Denialism: Are we all living in a self-serving delusion? And what can we learn from the ones who undoubtedly are?
Over the past two years we all have been living in unprecedented times. We had to cope with a new sort of reality, a pandemic that required us to change and adapt our behaviour in order to stay safe and ensure the safety of our social surroundings, our friends, families, neighbours and especially of the vulnerable people who have been threatened the most by the Coronavirus. But during this pandemic we might have also had a chance to encounter people who were not just frustrated and hence venting about the difficult situation, but potentially even denying the mere existence of this virus and the ensuing pandemic in the first place.
Personally, I did come across some very interesting representatives of this species, although this admittedly made me struggle to understand the etiology of such behaviour. Mainly because none of the pre-existing labels like “conspiracy theorists”, “skeptics”, “free-thinkers”, “obscurantists”, information bubble “agnotologists” or modern-day “digital esoterics” seem to capture the essence of what happens when otherwise intelligent people are somehow denying empirically proven facts for seemingly no obvious reasons.
However, after doing some initial research I was at least able to identify a common pattern in this behaviour, which can be described as “denialism”. Our beloved Wikipedia defines denialism as a person's active choice “to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth”. It continues to describe that denialism is “an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality”.
At first glance this seems to be a correct behavioural description, however it does not adequately explain why otherwise rational people would fall victim to such irrational behaviour. Three areas in which we all could experience such behaviour not just personally, on an individual level, but collectively, amplified via social media, are (1) the Covid Pandemic, (2) Climate Change, and (3) the most recent Economic Crisis. In all three cases, social media has become a breeding ground for the spread and amplification of this type of behaviour, giving rise to the question whether the specific types of “denialists” are all distinct in their characteristics and motivations, or whether in fact maybe any form of denialism might be explained by common features of people who are generally, as Wiki puts it, “rejecting overwhelming evidence … in attempts to deny the existence of consensus” on any given aspect of reality.
Whilst different theories already exist about the motivations and causes of denialism, including explanations based on religion, self-interest, and psychological defence mechanisms such as cognitive dissonance, we wanted to analyse existing commonalities within the personality structure of denialists, across the three above described areas of denialism (1, 2, 3).
As an openly available data source we have chosen to analyse Twitter data, which has shown us the following volumes of denialism-tweets related to either (1) the Covid Pandemic, (2) Climate Change, or (3) the Economy, over the past 3 years:
From the graph above we can see that the majority of all denialism-related tweets on these three topics are concerning either the Covid pandemic or the current economic situation. Together these two topics cover more than 94% of the denialism related tweets across these three topics over the past 3 years. Also, unsurprisingly, Covid is currently the area with the highest number of denialism related tweets among the three, although overall, the volume for the two topics of Covid and the Economy are almost equal in total volume.
Although all three topics have their own topological and social epicenters, they are actually interrelated. Especially insofar as some Covid denialists also seem to consider the involvement of big economic leaders like Bill Gates, George Soros or Klaus Schwab be involved in planning a #GreatEconomicReset, effectively rendering these denialists to be more like conspiracy theorists. This seems to be especially interesting as the distinction between denialism and conspiracy thinking should in fact be logically exclusive, as one can only be of the opinion that a phenomenon does not exist OR that some obscure conspiracy is ultimately responsible for it, but not believe in both things at the same time (!).
Psychologically speaking we could interpret this type of logically ambivalent behaviour as a strong, fear-induced impulse to protect the psyche against the disturbing concept of an actually inescapable global pandemic by initially simply denying its sheer existence, whilst then later, subsidiarily, blaming it on some powerful economic masterminds who are manipulating all of our lives from an unattainable, elitist economic position. Although such an irrational behaviour would not be considered technically logical, it might still be “psycho-logically” understandable in the same way that anyone facing an existential challenge in life might go through different stages of coping with this challenge, ranging from denial and anger up to, hopefully in the end, acceptance, where the mindset in any early stage might not be logically compatible with the mindset in any of the later stages of this coping process.
