Wayne Stollings wrote:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/12/10/166733644/what-do-aliens-climate-change-and-princess-di-have-in-common?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20121210=
HIV does not cause AIDS. Smoking does not cause lung cancer. And burning fossil fuels does not contribute to global warming.
What do these three statements have in common? They're all rejections of well-established scientific consensus, and recent findings in psychology suggest that people who believe one or more of them are also more likely to believe a number of conspiracy theories: that the New World Order is planning to take over the planet, that the Apollo moon landing was faked in a Hollywood film studio, that the death of Princess Diana was an organized assassination, that an alien spaceship in New Mexico was covered up by the United States' military, and even more.
I think the Kennedy assassination spawned the biggest conspiracy industry of all although perhaps the most lethal was the supposed Jewish banking conspiracy with its added bogus Protocols, all available to explain the depression of the 1930s. 9/11 inside job conspiracies have certainly been in play for a host of believers.
All of this suggests something in our dna that attracts us to this kind of thinking. Even I bought the Kennedy conspiracy coverup thesis for a while until I took the time to go over the actual evidence. I suspect paranoid tribal thinking, which probably was useful in many instances, translated badly into modern society.