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What are we talking about?

A conspiracy is a secret plan by a group to do something illegal or harmful. So a conspiracy theory is (in principle, at least) an interesting creature: a theory about a specific conspiracy - generally, seeking to explain certain events as being the result of a conspiracy. So when we talk in public about a conspiracy theory, we are not only revealing this secret plan, but also claiming that it is still being kept secret by some nefarious group. Presumably the plan is still considered to be a secret as long as the general public doesn't believe in it.

The term is used to refer to beliefs held by individuals which are at odds with the majority in their culture - it doesn't really count as a conspiracy theory if everyone around you believes the same thing. In practice, use of the term is fairly flexible, so some ideas we describe as conspiracy theories do not easily fit this framework.

Some Key Questions

A conspiracy theory is about a group of people conspiring to harm others, so from this perspective the key questions are obvious.

Who is conspiring?
What are they conspiring to do?
What is motivating them?

But a conspiracy theory is also about the group of people who believe the theory, and this raises some other key questions.

Why do they believe that a conspiracy exists?
What do they personally gain from their conspiracy theory activity?
What are they working to achieve?

A conspiracy theory is also about a group of people who believe they have access to a truth which some conspirators wish to keep secret, which raises yet more questions.

How is the secret being leaked or revealed to them?
Who is doing the leaking or revealing, and why?

Finally, it seems likely that, in some cases, the conspiracy theory is being fed by people who do not believe it, but for whom the conspiracy theory, and the activities of those who believe it, serve some useful purpose. This purpose may be the conspiracy meeting some psychological need (see this Psychology Today article), or there may be some more overt reason. So there may actually be a real conspiracy, even if the conspiracy theory is completely false. Which raises one other key question.

Who benefits from the conspiracy theory and the activities of those who believe it?

See the Sarah Kendzior link below: she argues that some powerful people deliberately 'weaponize' conspiracy theories as a way of deflecting attention from real crimes.

Some Common Features

One common feature of conspiracy theories is that people who have power and influence are manipulating us for their own ends. Clearly, this is often the case (politicians lie to us, businesses use advertising to sell us products we don't need), so it is entirely reasonable for us to be suspicious that we are being manipulated in ways we are not yet aware of.

Another common feature is that experts are lying to us, or holding back information we need to know. Again, this is often true: clearly, experts know a great deal more than we do, and do not tell us everything - partly because there is too much to tell, partly because we are not interested in the details, and partly because we don't have the background to understand the details anyway. And it is entirely reasonable to believe that there are likely to be times when the self interest of any group of experts does not entirely coincide with the best interests of the public at large.

But these reasonable suspicions (concerning, for example, politicians or doctors) do not constitute a conspiracy theory. We know that politicians work together in order to get re-elected, and we know that they often 'spin' the facts in order to achieve this: such behaviour is not a conspiracy, but simply people working together for their own good, as we expect them to. The board of Shell working together to find ways to keep us buying their petrol is not a conspiracy. But the boards of Shell, BP and ExxonMobil working together to secretly undermine public trust in electric cars would be a conspiracy (not that I'm suggesting that this actually happened).

A conspiracy theory requires not only that there is some secret plan, but also that this plan is not very secret - because the people who believe in the theory have become aware of it, and have probably posted about it at great length on the Internet.

One thing which gives power to conspiracy theories in general is the way that justice is not transparent. In (almost?) every country, there are rich and powerful people and organizations who appear to be getting away with activity which ordinary people would be caught and punished for. Powerful people have powerful friends, who can pull strings and prevent or slow down investigations. Some obvious examples include Epstein in the USA and Saville in the UK. So people become convinced that 'they' are hiding the truth from us, and this is corrosive of any trust in establishment institutions.

Why Does this Matter?

This subject matters for several reasons.

We all face the problem of deciding who to believe, and how much we should test what we are being told; we need to find a way to balance trust and skepticism in each area of life. There are serious problems associated with being too trusting, and serious problems with being too suspicious. We need to examine our own assumptions, and this is a useful way to address these issues.
We are seeking to understand people who differ from us in some significant way, and this is in many ways an excellent place to find people who generally operate successfully within mainstream society but who hold some strong beliefs which contradict the beliefs of the people around them.
Society is harmed (so we are all harmed) by people who reject solid science - by people who refuse to wear masks when they are helpful, by those who refuse to let their children receive important vaccinations, by those who prevent us using GM crops to feed starving people, and so on.
We rely on experts to do their job. We need skilled people to grow our crops, build and service our cars, keep electricity and water flowing to our homes. Society is harmed (so we are all harmed) by people who mistrust experts simply because they are experts - if this principle is accepted and allowed to grow, it is hard to see how civilization can survive, even if we overcome our current attempt to cook, poison and choke our planet.
We seem as a society to struggle with handling clear lies in our public media: somebody comes on air to say "Black is white," and the interviewer responds with "That's an interesting position," then turns to the next interviewee to ask what they think; facts are dismissed as being opinions, experts are dismissed because they are part of the establishment and therefore untrustworthy.

