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People who feel uncertain tend to be drawn to conspiracies, Douglas told Live Science.

The first reason has to do with the search for knowledge and certainty. The reasons fall into three main categories, said Karen Douglas, a social psychologist at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. Still, psychologists have studied why conspiracy theories are appealing, in general. The internet-era flat-Earth movement is new enough that no one has done any psychological research on it, Swami said, though one of his students is working on a project on the phenomenon now. Minor celebrities, such as rapper B.o.B and TV personality Tila Tequila, have boosted the conspiracy's profile by tweeting about their skepticism that the Earth is round. There was a smattering of interest in the 1950s with the creation of the International Flat Earth Society, but today's resurgence of the theory seems to derive from social media, said Viren Swami, a social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. And, psychologists say, flat-Earth conspiracy theorists may be chasing many of the same needs as believers in other conspiracies: social belonging, the need for meaning and control, and feelings of safety in an uncertain world.įlat-Earth theories aren't new in the modern era, they date back to an English writer named Samuel Rowbotham, who came up with a variety of creative interpretations of cosmology in the mid-1800s. So what is the appeal? For many believers, it's a matter of distrust of the scientific elite and the desire to see the evidence with their own eyes. [ 8 Times Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science in 2017)Īs conspiracy theories go, it's a pretty all-encompassing one. Exactly what this looks like varies by who is theorizing, but many flat-Earth believers say that walls of ice surround the edge of the disk, and that the planets, moons and stars hover in a sort of dome-shaped firmament above Earth, much closer to Earth than they really are. Instead, flat-earthers argue, the planet is a disk. That subculture is flat-earthers, people who argue that centuries of observations that the Earth is round (including astronaut photographs from space and the fact that round-the-world travel itineraries work) are either mistaken or part of a vast cover-up.