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Ideas

When we were coming up with ideas for our documentary Jess and I (Lauren was home and sick at that moment, but she also came up with few ideas) brainstormed what our society is obbsessed with. To do that we tried to think of what we are obbsessed with and looked up the common themes in a few online newspapers.

We ended up choosing 3 things to explore more individually, Jess chose to research more about obbsession with reality TV stars, Lauren chose to research obbsession with image and I chose conspiracy theories. 

Honestly, I wanted to research more about conspiracy theories and one of the reasons why this idea didn't work in the end was because I was (still am) kind of obbsessed with it. I just simply find it so fascinating, we live in the world where there's a conspiracy theory about almost everything. From some people believing that the moon landing was faked to the world being a simulation. So why do so many people believe in conspiracy theories? What's the science behind them?

From the start I found the subject to be really difficult to even start the research about, because I didn't really knew where to start because, as I said, there's probably a conspiracy theory about EVERYTHING, so I had to really narrow it down to specific theories. One that really stood out for me (mostly for its stupidity) is that the Earth is flat. I genuinely wanted to find out what makes people believe that the Earth is flat, but at the same time it was so hard not to make fun of others beliefs when it came to it and that was probably another reason why this idea would have been unsuccessful. People who I tried to get to talk to me about this probably thought that I was making fun of them, because of others before me doing so. It was really hard to find people who I could contact, because most of them had disabled others from messanging them and those who hadn't didn't reply to me.

While I was waiting for the reply I looked into the science behind conspiracy theories and why do people believe them. Found a few articles  and videos about it, but I think it's best explained in this video:

The main reason to believing in conspiracies is fear, it jumpstarts others and people end up believing in said conspiracies 
1. Evolved to be a bit paranoid (dismissing a possible threat might cause death)
2. Pattern Recognition (Our brain needs to link various events together)
3. Confirmation Bias (It's hard to admit we're wrong, especially about things that form our view of the world (religion, ideology))
4. Proportionality Bias ( believing that big events have big causes)
5. Projection (atributing our negative qualities to others)
Most of these are evolutionary things that made us survive for centuries, but with an access to loads of (true or false) information makes conspiracy theories wide spread.

Although, I liked the idea to base our documentary on conspiracies, it would have been way too hard to achieve due to the lack of accses to conspiracy theory believers and also it would have been hard not to accidentaly make fun of some of them.

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