re: What makes people more likely to be really into conspiracy theories?

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Imagine believing politicians are telling the truth all the time. Lol

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Because to these people, impressing their peer group is more important than being intelligent.

The Gubment would never lie to them.

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Tell me which CT you came up with on your own and weren't told by someone else, please.

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So you think people thinking for themselves is a conspiracy theory?

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What makes people more likely to be really into conspiracy theories?

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Religious upbringing conditions us.

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Only the most baby back bitch conspiracy theorists think the CIA killed JFK.

That's the easy narrative and shills like Tucker willingly spread to idiot non-thinkers, crafted by the real people who killed JFK.

Huh?

To the guy who just copy/pasted the list in the giant serif font, "Trump overfed koi fish" and some of the other bullet items don't meet the threshold of a conspiracy theory.

a conspiracy theory "is a larger theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

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To the guy who just copy/pasted the list in the giant serif font, much of what you posted are singular events by singular individuals and don't qualify as a conspiracy theory.

a conspiracy theory "is a larger theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

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A major part of what makes this topic contentious is there are multiple uses of "conspiracy theory".

Yours is a more neutral usage, but the other is something like "an unofficial account of an event that invokes a conspiracy as an explanation and contradicts an official account."

The 9/11 official account is a CT in the first sense, but not the second, while the truther account is a CT in both senses.

And then sometimes people weirdly use it simply to mean a fringe and dubious explanation (e.g. "he believed the conspiracy theory that the dinosaurs lived alongside cavemen").

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So you think people thinking for themselves is a conspiracy theory?

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No. Why won't you answer the question?

I don't think that you are thinking for yourself in the first place

People no longer trust their government and our institutions.

With good reason, I might add.

We no longer have a government of the people by the people, for the people.

I think its a little different today than it was... Even 10 years ago.

When some conspiracy theories turn out to be true, I think people start asking "well if that can be true, what else is true that was always thought to be a conspiracy theory?".

Personally, I think there are so many of them that the majority of them are not true, but that doesn't mean they are all not true.

But its almost the same as people who get sucked into different types of religion. I have a cousin who got sucked into.. What is it? Seven Day Adventist? Or something like that.

He and I used to split season tickets for LSU football, he was a laid back dude who was always up for a good time. He was a drinker and we had some interesting nights taking the weed. Seriously, he was the average dude who liked college football and was happy hanging out as long as he had a beer in hand and didn't mind engaging in marijuana every once in awhile.

He gets a job for a company in Lafayette and within a year he is big into Seventh Day Adventist. The weird thing is that their Saturday is like everyone else's Sunday. That's their day of rest. He stopped drinking and using marijuana (which there is nothing wrong with, but I am all about moderation. And he wasn't an alcoholic so it wasn't like cutting back was hard. After all, he just all of a sudden stopped drinking). He stopped watching college football which mean he stopped hanging around with his college football friends. He was into dirt bikes and for whatever reason gave that up and stopped hanging around his dirt bike buddies.

While that's not a conspiracy theory, its the same mindset to some degree and that fascinates me. I can't imagine just all of a sudden making that type of drastic change, but evidently this new company, everyone who worked there was in this church. So I figured that it being a job he really liked, being around them everyday and I guess wanting to fit in, it was a recipe for converting.

It seems like it all starts with questioning something you have always believed in and realizing that what you always believed might not be what you always thought it was. And then once that happens, that's like tearing down a wall which then allows that person to question everything.

It is interesting to me how people can fall into something deep within a short period of time.

I try to keep a balanced train of thought. Anything is possible but a lot of things are not likely. And I always ask "is there more to this?" or "where did this stem from?". I am not going to believe something just because it becomes a "popular" idea. And that most people really don't research their beliefs. It really comes down to them hearing it from a few people, but I think there are several things that makes people more likely to be "really into" conspiracy theories.