Disproportionate effect-to-cause gaps drive people toward conspiracy explanations

Evidence

A second cognitive element is proportionality. When something of importance occurs, we look for a cause commensurate with the act. We’ve noted this before: it seems implausible that events of world-historical importance could result from the actions of a single person or a few anonymous people. The effect (the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11) and the cause (two dozen obscure individuals) seem out of proportion, so much so that one cannot seem to have resulted from the other. So, the conspiracist explanation goes, the US government must have been complicit in the collapse of the World Trade Center, just as the government must have been complicit in the killing of JFK—or, if not the US government, then the KGB, or the mob, or Fidel Castro in Cuba. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 116

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the proportionality reasoning used to doubt lone-gunman accounts in JFK historiography and in chapter-1 discussion; pairs as the second element with [115] and [118]. — connects to: Conspiracy belief functions as a coping mechanism for groups facing loss and marginalization — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 146; Trivial procedural errors become conspiracy fodder against an unwelcome president — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 170; Threat and insecurity from structural conditions drive heightened conspiracy thinking — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 56 (+3 more)