The Desire for Cognitive Consistency Encourages Conspiracy Theories

Thirty-seven years have now elapsed since President Kennedy’s assassination, and despite the passage of time, the painful memory of that event still occupies a special place in the national consciousness. An endless stream of books about the assassination has certainly figured importantly in keeping that memory fresh. To help the conspiracy-challenged, there are even such books as Who Shot JFK?: A Guide to the Major Conspiracy Theories. Why do conspiracy theories have such widespread appeal?

There is often a tendency to associate beliefs in conspiracies with the “lunatic” or political fringe. To the extent that conspiratorial beliefs dominate one’s thinking, or are central to an ideology, then we are indeed talking about an extreme. But when they are not all-pervasive concerns, beliefs in conspiracies can represent a quite normal way of looking at things—normal in the sense that such beliefs can meet a very ordinary, nonpathological need.

One of the most influential social psychologists, Fritz Heider, has theorized that a pervasive human need is to maintain a sense of consistency among our various thoughts, feelings, and actions. The belief that the Kennedy assassination involved more than one person, it has been suggested, can be understood as something that fulfills this need for consistency.

As Tom Bethell argued in the pages of the Washington Monthly many years ago, to think that such a big, devastatingly important result—the killing of a President—was caused by a very unimportant, solitary individual is jarring to the mind. To believe that a big outcome has a big cause achieves a sought-after consistency, since there is a better fit between cause and effect. Thus, it is quite easy to accept the possibility that Kennedy was assassinated through a conspiracy involving several (or even many) people.

A different perspective on conspiratorial beliefs comes from some studies conducted by Clark McCauley and Susan Jacques at Bryn Mawr College. They presented subjects of their experiments with simulated newspaper headlines about assassinations. One headline said that an attempt was made on the President’s life and that it was successful. Another said that an unsuccessful attempt

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 was made on the President’s life. Subjects were simply asked to indicate the likelihood that there was only a lone gunman or that more than one person was involved.

Over a series of experiments, these researchers found that people were more likely to assume a conspiracy when a successful attempt took place than when the assassination attempt failed. Rather than a consistency-based explanation, their findings point to the following one: People reason that if an assassination attempt was successful, it must have involved a conspiracy, since a group should be more effective than one person.

Whatever the best specific explanation, it is quite clear that persistent beliefs in conspiracy accounts of President Kennedy’s death are not necessarily a manifestation of human perversity. Rather, they are quite akin to the ways of thinking that figure daily in people’s attempts to make sense of their world.

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