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Conspiracy theories are the default mode of thinking, and people need to be trained out of them. It is not a coincidence that less educated/less intelligent people are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories (though education is by no means proof against them). People literally have to be taught to not think in conspiracy theories.
Or rather, people have a really hard time grasping larger-than-immediate-community institutions and scale of action. This is not a natural frame of thinking, in much the same way thinking in terms of statistics and data rather than anecdotes is not natural. My armchair evopsych bullshit theory is that humans are adapted to living in small communities with and their manner of thinking reflects that. Specifically, in a community of 100 people, if something suspicious is happening, blaming an individual or small group of malefactors is fairly credible. It may not be right, but it's not ridiculous. Conspiracy theories arise from applying this intuition in frames where it doesn't make sense (usually with an added dose of paranoia).
The term 'conspiracy theory' is schizo-coded, but if you interrogate the average person about their beliefs, you'll quickly find they believe a lot things that might not have you wondering if they're off their meds but do conform to the general pattern of conspiratorial thinking. Which is to say, they're quick to explain facts about the world as coordinated action by a group of people, even when that explanation makes no sense. A silly, mostly non-political example: a remarkable number of people I know believe that the vestigial pockets ubiquitous in women's clothing are a scheme to sell purses. This is the sort of thing that doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny , but it does past a casual intuition test and (wrongly) explains an annoying fact about the world.
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