What Is a Conspiracy Theory?

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.