Originally Posted by Dollarmansteve

9/11 truthers fall into the following psychological traps:

- confirmation bias

9/11 truthers go to irrational lengths to justify their improbable beliefs. No one can say thay anything is "impossible", but to deny the most probable series of events is not indicative rational or analytic thought. This is the paradox of the 9/11 truther - the basis of THEIR skepticism is to "not believe what they're told" and "question the 'official' story" and seek "truth". Yet, the first thing one must do when buying into the "9/11 truth" movement is to throw common sense, rational thought and critical thinking out the window to justify pie-in-the-sky, low-probablility, postdictive speculations.

- out-group homogeneity

The 9/11 truther is brainwashed into believing that anyone who "believes the official story" is a "sheep" or is "unable to think for themselves". This is a defense mechanism used by the 9/11 truther to cast all those who don't share their beliefs as being the same. Once all those in the out-group are cast as being the same, they can be discredited and demonized. The demonization is carried out by piggy-backing unpopular political and social beliefs onto the generic "non-truther". The popular method has been to cast all non-9/11 truthers as being "republican" or "Bush loving" ignorant zombies who watch fox news, etc.

Social disenfranchisement is the driver for belief in conspiracy theory. Asymmetrical information and incorrect information entaglement also plays a role.

Social disenfranchisement creates a macro "them vs. us" psychology. This disenfranchisement manifests in the micro-sense through vehicles like conspiracy theory movements. 9/11 and the subsequent 9/11 truth movement is perhaps the most glaring example of how political and social (and now economic) disenfranchisment can manifest itself as mass psychosis.

Asymmetrical information plays its role in the truth movement because there is so much information and knowledge spread amongst so many different individuals / groups / agencies. In fact, I would say that there is no single entity that has the "whole" picture. As an outside observer (say, the average 9/11 truther) it is very difficult to find "the truth" since it's basically impossible to have all the information. Even at its best, there would be massive, massive holes in information. The shortcut then is to fill in those holes with "rules of thumb" or, as I will explain, incorrect information entaglement.

Incorrect information entaglement means simply: to connect pieces of information together that have nothing to do with eachother. 9/11 truthers engage in this practice almost endlessly to overcome asymmetrical information in the irrational quest for truth. I credit the internet and the mass availability of information as being the driver for this phenomenon. One good example is the citing of "operation nothwoods" as being causally connected to 9/11. Operation Northwoods was a theoretical operation that would have involved a "false-flag" attack in order to justify further military intervention in cuba in the 1960s. The rationale of the 9/11 truther is that, since at some point in the past some group (1960s CIA) proposed the idea of a false-falg operation, that it was probable that it would happen again. The psychology is understandable, it's why people buy stocks that are on the way up (buy high) and sell on the way down (sell low) - the exact opposite of rational behavior. People expect past events to predict future events. Unfortunately, this information has been incorrectly entangled with 9/11 (with massive confirmation bias) solely for the purpose of suppoting the highly improbably (yet minutely possible) scenario of 9/11 being a false flag operation perpetrated by the US government. There are many other examples, some are pretty crazy and are on display in this thread (numerological arguments, symbolic predictions in media, etc).

I could go on. I have a keen interest in the psychology of the 9/11 truther. The pitfall is actually getting into the details of the arguments.. since, as you've stated above, the ego of the 9/11 truther is ultimately insurmountable. The nature of conspiracy belief is kind of like an old philosophy joke:

So I had this dream where all the great philosophers came to me: Socrates, Plato, Hume, Locke, Kant... and as each of them spoke to me I was able to present a counter-argument to all of their great theories, and it was the same to each. I had discovered the great grand unified philosophical theory.. at this point, half asleep, I was able to write down what I said to each of them on a notepad by my bed. When I awoke in the morning I grabbed the notepad to see what I had written down, it said "That's what YOU think!"

Basically, the 9/11 truther always has a "that's what YOU think" argument as a last resort which cannot be overcome. There is much that can be learned about sociology and psychology by studying things like the 9/11 truth movement. Unfortunately (and ironically), there isn't much than can actually be learned about 9/11 by studying 9/11 truth, lol.