Skyscraper Engulfed By Flames...DOES NOT COLLAPSE

This one goes out to all the COWARDS who refuse to question the official story of 9/11 and the FACT that it was a CONTROLLED DEMOLITION and STAGED from DAY ONE!

Ps. The building was in Chechnya...as if it matters. Half you losers wouldn't even know where Chechnya was unless Anderson Cooper pointed it out to ya.

• added by: FunkBrother 
• funkbrother commented on Skyscraper Engulfed By Flames...DOES NOT COLLAPSE21 hours ago

   

                Belief in Conspiracies as a Generalized Dimension:

                There is remarkably little psychological literature on belief in conspiracy theories.  Graumann (1987: 245) observed that this is a "topic of intrinsic psychological interest that has been left to history and to other social sciences."  Historians (Groh, 1987) and sociologists (Lipset and Raab, 1970) find that conspiratorial thinking has been central to anti-semitic and other author­itarian belief systems, and to many social movements in both Europe and the United States.  A well known historical discussion by Hofstadter (1965) argued that there is a distinct paranoid "style" in American politics.  Despite this historical evidence, conspiratorial thinking was not part of the author­itarianism syndrome as originally conceptualized by Adorno, et al. (1950), and has not been addressed in the subsequent research on author­itarianism or related social psychological constructs.

                Given this lack of prior empirical research, our first goal was to determine to what extent there is a generalized tendency to believe in conspiracies.  The matrix of correlations between the nine conspiracy theory items is shown in Table Two.  The table shows a moderate to high level of correlation between many of the items, including several that have no strong logical or topical connection.  Most of the correlations are statistically significant, as indicated in the table.  A factor analysis determined that the first principal factor explained 37.8% of the variance common to these items.  (For the white respondents alone, the first principal factor explained 32.5% of the variance; for the black alone it explained 39.9%).  These findings offer strong support for the hypothesis that belief in conspiracies is a generalized ideological dimension.
   
             
                Correlations Between Belief in Specific Conspiracies
  Theory              1.    2.    3.    4.    5.    6.    7.    8.    9.
  1.  Kennedy       
  2.  Anita Hill     .08 
  3.  Aids Govlab    .22** .28**
  4.  Aids-Gays      .11   .24*  .69*
  5.  Aids-Blacks    .15*  .24** .67*  .78**
  6.  Flying Saucers .24** .15*  .21*  .19   .11  
  7.  FBI-King       .27** .27*  .35*  .33** .42** .16*
  8.  Iran Hostages  .16*  .11   .32** .31** .32** .17** .34**
  9.  Japanese Econ  .07   .29** .20** .23** .22*  .03   .24** .17**
  10. Drugs-Gov      .08   .34** .52** .54** .56** .19** .44** .29** .29**
  N of cases:   348         One‑tailed significance:  * < .01,  ** < .001
   
                Correlates of Belief in Conspiracies:

                These ten items were used to construct a summated scale of Belief in Conspiracies.  This scale had a reliability coefficient (alpha) of .78, confirming that the items have enough variance in common to justify treating them as a scale for this population.  The scale was then used to investigate some of the correlates of belief in conspiracies as an attitude dimension.

                Belief in Conspiracies was not significantly correlated with gender, educational level or occupational category.  There was a weak (r = -.21) negative correlation with age (all correlations mentioned in the text are significant at the .001 level).  Attendance at the movie JFK was not correlated with Belief in Conspiracy scores.  There was a strong correlation (r = .44) with minority status (defined as white=1, hispanic=2, black=3) and with black race as a dummy variable (r = .42). 

                Belief in Conspiracies was significantly correlated (r = .43) with a three-item scale of "Anomia" (alpha = .49) made up of items taken from the General Social Survey of 1990.  These items measured the belief that the situation of the average person is getting worse, that it is hardly fair to bring a child into today's world, and that most public officials are not interested in the average man.  These items tapped into feelings of discontent with the established institutions of contemporary society which were widely observed by pollsters and pundits in 1991 and 1992.  A comparison of scores from this sample with those from the national 1990 sample confirmed that Anomia in this sense was higher in 1992 than in 1990.
   
                The Belief in Conspiracies scale was significantly correlated (r = -.37) with a three-item scale of trust (alpha = .57), which asked whether respon­dents felt that they could trust the police, their neighbors or their relatives.  The Belief in Conspiracies scale was also significantly correlated (r = .21) with the item "thinking about the next 12 months, how likely do you think it is that you will lose your job or be laid off."           
   
  Group differences on all three scales were statistically significant at the .001 level by analysis of variance test.

                In a multivariate regression analysis of the determinants of Belief in Conspiracies, age and economic insecurity were not statistically significant.  The variables which retained significance were minority status, anomia and trust.  The multivariate relationships are shown most clearly in the path analysis in Figure 2.  Minority status and Anomia are clearly the strongest determinants of Belief in Conspiracies.  Minority status is also strongly correlated with Anomia and with lower levels of interpersonal Trust.  The correlation between Trust and Belief in Conspiracies was weakened when anomia and minority status were controlled, but it retained statistical significance.

            Multivariate regression did show, however, that both education and anomia were significant as determinants of belief in the Kennedy conspiracy for the sample as a whole. 

                This shows the correlations between the scales of Anomia and  Trust and the ten conspiracy items.  The Anomia scale is significantly correlated with all of the items except the one about flying saucers, which supports the idea that this item may tap into a different belief system.  The Trust scale is significantly correlated with most of the conspiracies, although the correlations are lower and do not achieve statistical significance in the case of the Kennedy, Anita Hill and flying saucer conspiracies.
   
                Discussion:

                These data confirm that conspiracy theories are alive and well in contemporary American society.  Most respondents are inclined to believe that several of a list of conspiracies are probably or definitely true.  The tendency to believe in conspiracies is correlated with anomia, with a lack of trust in other people, and with feelings of insecurity about unemployment. 

                  The strong correlation with the scale of Anomia indicates that Belief in Conspiracies is associated with the feelings of alienation and disaffection from the system.  Volkan (1985) suggests that during periods of insecurity and discontent people often feel a need for a tangible enemy on which to externalize their angry feelings. 

  Conspiracy theories may help in this process by providing a tangible enemy to blame for problems which otherwise seem too abstract and impersonal.  Conspiracy theories also provide ready answers for unanswered questions and help to resolve contradictions between known "facts" and an individual's belief system.

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