Yes, tribalism, group think, peer pressure, limited sources of information, all play a part in the acceptance of conspiracy theories. Of those 22, there are a couple I kinda think happened, but not with certainty. Still waiting for more evidence.

Are some people genetically predisposed toward accepting unfounded ideas? I would think it is a factor. As a therapist for many years I know that many people are constitutionally more anxious than others. That usually makes them less willing to tolerate ambiguity, to not have an answer, to be able to live with uncertainty. Those people will more easily accept a partial explanation.

But, the big factor I think is that it shows the huge flaw in the current education system. We live in a time when we are being overwhelmed with information. TV, newspapers, radio, sixteen social media sites, twenty-four internet news sources all churning out pieces of information every seven minutes. And people are checking them with every “ping” on their phone.

Now the hype, the con, the fakes, the deep fakes, the lies, get repeated 1000 x in ten minutes. How do we teach critical thinking? How do we teach people to think about cause and effect, such that if I do A THEN B is likely to happen. It would be even better if people could stay still for another minute and think If B does happen, what will happen NEXT?

What we are seeing now is that the craziness and lies just keep coming, keep changing, and there is little time to dispute, refute and no place to ever correct the damage.

Maybe after every email, Tweet, FB post, Instragram pic, WhatsApp message, TickTock dance video, or cable news screen crawl, there should be a 20 second pause, with a pop-up screen that says “Really?”