He didn't quit, but his following two thrillers, " Deception Point" and " Angels & Demons," also debuted with little fanfare. It had all the making of a mass audience book - but no audience. Martin's Press published " Digital Fortress" in 1998. It turned out that Brown had a knack for cranking out a thriller, and St. This agent reached out to him and convinced him to try writing a novel. A bonus just for you: Click here to claim 30 days of access to Business Insider PRIMEīrown spent the '90s as a struggling musician, and an article he wrote for his own amusement for his high school alumni magazine happened to catch the eye of a literary agent. You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter and on Facebook. Showing logical arguments against them doesn't change people's minds."
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"There is past research showing that conspiracy beliefs don't really respond to counterevidence very well, because they're not based on logical arguments to begin with. "There is something very fundamental about the nature of these kinds of beliefs," Newheiser said. She and her colleagues are launching more studies to examine a wider variety of conspiratorial beliefs. government had something to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Newheiser said. Religious people have their own understanding of those events, Newheiser said, which may be why they were more easily persuaded that the Da Vinci conspiracy was false.Ī similar need for control may be at play in other conspiracy theories as well, including the idea that the U.S.
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"In this case, it's particularly interesting because it might help people who are nonreligious or non-Christian to understand the events related to early Christian history." But the finding that people with death anxiety are more likely to believe in the Da Vinci conspiracy jibes with the theory that conspiracies, as wacky as they can be, provide a sense of comfort to adherents.Ĭonspiracy theories "can alleviate people's sense of loss of control by giving them a reason that things happen," Newheiser said.
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7 in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, is preliminary, Newheiser said. Nonreligious participants, however, did not budge. They found that among the most religious participants, this counterevidence lessened the belief in the conspiracy. Next, the researchers called 50 of the original students back and presented them with historical evidence that the Da Vinci conspiracy is false. People who were religious, knowledgeable about the Bible and desiring of social approval, on the other hand, tended not to buy into the Da Vinci conspiracy. The students most likely to believe the conspiracies in Brown's novel were those who enjoyed the book the most, expressed the most New Age beliefs, and felt the most anxiety about dying. They also answered questions about New Age beliefs, such as "The whole cosmos is an unbroken living whole that modern man has lost contact with." In the first, they asked 144 students to rate their agreement with Da Vinci conspiracy beliefs, such as "The church has burned witches and other 'heretics' to keep the truth about Jesus hidden." The students also filled out questionnaires about their religiosity, biblical knowledge, enjoyment of "The Da Vinci Code" novel or movie, and their fear of death. The researchers gathered college students who had read the book and conducted two studies. "The Da Vinci Code" was a good starting point, Newheiser said, because unlike other conspiracy believers, Da Vinci conspiracy believers are not marginalized as tin-foil hat types.
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Newheiser and her colleagues decided to use belief in this "Da Vinci conspiracy" to find out what people get out of believing in conspiracy theories.