Asked & Answered: 'Birther' Psychology

(Aug. 2) -- To paraphrase a slogan from "The X Files," they want to believe. What people who've come to be known as "birthers" believe about President Obama isn't what mainstream America believes. The skeptics contend there's no proof Obama is a natural-born citizen, so he doesn't meet a constitutional requirement to be president. Evidence to the contrary seems only to feed their conspiracy theory.

Rutgers University sociology professor Ted Goertzel studies the psychology of conspiracy theory believers. With Obama's birthday coming up Aug. 4 and online buzz about the citizenship question louder than ever, AOL News asked Goertzel:

"I think people are trying to simplify a complex situation and trying to look for a mechanism where they feel they can make a change in the world. So if you believe that the world has been distorted by some sort of a conspiracy then you can set it right and a lot of complex problems will be resolved. ...

People who get involved in conspiracies tend to be relatively intelligent. And they use their intelligence to support a fixed idea. You get a fixed idea of one thing, which may be that Obama is bad -- you want to get rid of Obama -- and then they find a reason to adjust the reality of the world to fit that belief."

"For some people it's sort of like a hobby or an entertainment. They enjoy doing it. They enjoy the attention. They enjoy the fact that people are interested in what they're saying. I think for other people, it becomes a little more dangerous in the sense that it becomes an excuse for not dealing with real problems in their own life. It becomes a way of finding somebody to scapegoat for their problems. ...

It's better to have somebody specific to blame rather than just social forces. You know, the economy is going down, I've lost my job. Somebody must have done this. Somebody must have been responsible. ...

I think it's rather amazing we haven't had more of that related to the recent economic crisis -- you know that somehow the Jews did it or the bankers did it. And there's somebody back there behind the scenes who's ripping us all off. Typically in economic crises, people come up with theories like that. In this case, we haven't had as much of that as one might expect."

"Well, I think they come up quicker and there's more variety of people doing this. ... Today things can catch on very quickly and people find them intriguing. ...

Nobody can really take the time to thoroughly investigate all of these things. How many of us have time to go study Obama's birth certificate or something? We sort of assume that if this were true it would come out... No one person can really study the original data on all of these things. And some of us tend to believe the New York Times. We think that they're a reasonable outfit and they know what they're doing or other press outlets. And of course sometimes they do get fooled and they make mistakes. But if you don't want to put your confidence in them, and you don't make that distinction, you can go with any web site that happens to catch your fancy. Then you can believe anything."

"Statistically, that's a survey that I did here. At least in New Jersey, we found that there was a general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. And it's related to a feeling of alienation, a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that the powers that be are out to get you. And then that can be expressed in different ways."

"I think the moon landing thing is really unbelievable because there's all kinds of physical evidence. And you'd have to say that they fooled the Soviet Union and they fooled all these astronomers in the world. There's just scientific, physical evidence that this thing did happen. So it is really incredible that that persists. Now there are other things that did turn out to be true. The Watergate conspiracy did take place. I mean, there are conspiracies in the world. I don't know that many people knew about that before it was broken by the press, really... It wasn't so much of a popular belief.

But there are conspiracies that do happen. So you can't say just because someone says there's a conspiracy that it's necessarily false. It may not be very plausible. It may not be worth the trouble to investigate because of the inherent implausibility of it. But to disprove something is very difficult. Particularly with people who say well the more evidence there is against it, that just proves how devious they were in manufacturing false evidence. ...

And there's sort of a contradiction there in that they believe that these conspiracies are terribly powerful, but somehow they have managed to penetrate it, even though other people haven't, with relatively simple means of investigation."