'Elvis Presley is alive' and 11 more conspiracy theories

Why do so many people believe in them?

Even the most rational people buy into conspiracy theories as a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness in the modern world, says the New York Times. "Believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular," the paper says citing a 2010 study.

US psychologist Rob Brotherton, the author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, says many as 90 per cent of people acknowledge entertaining one conspiracy theory or another. "Given a handful of dots, our pattern-seeking brains can't resist trying to connect them," he says.

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But Brotherton also suggests we shouldn't be so quick to reject even the stranger notions. "Dismissing all conspiracy theories (and theorists) as crazy is just as intellectually lazy as credulously accepting every wild allegation," he writes in the Los Angeles Times.

"If you had claimed, in the early 1970s, that a hotel burglary was, in fact, a plot by White House officials to illegally spy on political rivals and ensure President Nixon's re-election, you might have been accused of conspiracy theorising," he says.