Letters

Conspiratorial skepticism

After achieving two degrees in psychology, I concluded that the field is largely bereft of genuine insight and simple common sense, and that it masquerades as a science, with notable exceptions here and there. Articles such as “Tracing the inner world of suspicion,” (SN: 6/20/09, p. 11) confirm and underline psychology’s essential mindlessness. For one thing, the investigators cited in the article contrived a spurious category: that there is a personality given to forming conspiracy theories, and they can be identified by certain traits (none of which, as it turns out, have anything to do with the reliability or the lack thereof of the sources of their information).