The world of scientific research holds a principle of conservatism that hasn’t yet entered the public consciousness–and likely never will. It is the idea that if something isn’t yet explainable by rigorous and established controls and procedures, researchers are cautious to draw broad conclusions about that phenomenon.

The reason for this is simple: In order to best understand phenomena, researchers are careful about offering conclusive statements because the process of research demands a constant challenging and updating of information, new and old. What makes science, science is the constant refining of knowledge.

Problems arise because the human tendency is to take familiar features of one’s situation and to reduce those features into a seemingly plausible and easily accepted conclusion. An example: The world works in mysterious ways and many ideas exist about how and why the world turns as it does. Commonly, an invisible force–an intelligent designer, a god—is deemed to be responsible.

Such a deduction goes against fundamental scientific principles. Evolutionary explanations are readily available and are accepted by scientists in spite of the fact that more than 80 percent of Americans believe in God.

A more specific example: Holes in the explanations of details in the 9/11 terrorist attacks have led conspiracy theorists to allege that 9/11 was a U.S. government plot. By most standards, this comes off as far-fetched—yet the road conspiracy theorists travel to generate these conclusions is the same road most take to formulate everything from minor understandings of human interactions in the workplace to the widespread adherence to religious and spiritual ideas.

The 9/11 conspiracy theorists, in other words, are more similar to most people than they are dissimilar—the 9/11 “truthers,” as they are referenced, just picked a topic that resonates with them and likely confirms their beliefs about the current U.S. government.

There are countless other examples. The nature of self- and collective-delusion means that human interpretations of things will be fraught with bias and will exhibit disfavor toward rational explanations especially if contradictory to already cemented beliefs. Consider everything from New Age health remedies, UFOs, ghosts, psychics and government conspiracies to anthropomorphism, political dogmatism and various forms of activism. Confirmation bias, one of the more nagging human psychological traits, has been well documented to partially explain why strong, if irrational, beliefs exist.

Nobody understands the phenomenon of delusional thinking perhaps better than Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic Magazine and author of numerous books including Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. As of this writing, Shermer is on a book tour promoting his new book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics(a review on this blog is forthcoming). At many of his stops, he began noticing faux questions being asked by what are, in fact, 9/11 conspiracy theorists attending to espouse their ideas and, essentially, disrupt Shermer’s talks. Shermer writes about, and documents with video, truther harassment here.

Some background: Skeptic published a recent issue devoted to debunking 9/11 conspiracies. Shermer also wrote in 2005 a column for Scientific American. The responses by conspiracy theorists have been predictably hostile and ad hominem. In fairness, Shermer’s delivery can understandably invoke these kinds of reactions at times; nevertheless, truthers have been actively trying to cause trouble for Shermer .

Common threads appear in such activist attacks. I wrote about some of them here. After watching the Shermer videos, there are two more traits than can be added to the list:

In public forums,

1. Activist comments will be off topic.
2. Grandstanding will be prefaced by asking faux questions.

Fortunately in Shermer’s case, the rest of the audience in Seattle was annoyed and adamant about moving on.

The question then arises: When will that be the case for the myriad other topics laced with noted delusions?