Because reality is complicated, messy, nuanced, moves extremely quickly, is sometimes seemingly contradictory, and feels completely out of control. The root of

Because reality is complicated, messy, nuanced, moves extremely quickly, is sometimes seemingly contradictory, and feels completely out of control. The root of much of conspiratorial thinking is attempting to make sense of a chaotic world by assuming that everything is being organized and controlled by a small group. The feeling of being "in the know" about the "way things really work" gives adherents a sense of control. Put another way: modern conspiracy theory could be seen a coping mechanism for information overload. I think that it's at least in part rooted in epistemic heuristic, and I suspect that the reason people engage in conspiracy theory today is exactly the same reason ancient humans imagined the movement of the sun and the tides as being controlled by anthropomorphic deities. Of course this isn't the complete story, there are social aspects as well, but it is a very large part of it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/