Fiche de révision : Conspiracy Theories and Modals

📋 Plan du Cours

1. Exemples de théories du complot
2. Structure d’une théorie du complot
3. Mécanismes cérébraux impliqués
4. Pourquoi y croire
5. Exprimer la certitude et la possibilité
6. Vocabulaire essentiel

📖 1. Exemples de théories du complot

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Roswell : a town in the United States near Area 51 and a military base where a spacecraft is supposed to have crashed with aliens inside
• Big Foot : said to be a prehistoric giant man covered in hair who lives in American forests and mountains, although the story was a joke by students
• Shape-shifting lizards : extraterrestrial lizards that are said to have taken human form to invade Earth

📝 Points essentiels

• Examples of alleged secret societies or groups include:
  • the Illuminati
  • the Freemasons
  • the Jews
  • the Bilderberg Group
  • the Skull and Bones society
  • Big Pharma
  • the military-industrial complex
  • global elites

📖 2. Structure d’une théorie du complot

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Conspiracy theory : claims that phenomena are caused by an evil plan that cannot otherwise be explained

📝 Points essentiels

• Conspiracy theories contain three elements:
  • a conspirator who invents the conspiracy
  • a plan involving world domination
  • mass manipulation

💡 Astuce mémo

Conspirateur → plan → manipulation

📖 3. Mécanismes cérébraux impliqués

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Pattern recognition : the brain’s tendency to identify a situation with patterns already known
• Dopamine : a neurotransmitter involved in emotion, reward and cognition, and extra dopamine may encourage belief in conspiracy theories

📝 Points essentiels

• 🔄 Pattern recognition can operate as follows:
  1. The brain sees dark clouds.
  2. It automatically associates them with rain.
  3. The brain sees a mysterious shadow.
  4. It associates the shadow with a possible predator.
  5. It may eventually find patterns where there is nothing.

💡 Astuce mémo

Recherche excessive de motifs → croyance conspirationniste

📖 4. Pourquoi y croire

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Confirmation bias : the tendency of the brain to pay attention to information that agrees with existing beliefs and disregard other information

★ À maîtriser

📌 Repeated exposure to a false piece of information can eventually make people believe that it is true.

📌 When a myth is corrected, the correction may fade from memory faster than the original myth, so the myth is not necessarily erased.

Compléments

• People assume that new information is true because much of the information they receive is true and this assumption is easier to process.

• The group effect makes people inclined to give the same answer as the rest of the group when everyone believes incorrect information.

💡 Astuce mémo

Information confirmée contre information rejetée

📖 5. Exprimer la certitude et la possibilité

★ À maîtriser

• In English, must expresses a strong deduction or certainty, as in “She must be tired.”

• In English, might and may express possibility, as in “She might be pregnant” and “She may be in hospital.”

• In English, can’t expresses impossibility, as in “She can’t be dead.”

• For a deduction about a past action, English uses must have followed by a past participle, as in “He must have turned off his phone.”

Compléments

📌 In English, could can express a possible future situation, as in “We could go to the US next summer.”

💡 Astuce mémo

Must exprime la forte certitude, might et may la possibilité, can’t l’impossibilité

📖 6. Vocabulaire essentiel

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Permettre : “to enable” ou “to allow”
• Plus étendu : Plus étendu signifie “wider”.
• Perte : Perte signifie “loss”.
• Éveil : “awakenings”
• Éviter : “to avoid” ou “to avert”
• Inspiration : “insight”
• Déclencher : “trigger”
• Seul : “in insolation” dans la liste du cours