In short, how we deal with questions of truth are vitally important. We need to be able to engage with people who believe things which seem to us to be obviously false.

Looking at Some Specifics

A Few Popular Conspiracy Theories

Among the conspiracy theories we have come across are the following.

Flat Earth
Moon landing
Antivax
Anti GM
The Democrats stole the 2020 US Presidential election
The death of President Kennedy - there are many interconnected theories around this, involving (amongst other details) who was involved in killing him and who was involved in covering it up afterwards.
The Phoebus Cartel - officially ensuring the standardization of light bulbs, in practice reducing their life span: their claim is that they were simply applying an industry standard which was "the best compromise possible", but the 'best compromise' would mean different things to different people and change over time, and they worked to prevent the market from developing over time, and from supplying different products for different niche uses. So this seems to be an example of a true, documented conspiracy from the past.

Some Personal Thoughts and Comments

These thoughts mostly come from an online meeting in September 2021. Further input would be welcome, especially from anyone who espouses any of these ideas.

Flat Earth

We struggle to see how the Flat Earth people manage to hold this belief when there is so much evidence to the contrary: every time you fly in a plane, you see over the sea level horizon, and see more the higher you fly; as you fly, new land appears before you and disappears over the horizon behind you; the distances and flight times of international airlines can only be possible on a globe; nobody has managed to publish photographs of the world's edge; and so on.
Similarly, it is hard to see why they believe this conspiracy is being perpetuated. A great many people, from Encyclopaedia and Atlas publishers to airline companies, to all the space agencies, must be perpetuating the conspiracy - but what do all these people gain from this immense effort?
For example, we can fly around the equator - or, at least, between cities very close to the equator. One possible journey (with flight times given by Google maps): from Libreville to Nairobi, 9 hours; then to Singapore, 14 hours; then to Quito, 29 hours, then to Belem, 13 hours, then back to Libreville, 25 hours. On a Flat Earth, this is only possible if you fly in a circle, but that means everything inside the circle must be closer together than our maps say, and everything outside the circle must be further away. No Flat Earth map can show distances which correspond to the reality as reported by many independent sources. This is not a conspiracy: it's the Truman Show, with you as the victim.
On the other hand, the evidence for a Flat Earth is, at face value, fairly obvious: things fall down; it clearly goes against common sense to suggest that a very, very long way away, things would fall upwards towards the soles of my feet. And the attraction of believing in the conspiracy is also fairly obvious: it must be a good feeling to think you are one of the few people in the world bright enough to see through this global conspiracy, fellowship with fellow believers probably generates a strong sense of community and belonging, and working to educate the world would provide a clear sense of purpose.

The Faked Moon Landing

The motivation behind a faked Moon Landing is presumably that America wanted to win the space race. But this would mean that Russia would be highly motivated to attack the false claim - as they are quick to do in many other areas. The lack of a Russian denial of America's success seems a fairly convincing argument that it must be so obviously true even Russia doesn't see any benefit from questioning it - at least, not openly.
The main reason why people believe it to be faked is that landing on the Moon seems so utterly unlikely: "We just didn't have the technology to do this back in the 1960s." Which, when you see what they achieved with the technology they had, seems to be very close to the truth. And the pictures they took were such poor quality, which arguably would be to hide the fact that they were taken on a large film set. On the other hand, the iconic 'Earthrise' photograph must then be an astonishingly good piece of fiction.
The main argument against it is the incredible number of people, from many different nations, who took part and tracked the expedition throughout. Multiple stations around the world simultaneously received radio broadcasts from the surface of the Moon and from Lunar orbit, which automatically triangulated unique points in space - every single one of them must be part of the conspiracy. And nobody has ever admitted to it, or produced any actual evidence that any of these organisations and people were lying.

And others ...

Some people like to consider all religions to be conspiracy theories. It would be interesting to see how far the actual evidence supports this way of understanding religion: presumably those who make this claim are thinking about those who make a comfortable living from the religion, or who gain substantial social status from it. But, even for those people, where is the evidence that they somehow 'know' the religion to be untrue (when, for most religions, it is not at all clear what this actually means); it also ignores the substantial numbers who have suffered and died for their religion, and those who have believed because of their testimony and faithfulness.

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Conspiracy Theories