Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

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10. Rational people want the world to make sense

And it hasn't been doing a whole lot of that lately.

When modest gun control measures that enjoy broad support from all points of the political spectrum can't even get through Congress, people start to suspect there is something else at work than the will of the people.

When the same people who got us into our economic mess are put in charge of pretending to fix it, people wonder what's really going on.

When our government tells us ten different unlikely stories about the same event, people question whether the tenth is any more reliable that the first.

The problem I see with most conspiracy theories is that they're too simplistic. They assume the existence of super-villains who can bring off complicated plots requiring flawless split-second timing. But the intuition that there are covert forces behind certain baffling events isn't misplaced. And it arises from nothing more complex than an assumption that the world is not as WYSIWYG as the pundits and politicians would like us to believe.