You've been conditioned to believe conspiracy theories. Or have you?!

A smart conspiracy theorist never wears a tinfoil hat. According to research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology students in 2005, tinfoil can actually amplify mobile communication and satellite frequencies, including those used by the Federal Communication Commission.

- Joshua Pease

Based on these findings, the researchers (jokingly) speculated that tinfoil hats were a ploy propagated by the government to track the thoughts of US citizens.

So remove the headgear: Thanks to evolution, you’re probably curious about dozens of conspiracies – even in the face of logic and reason. Conspiracies are fun to dissect and debate, but there’s a deeper appeal: Humans have a natural skepticism towards authority and power.

‘We descended from primates that tended to notice dangerous, hidden things, like a predator in the grass,’ says Michael Shermer, Ph.D., a presidential fellow at Chapman University and bestselling author of Why People Believe Weird Things. ‘Our ancestors were the paranoid ones who assumed the worst and survived.’

According to Shermer, a conspiracy theory concerns two or more people plotting in secret to gain an immoral or illegal advantage over someone else. Whether rooted in a Wikipedia deep dive or documented history, however, most conspiracy theories are hard to prove, which is part of what makes them alluring – and dangerous.

Conspiracy theories give us just enough facts to entertain our whispering, primitive fears. But instead of a hungry sabre-toothed tiger working against our well-being, the modern danger might be the government, a powerful corporation, or – in the ugliest examples – an entire ethnic or religious group.