On Thursday Nov. 2, the Bakersfield College hosted the third of three presentations as a part of their Tricks and Cheats lecture series.  Thursday saw the presentation titled Political Plots by librarian Laura Luiz.  Luiz spoke about conspiracy theories and their influence on politics.

To be clear Luiz made a point that this is not the first time in history in which conspiracy and distrust in government has been prominent in the U.S.  Today though, conspiracies run rampant and many fall victim to what Luiz calls the illusory truth effect.

Luiz describes the illusory truth effect as when someone decides something is truth simply because it is prominent and seen frequently.  An example of this can be seen when a friend tells you a conspiracy that children are being trafficked in an underground sex ring by Democratic party members.

At first it might sound crazy, but if everyone in your community believes it’s true, more social media posts about it show up in your feed, then maybe it’s not just a theory and it is true.  Pizzagate is just one example of a discredited conspiracy that pushed people to take extreme actions like walking into a pizza parlor with a gun looking for the children to be saved.

However, as part of Luiz presentation she gives useful tips to help identify if something is true, or just a conspiracy.  First it is important to understand some of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory.  Luiz mentioned that some of the characteristics include: a lack of evidence, complex and elaborate explanations, anonymous sources, and evoking a feeling of persecution.

Luiz also recommends that to help prevent falling into the rabbit hole of conspiracy some useful tips to prevent that can include checking your emotions, fact checking, and scanning your online environment.  Luiz elaborated that by checking your emotions, it allows yourself to understand how the post is making you feel, fact checking helps to determine if what the post is saying has any merit or truth, and lastly, checking your online environment can help evaluate if this is something that everyone is seeing or just you.

Altogether, that tips and advice that Luiz offered are tried and true methods.  Luiz emphasized that conspiracies often hijack our emotions and cloud judgement, so it is even more important to have useful methods of discernment to determine the validity of a claim.