What Is a Conspiracy Theory?

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Conspiracy theories are not a recent phenomenon, says author Jesse walker. All conspiracy theories reflect the anxieties of people who believe in them and those anxieties change depending on the era in which they are found. People use pattern recognition to begin building a case for why they feel so anxious. And we do that by cherry picking the evidence available to us for clues. It's those clues that overtime become our hunches that something is,. Those hunches, over time, become beliefs, and overtime, those become the conspiracy theory itself.

When we talk about conspiracy theories we tend to focus on what people believe instead of why, and, more importantly, why they believe those things and not other things. In this episode, we sit down with two psychologists working to change that, and in addition, change the term itself from conspiracy theory to conspiracy narrative, which more accurately describes what makes any one conspiracy appealing enough to form a community around it and in rare cases result in collective action.