Firstly conspiracies do actually play an important role in society, it gives people a means to think outside the box. However with any hypothesis you need to look at ALL the evidence and that is where theorist usually fall short. theorist are not trying to find a conclusion to a hypothesis, they are only trying to prove what they want so badly to be true no matter how absurd it is or how much evidence there is contrary to there own belief. Interestingly there is a common economic and social pattern to who believes in conspiracy theories. Firstly the poor have a higher tendancy to believe in conspiracies, one theory as to why is that the many poor people are more likely to place blame on "the man" for socio-economic situation rather than take responsibility for there own actions. this can likely be attributed to there general feeling of dis-empowerment and dis-association with society.
Another theory as to how conspiracies develop is the notion of "major event, major cause" below is a excerpt from an experiment carried out in 2002.
"So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called "major event - major cause" reasoning. Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging.
I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. Those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.
To appreciate why this form of reasoning is seductive, consider the alternative: major events having minor or mundane causes - for example, the assassination of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability."
We also have to be aware of the fact that even anti theorist are susceptible to bias as well if for no other reason than to try to win an argument with a theorist and become biased towards the evidence.
I could go on and on and make this quite lengthy but ill end it here and leave you with this video from Michael Shermer from Skeptic magazine.
works cited from http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/why_do_people_believe_in_consp.php
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