Why do people believe conspiracy theories?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. Yes. A big discernment tool is to ask how many people are needed to make a CT work

Tuskagee, for example, a few doctors, a few ethically challenged quasi-scientists, a few bureaucrats. They depended on a compliant population of privileged whites and oppressed blacks blocked from ethical safeguards.

Watergate is another excellent example of how a few people did great damage; about four levels (burglars, operatives like Liddy, pols like Mitchell and WH exec staff, and president) and only a few people at each level. Biggest single group was the 7 burglars, and they were not part of the coverup or the bigger plans.

The more wild CTs like biological impossibilities (JFK Jr and lizards) are for fringe lunatics.

But MIHOP conspiracies (Make It Happen On Purpose) about 9/11 require huge teams of people to hide or kill people and to rig jet planes to fly by remote control and do preliminary weakening of buildings and to do demolition work on the day, etc. Vast numbers of people all doing big stuff that would be obvious to themselves as Not The Way Things Are Usually Done Around Here. Vast numbers who would know something is majorly wrong and bought into it or were drugged (vast numbers to drug them) or were threatened (vast numbers of security thugs threatening seemingly ordinary citizens), and it goes on and on.

LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) requires tiny conspiracies by contrast, Watergate sized conspiracies.