scares and Freemason freak-outs and Illuminati scares," he said. "You don't need the new communication technologies for these things to spread on their own."
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More Biography of Dr. Boyle, summarized from Wikipedia
He served on the board of directors of Amnesty International, as a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, and on the Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Genetics. As member of the board of Amnesty International USA at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, he claimed that Amnesty International USA acted in ways closely related to United States foreign policy interests. He stated that Amnesty, along with other human rights organizations in the US, failed to sufficiently criticize the Sabra and Shatila Massacre in Lebanon.
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