Conspiratorial Thinking
What the research says about people who believe hurricanes are man made
“Say whatever the f*** you want, that hurricane was man made,” the woman spit into the camera. She is dressed in a white tank top, her blonde hair pulled hastily back. She looks to be in her early 50s.
The comments under the video online are full of, “Amen, sister” and, “Finally, someone said it.”
Dozens of videos are made in response, with creepy music set behind pictures users deem suspicious, including a building in Africa that supposedly shows where hurricanes are made, weather maps that depict vortex shapes, and videos of downed trees with text that say “this was no natural storm.”
Let’s get the high school science out of the way: the first law of thermodynamics teaches us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change forms. An average hurricane, not a particularly strong one like Hurricane Helene, produces 1.5 trillion watts of power. That is the equivalent of a 10 megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. (By contrast, the nuclear bombs the United States dropped on Japan had a combined power of .4% of a 10-megaton bomb.)
Because we cannot create energy, the energy for a hurricane has to be transformed from another source. There is no human technology that exists that can transform 1.5 trillion watts of power from one energy source to another and unleash it in the form of a weather system. Not even close.
And it's not rational or reasonable to think so.
But here’s the thing: belief in conspiracy theories, the idea that a secret group is controlling something with the intent to harm a person or society, doesn’t require rationality or reasonability. In fact, the opposite.
Conspiratorial thinking is strongly related to delusion-proneness, which is defined by a propensity to engage in intuitive and irrational thinking, rather than thinking based in reason. Researchers who have studied more than 158,000 people in multiple countries say that people who are likely to engage in this “the government is creating hurricanes to rig the election” thinking are likely to eschew complex and effortful thinking in favor of effortless thinking.