Why We Love a Good Conspiracy Theory
(and what your brain has to do with it)
There have always been conspiracy theories. From the whispers that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, to the suspicions that the moon landing was staged on a Hollywood set, humans have never met a major event they didn’t think someone secretly orchestrated. The assassination of Julius Caesar? Conspiracy. The Black Death? Blamed on poisoned wells. The French Revolution? A plot by secret societies. Even the printing press was accused of being a demonic tool spreading heresy.
Why? Because our brains have been the same for tens of thousands of years, and they haven’t evolved nearly as fast as our information environment.
The Three-Pound Detective in Your Skull
Your brain is a three-pound organ sealed in darkness. The only information it ever gets comes through your senses, those little snippets of light, sound, taste, and touch. From these fragments, it builds a map of the world.
It’s constantly looking for patterns: What goes with what? What causes what? If I eat this berry, will I get sick? If thunder follows lightning, what does that mean?
This tendency is called pattern recognition, and it’s one of the greatest survival tools evolution ever gave us. But it comes with a quirk: sometimes we see patterns that aren’t really there. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as apophenia, which is the tendency of humans to perceive meaningful connections in random data.
Our ancestors who connected too many dots may have been paranoid, but the ones who didn’t connect enough often didn’t survive. The cost of a false positive (”that rustle in the bushes is a tiger”) was far lower than a false negative (”oh, it’s just the wind”).
We’re wired with a Threat and Agency Detection System. A kind of mental alarm that scans for danger and assumes intention behind events. When something happens, our brain’s first question isn’t “What happened?” but “Who did this?” It’s a bias toward agency, and it once kept us alive. Today, it can keep us scrolling.
Meaning Is a Dopamine Hit
When we detect a pattern, solve a puzzle, or “figure something out,” our brains reward us with dopamine. That aha! feeling isn’t just emotional satisfaction. It’s neurochemical reinforcement.
Pattern recognition, meaning-making, and “thought closure” all activate the reward system. That’s why we chase closure when things feel uncertain. Cognitive dissonance, the tension that arises from holding conflicting beliefs or encountering complexity, consumes mental energy, and our brains are wired to be efficient. A tidy story (even if it isn’t accurate) relieves that discomfort, giving the brain a break and a burst of dopamine.
And conspiracy theories, for better or worse, are like mystery novels where you get to be the detective.
The Ingredients of a Good Conspiracy Theory
Not every outlandish idea sticks.
For a conspiracy theory to spread, it has to check certain boxes — ones our brains are primed to love:
It tells a good story.
Our brains crave closure. Randomness and uncertainty are uncomfortable, but a story with clear villains and heroes soothes that discomfort. “This happened because they planned it” is far more satisfying neurologically and psychologically than “sometimes terrible things just happen.”
2. It simplifies chaos and restores control.
The world is complex and messy. A theory that boils confusion into a tidy plot feels more manageable. By assigning motive and blame, it turns uncertainty into a sense of order, creating cohesive meaning and pattern validation, even if that order is imaginary.
3. It feels emotionally true.
A good conspiracy theory doesn’t have to be factually accurate; it just has to feel right. It must resonate with existing beliefs, fears, or mistrust, especially within the groups we identify with. Shared belief strengthens social bonds, turning information into affirmation. Believing together feels safer than doubting alone. It confirms our sense of connected ‘rightness. And when a theory flatters our in-group or blames an out-group, it hits the sweet spot of emotional reward and tribal cohesion. That social validation makes it extra sticky.
Connecting the Dots (Too Well)
So when a big event happens, we instinctively look for who benefits.
Who had a vested interest?
Who stood to gain power, money, or control?
Those aren’t bad questions. In fact, sometimes they need to be asked. History has shown that real conspiracies do exist. Watergate happened. So did MK-Ultra. But the difference lies in how we look for meaning. A good investigator tests evidence. A conspiracy believer starts with a conclusion and works backward. Once we find an explanation that feels emotionally right, confirmation bias kicks in. We start looking for evidence that supports it and ignore what doesn’t.
Before long, a narrative emerges:
“They did it for this reason, and then those people covered it up.”
The Brain as Scientist (and Storyteller)
In truth, your brain is less a detective and more a scientist — constantly forming hypotheses based on limited data. The trouble is, it can also be a storyteller that falls in love with its own plots. Once a story feels right, it resists revision.
The challenge isn’t that we look for meaning. It’s how we do it.
A healthy mind tests its theories, updates them with new evidence, and tolerates the discomfort of not knowing.
A conspiratorial mind seeks certainty first and evidence second.
So the goal isn’t to stop connecting the dots; it’s to stay curious about which dots we’re connecting and why.
To ask:
“What else could be true?”
“What evidence would change my mind?”
Our brains evolved to find patterns because, at their best, patterns keep us alive. But in the modern world, they can also trap us in stories that feel safer than reality.
Because in the end, every conspiracy theory — good, bad, or absurd — tells us less about the world’s secrets and more about the beautiful, fallible machinery of the human mind trying to make sense of our world’s inherent uncertainty.
Uncertainty, and the vulnerability it produces, isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system. And every conspiracy theory is just the mind’s way of pretending, if only for a moment, that it isn’t.
Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash
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