Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

Conspiracy theories have played, and continue to play, a prominent role in American culture. Belief in UFOs, suspicions about the official account of the assassination of JFK or the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 are just a few examples of the many kinds of outlandish beliefs that Americans -- and even some non-Americans -- hold.

The causes of belief in conspiracy theories can be broken down into two broad categories -- internal causes and external causes. There is a kaleidoscope of internal causes of belief in conspiracy theories. Many kinds of mental illness involve symptoms of conspiracy theory belief. Conspiracy theory belief can fuel narcissistic delusions of grandeur -- after all, I must be a very important person to be the target of such a grand conspiracy!

But it is not just mental illness that can cause people to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories. Humans are notoriously susceptible to obvious mistakes of reasoning (for example, the Baader-Meinhof effect). We are not even good at probabilistic reasoning. And some people just have a melancholic temperament -- they inhabit a world in which they imagine a villain hiding behind every corner, peeking out of every window and slinking along every alley-way. Mistakes of reasoning, cognitive biases, mental dysfunctions, mental illness, emotional dispositions -- the internal causes of conspiracy theory belief are numerous and diverse.

In addition to the internal causes of conspiracy theory belief are the external causes. Everyone agrees that there are real, criminal conspiracies -- there are even laws on the books to punish criminal conspiracies, such as the RICOH statute. Unfortunately, not all criminals are dumb. The smartest criminals are able to evade detection for arbitrarily long periods of time. They operate in offshore jurisdictions, split their operations across borders and take other counter-measures that moot ordinary police work. Newer forms of policing have been invented over the course of many decades, but the fact is that police methods are, and always have been, at least one step behind the latest methods of criminal activity. That one step is all that the most astute and well-organized criminals need to operate.

It's bad enough that there are criminals who are intelligent enough to evade capture by the police and operate highly organized systems of crime. But what happens to all the money that is generated by organized crime syndicates? Does it just get buried in the ground? Try as you might, you could never purchase a billion dollars' worth of Lamborghinis, so the untold billions of dollars captured by South American drug cartels -- as just one example -- can't all be going into luxury items. No, the bulk of the money is "laundered" (put through apparently legitimate channels, such as shipping or warehousing companies) and then put into ordinary business investments. In short, there is some unknown, non-negligible percentage of ordinary assets -- real estate, bonds, stocks, and so on -- that are actually the proceeds of organized crime.

But are organized crime syndicates really the apex of power and corruption in the world? Again and again, throughout history, we have seen the emergence of depraved, autocratic rulers hell-bent on one narcissistic adventure, or another, often trampling over the skulls of millions of their murder victims. By comparison, the damage that can be done by any one private criminal is quite limited in the grand scheme of things. To make a really big mess, you need a national government with domestic police, tanks, ships, bombs and armies. But to anyone who opposed corruption in, say, Nazi Germany, what were the Nazis except the grandest and most sinister of conspiracies?


Ordinary people really cannot comprehend what it means to be extremely wealthy or powerful so we underestimate the structural influence of power on our lives. We are used to managing almost all of the mundane details of our lives. When the light bill is due. Which brand of dog food to buy. How many miles since the last time the car had a tune-up. Very wealthy and powerful people do not have to waste time and energy on these kinds of concerns. They have paid staff to take care of these -- and many more -- details. When ordinary people think about a "grand conspiracy", they fail to imagine what is really possible because they cannot imagine how they themselves could orchestrate such complex events at such large scales. Given the amount of criminal cash flow that we know exists in the illegal drug trade alone, it is impossible to believe that major corruption scandals, such as the Enron corruption scandal, are as exceptional as we are led to believe. It would require a superhuman capacity for naivete in order to believe that large-scale, white-collar criminal conspiracies are not commonplace. In the words of Gordon Gekko: "Fund managers can't beat the S&P 500 ... because they're sheep, and sheep get slaughtered."

The Nazis reduced countless millions of people to destitution, internment and death. You cannot operate a vast, criminal conspiracy without creating a lot of victims. Victims of crimes that are connected to organized corruption become acutely aware of the fact of corruption when the ordinary means of remedy against crime -- such as reporting it to the police -- malfunction in ways that are inexplicable. Let us say that a local gang holds up your corner store. You call the police and they dispatch an officer to take the report. Unbeknownst to you, this officer happens to be corrupt and on the take from the very gang that has robbed you. You find that the officer is singularly unhelpful, maybe even rude and disrespectful or incredulous. Or, maybe he is gushingly apologetic and offers a lot of emotional sympathy, while offering to take the tapes in for "evidence". Such petty conspiracy is indisputably real and has happened countless times. But the pattern generalizes. And it is this gagging effect by which corrupt conspirators silence their victims -- or even reverse the situation and accuse their victims of criminal behavior, irrationality or mental illness.

It is true that many people hold conspiracy theory beliefs because of some internal cause, not because of any actual evidence of crime which they have witnessed or experienced. But, by the same token, it is also true that many people -- ordinary people -- have been victimized at the hands of real conspiracies. We can argue about the extent of the problem, but the fact of the problem is beyond reasonable dispute.

It is obvious that any real criminal conspirator wishes to remain concealed and always to misdirect attention off of himself or herself. This is true in the small, and it is true in the large. Thus, using logic, we can infer that the smartest, most well-organized and most well-resourced criminals will seek to utilize the methods of mass communication -- that is, propaganda -- to conceal the true nature of their activities. In particular, such individuals will be maximally interested in discrediting the very notion of sinister conspiracies. Pedestrian notions about how effective such individuals can be at influencing public opinion are likely to be mistaken because ordinary people do not really understand how things are done at such large scales. And once we understand that conspirators and their victims have opposite motivations in respect to what people believe about conspiracies, we see that finding out the truth is really a problem in game theory, that is, it's a really hard problem.

In closing, it is worth noting that there are two, equally mistaken positions that one can take on the question of the existence of conspiracies. On the one hand, there is the pollyannaish view that there no real conspiracies or, at least, no real, large-scale conspiracies. On the other hand, there is Lovecraftian horror, the sneaking suspicion that everything is a sinister conspiracy. As it was succinctly put on a viral conspiracy theory video: "Everything is a rich man's trick." Both of these views are symptoms of lazy thinking. They fail to honestly handle the thorny problem of how to think about the category of sinister, large-scale conspiracies. The truth of the matter is that it is not easy to know the truth about conspiracies precisely because the smartest, most well-organized and most well-resourced conspirators seek to corrupt knowledge itself. After all, the corruption of knowledge is just a variation on keeping double sets of books.