Chemtrails, Moon landing Conspiracy, Elvis alive, Flat Earth, or maybe 9/11 was inside job? Is it possible to believe, that Princess Diana is both alive and dead?
Things I just mentioned are called conspiracy theories

Thanks to the Internet, every day we can meet somebody who claims, that vaccines cause autism. Maybe it's just me, but after every discussion, when instead of solid arguments based on facts my opponents use emotions, people base their arguments on content placed on low credibility sources - I'm just getting tired.
After one of 'these' conversations I started to wonder:

Are they somehow different?

Cutting hydra's heads

With this question in mind, I started to look for the answer. Let's start with a scale of this phenomenon. In information era number of conspiracy theories grows exponentially. Most of them have few supporters, but as we can clearly see it doesn't mean, that busting one of conspiracy theories creates couple new ones, and accusations about being part of conspiracy towards a person, who busted it. So what really constitutes conspiracy theory?

• It's a contradiction to the common state of knowledge - it's very hard for a conspiracy theory to survive, without an official version of facts, that conspiracy theory can stand in contradiction to.
• It's usually simpler explanation of complex phenomenon - conspiracy theories provide explanations that don't require any specific knowledge about physics, biology and so on. It's simpler to explain chemtrails as "government poisoning citizens" than learn how clouds are created, what are conditions at 11 km and stuff like that.
• Divides the world into good ones and bad guys. Black and white. US and THEM - usually results of 'research' conducted by people who believe in those people leads to a single organization, that lies to rest of the world.
• Knowledge that is propagated by people who believe in conspiracy theories is always secret, and government fights with it
• Conspirators are always THE BAD GUYS
• Conspirators want to rule the world but they achieve it differently. The government uses nanochips in vaccines, jews with money, reptilians try to put their people at the government to rule the world.
• Lack of essential and scientifically proven evidence that could support these theories.
• Resistance to facts that debunk conspiracy theories best example here is the theory, that "Vaccines with thiomersal can cause autism". It's based on infamous Wakefield's paper and hasn't been confirmed even in research financed by STOP-NOP oranization. That didn't stop some supporters of this theory to migrate their support towards similar theories, usually not confirmed with any scientific research. Of course "thiomersal theory still gathers the strong community that believes in it despite any evidence against it.

Believers

Conspiracy theories are 'invention' of Information Era we live in. Fact that internet made possible to anyone say anything caused, that even most ridiculous thoughts can find the audience that will agree with them. Christopher Hitchens (author of Mortality) calls conspiracy theories as exhaust fumes of democracy.

One of the principals that drive conspiracy theories is a tendency to explain complex problems in the simplest way possible. That is because based on [this research](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5248629/ people with high education are less likely than people with the low education to believe in conspiracy theories. What is even more interesting there is a correlation between likeliness that someone will believe in conspiracy theories and radical worldview.

What are benefits of that?

Despite the fact, that Flat Earth Society can't tell what are benefits of knowing about whole round Earth conspiracy, psychology can give us some clues.

• Sense of control - people with higher education can spot in process of education their influence on society. They feel more control over their lives and life of society they belong to. Less educated people use conspiracy theories to have a feeling of control on event unfolding in their surrounding. Research shown, that most prone to believe in conspiracy theories are people, that feel powerless. Lack of control leads to looking for cause and effect relationship in phenomenon or events that are not necessarily connected.
• Self-esteem - people who believe in conspiracy theories have a tendency to have lowered self-esteem. Affiliation with people who has **secret information ** gives them a sense of being elite and raises their self-esteem.

Contradicted conspiracy theories? That's nothing!

People who believe in conspiracy theories have one phrase that is supposed to force listeners to stop believe in mainstream beliefs. Have you ever heard

Think for yourself | Don't have foolish faith in authorities

But apparently, as research shows that two conspiracy theories are contradictory doesn't mean you can't believe in both. Apparently in Study 1, the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. A conclusion is simple: It doesn't matter what about is conspiracy theory

What they come from and how they hold up?

Despite psychological aspects of vulnerability on conspiracy theories, very important factor, that makes people believe in such 'brilliant' ideas is lack of proper education. We live in Information Era, and lack of knowledge is not an issue anymore.

Source rating

There are a lot of ways to judge if some source of information is credible or not, but you can do a simple check - see what are references to two sources:

• Scientific Paper
  

• Article about GMO
  

Summary

Often you can hear from people who believe in conspiracy theories to not to believe blindly in authorities and question everything.

I agree with this totally

But the problem is when you put memes before papers. That's not wisdom. That's ignorance

source: trending/vaccines