The past half-century has seen a steady erosion of trust in authority of all sorts,
ranging from a healthy scepticism to conspiracy theories, which say that governments
and their agencies or associates are capable of anything, even murder. To put it in
a more scholarly fashion,
conspiracy theories are “attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event…as a
secret plot by a covert alliance of powerful individuals or organizations”. The phrase
conspiracy theories is often seen as pejorative and belief in them as irrational,
but researchers from the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, are asking for more research
into “why people overtly reject conspiracy theories but privately accept them as true”.
For that is what we do, apparently.
