Why Do We Believe Conspiracy Theories?

A PITHY EXPLANATION
Evolution Continues to Pull Us by Our Noses

*
They will make us sex slaves who eat something called 'pizza.'
 (With apologies to Iain Banks and Robert Heinlein)

The evidence is mounting that "irrational" human behavior is hard code writtten on the substrate of those big computers we call our brains. 

The willingness (nay, eagerness) to believe in conspiracy theories is an artifact from evolutionary pressures. All those millenia when there were no scientific sources of explanations for the dangerous mysteries all around, those of our predecessors who could believe "theories" were more successful at organized response to dangers (any organized response was probably better than chaotic response), thus survived in higher numbers. 

So here we are, rational and logical thought overridden by primitive credulity, in a time when science is too new for (many of) our primitive brains to fully grok.


Evolution explains EVERYTHING.


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