Such a stage-dependant explanation of coping with the existential angst induced by the pandemic is in fact supported by the relative volume of fear vs. anger related tweets of the denialism audience when talking about the pandemic vs. the imaginatively causal economic reset:
In a way, this interpretation could point to an understanding of denialist behaviour as a lense into the collective unconscious of our societies when facing hard to accept truths which require all of us to significantly change and adapt not just some aspects of our behaviour, but our whole way thinking and feeling as well as our emotional baseline and our normal emotional regulation when it comes to basic human needs such as our personal health, our safety, and our individual security. Not being able to ever feel completely safe again can in fact be emotionally traumatic for some people to the extent that they would rather deny such a reality, than to actually live with the emotional consequence of a never ending fear. Social data supports what has also been described in a recent Guardian article on “Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories”, namely that, like conspiracy theorists, denialists also imagine stakeholders like Bill Gates, George Soros, and big economic players like the WEF or pharma companies to be behind the (not existing) pandemic or climate crisis.
From a social network perspective it is especially interesting to see how all three denialist groups are ultimately interconnected and how they are utilising arguments from each other’s narrative to support their individual worldview and perspective.
In effect, this reveals how denialists, much like conspiracy theorists, selectively piece together aspects from different anecdotal narratives to create their own version of reality, which ultimately helps them to both a) simplify and hence better grasp “the” root cause behind complex matters like the Covid pandemic or climate change, as well as b) alleviate their individual feeling of helplessness in face of difficult circumstances which would otherwise force them to challenge and adapt their personal worldviews and attitudes with respect to existential concepts like freedom, health and social responsibilities. Especially the most trending hashtags and keywords associated with this audience reveals, to what extent they are perceiving everyone else to be living in some kind of #masspsychosis whilst they see themselves legitimised to #holdtheline in civil disobedience against an inhumane system which is taking their freedom away, committing #crimesagainsthumanity:
But what ultimately drives people to go down this route of constructing such an alternative reality? In their Guardian article “Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories”, Anna Leach and Miles Probyn identify a combination of catastrophic events and environments lacking trusted information as possible cause, whilst also conceding that an overload of information might have the same effect as lack of trusted information.
When looking at some of the most recently shared #masspsychosis content by this audience, it is however becoming very doubtful whether any overload or lack of (trusted) information can ever explain on its own why someone would unpromptedly just start to believe that there simply is no virus and that in fact the whole pandemic is just a devious plan to reset the economy.
A sample of Twitter content examples using the hashtag #masspsychosis:
In summary, based on a more in-depth analysis of the denialist audience data, we have been able to identify a series of clear indicators for denialist behaviour across all analysed segments. These indicators include the following characteristics:
Being (highly) religious, specifically of Christian faith
Being conservative, specifically loyal Republican followers of Trump
Identifying oneself as a “patriot”
(Over)valuing individual freedom
Being interested in guns and rifles
Having an affinity for armed forces and the military
(Over)valuing stability, structure and simplicity
Having an interest in specifically power & dominance oriented sports types like paintball, boxing, wrestling, rodeo riding and bodybuilding
Having significantly lower than average Neuroticism as a personality trait, corresponding to outwardly self-assured and imperturbable behaviour of people who generally try to avoid or find it difficult to respond and adapt to any environmental change but rather compartmentalise or hide any negative emotion or anxiety.
Especially the latter aspect might point to an underlying emotional reason why denialist audiences will find it difficult to adapt to big behavioural challenges such as the pandemic, the changing economy or climate change - they might have a general problem dealing with the negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, sadness and frustration associated with such big changes. Rather than facing these emotions, denying the challenging facts in the first place might hence simply be the easier route for this audience than having to act contrary to their very own personality structure which mandates them to always keep calm and imperturbable in the face of change. If this is the case, then we should see more of such denialist behaviour in a world that appears to be increasingly determined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), and in which social media stakeholders are incentivised to play right into the resulting anxiety, fear and doubt.
