So let's get into it. What the psychological literature can tell us about QAnon. I personally

am not a research psychologist, but I could read research psychology papers and tell you what

they say. Sure. And so I'm going to share like three papers with you today. But before I do,

I want to emphasize something important is that conspiracy theorizing is sort of like a normal thing

that has always happened throughout every civilization history. Yes, not great, but it's just a

normal thing like the old phrase, Neuro fiddled while Rome burned. Apparently this derives from

a devastating fire that ravaged Rome in July of 64 AD. And in the aftermath, a popular conspiracy

theory among the Romans was that Neurohired goons to start the fire or even prevent people from

putting out the fire was Neuro Jewish. So it's a really, really normal thing, but you know, why is

it happen? So there are lots and lots of reasons. It's not a simple thing, but you can categorize

the many motivations for why people believe in conspiracy theories. And in order to do that,

I'm going to turn to a 2017 research paper titled The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

by Karen Imdugles, Robbie Imstanton, and Laoxandra Chicatka, which I'm probably pronouncing wrong.

So sorry. They looked at dozens of papers from current literature on the psychological factors

that appear to drive conspiracy belief. And from that, they grouped motivations for believing

conspiracy theories into three categories. There are epistemic motives, existential motives,

and social motives. So the first one is epistemic motives for believing in conspiracy theories.

This means that people believe in conspiracy theories because they explain things in the way that

allows them to preserve their beliefs in the face of uncertainty and contradiction. And of course,

I think we see this a lot in the Q&NI community. Matt Christman was on the pod. He observed that

Q&NI may be a way for QNN believers to bridge the gap between what they thought Trump was going to do

in office and what he's actually doing. And so the second motivation is existential. Conspiracy

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