Why Hundreds Gather Each Year to Celebrate a Flat Earth

Picture this: You walk into a hotel ballroom. Strobe lights flash. Music blasts. A crowd cheers as a man in a cowboy hat strums a guitar, belting out an anthem with the chorus: “Space is fake.” This isn’t parody. It’s the opening act of the Flat Earth International Conference, where hundreds of people have gathered to hear why the Earth isn’t a globe but a disc under a dome.

You might laugh—or shake your head—but what researchers Philip Fernbach and Jonathan Bogard saw at this conference reveals something far more interesting than foolishness. Their study, published in Topics in Cognitive Science, argues that conspiracy thinking isn’t a glitch in the human brain. It’s actually the product of very normal ways we all make sense of the world.

Why Conspiracies Feel So Convincing

Let’s start with what psychologists call explanatory coherence. Humans love stories that tie loose ends together neatly. At the conference, speakers would toss out odd facts—say, a strange blur in a NASA space video—and then tie them together with a single explanation: astronauts were faking it underwater. Each piece clicked into place like a puzzle, and the audience gasped.

Here’s the trick: the story feels right because it fits together, even if the odds of it being true are vanishingly small. It’s the same mental shortcut that makes us see shapes in clouds or believe big events must have big causes (like “9/11 couldn’t just be 19 men with box cutters”). Our brains are built for coherence, not probability. That’s why a messy truth often loses to a tidy lie.

Why Evidence Doesn’t Change Minds

If conspiracy thinking was just bad logic, it might be easy to fix. But Fernbach and Bogard highlight another quirk: belief updating gone wrong.

In theory, we update beliefs when we get new evidence. But in practice? We pick the evidence that supports what we already believe and dismiss the rest. Flat Earthers at the conference proudly showed off their own “experiments,” like zooming in on ships that disappear over the horizon. To them, this proved the Earth is flat. What they didn’t do was test their theory in ways that might disprove it.

Worse, when shown strong counterevidence, many believers actually double down. Psychologists call this “belief perseverance.” Once a conspiracy has a foothold, every debunk becomes “just more proof” of the cover-up.

Why It’s a Group Effort

Here’s the twist: belief isn’t just in our heads—it’s also in our groups. At the Flat Earth conference, the atmosphere was surprisingly upbeat, even joyful. Attendees swapped stories, tallied believers and doubters on a whiteboard, and cheered for their YouTube heroes.

This matters because conspiracy theories thrive on social processes. The researchers point out a few key ways:

1. Trust rules: Flat Earthers distrust scientists but trust each other. Community norms decide what counts as “evidence.”
2. Contagious understanding: When someone nearby nods along to a complex explanation of eclipses, you feel like you understand too—even if you don’t.
3. Group polarization: Doubters who show up out of curiosity often leave as believers, swept along by the majority view.
4. Distributed knowledge: No one person knows the full theory, but everyone assumes someone else does. This “community of knowledge” makes each believer feel more certain.

Sound familiar? It’s not so different from how religious groups, political parties, or even fandoms hold together.

Why This Matters for All of Us

It’s tempting to dismiss Flat Earthers as fringe oddities. But the researchers argue that conspiracy thinking draws on the same mental tools we all use daily: pattern detection, story-building, motivated reasoning, group belonging.

That’s why conspiracy theories pop up during crises, from pandemics to political turmoil. They give people certainty when life feels uncertain, and belonging when trust in institutions is low. The scary part? These same dynamics fuel movements like QAnon, vaccine denial, and election conspiracies. The difference between believing the Earth is flat and storming a Capitol is only a matter of stakes.

Let’s Explore Together

Conspiracy thinking is less about being gullible and more about being human. And that’s what makes it tricky. If it comes from ordinary cognitive and social processes, then mocking believers misses the point. To fight harmful conspiracies, we have to understand why they’re so sticky—and how they meet real psychological needs.

Now it’s your turn:

• How do you see this research affecting your life?
• What’s the wildest conspiracy you’ve ever heard—and did you catch yourself almost believing it?
• What’s the coolest science fact you’ve learned recently that changed how you see the world?

Let’s keep asking questions, even uncomfortable ones. After all, science isn’t just about facts—it’s about how we, together, make sense of them.