I am a nut for conspiracy theories. They are entertaining, often disturbing, but always fascinating. What makes conspiracy theories so captivating? Why do some communities seem especially drawn to them? Over the past few years, I have put my training as a researcher in the behavioral sciences to work answering this question. I’ve come to understand that we are all conspiracy theorists to some extent. I’ve also learned that some features of Mormon communities are especially good at making us susceptible to conspiracy thinking. I’ll explore why over a series of posts.

A foundational element of conspiracy thinking is the need for “cognitive closure.” As rational creatures, we crave clarity and understanding about the world. We don’t like ambiguity or confusion and yearn for the comfort of certainty. This is one of the reasons we like Google Maps. It reduces the discomfort of traversing unfamiliar territory by providing simple, black-and-white guidance.

When information about how to navigate our environment (whether physical, psychological, political, spiritual, social, etc.) is sparse, unreliable, conflicting, or otherwise ambiguous, humans naturally construct narratives that impose some kind of order onto it. It can be anything from, “Every time I’m in a hurry, some slow guy pulls in front of me,” to “I just know there’s someone watching from those traffic cameras to make sure I get stopped at every light.”

That second story comes from a conspiracy mindset, which always posits that someone—or, more likely, some many, acting in concert—are intentionally hiding information from us or otherwise manipulating our lives. It’s like the movie The Truman Show, where an entire artificial environment, sealed off and populated with actors and hidden cameras, has been constructed to provide Truman with a life that is scripted without his knowledge. If we only had the information “they” are hiding, our ambiguity would be clarified, and traffic would flow unimpeded.

This kind of conspiracy thinking is at the foundation the Book of Mormon, which says that it restores the “many plain and precious things taken away from the [Bible]”—the removal of which has resulted in an “awful state of blindness” wherein “an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.” This has been perpetrated by the agents of a “great and abominable church” that have purposefully pulled the wool over the eyes of contemporary Christendom.

The Book of Mormon uses this premise of hidden information to resolve a lot of the ambiguity that was present in Protestant thinking during Joseph Smith’s time. As Alexander Campbell wrote in his critique of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith “decides all the great controversies—infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement . . . even the question of free masonry, republican government, and the rights of man.”

Having this basic element of conspiracy thinking at the foundation of Mormon thought tends to make Mormons more willing to believe that bad actors are hiding essential information from them in other parts of their lives, such as in government, news media, and healthcare.

The thing is, bad actors do sometimes hide information. Mountains of evidence demonstrate that tobacco and opioid companies withheld a lot of information about the negative effects that their products had on the human body and the risks for society. What, then, is the difference between affirming widely accepted conspiracy realities and believing speculative conspiracy theories?

A simple answer is the quantity of evidence. We can know that Richard Nixon conspired to surveil his political rivals because there is just so much tangible evidence, but we can discard theories that the moon landing was a hoax because the evidence is so scant. That is the comforting answer which reassures us that we are rational and they are delusional; but they can be saved if only they can be taught to objectively weigh the evidence. This answer satisfies our own need for cognitive closure, but the reality, I argue, is more complicated, ambiguous, and discomforting.

The distinction between “accepted” and “speculative” conspiracy beliefs is not a matter of the quantity of evidence, but what qualifies as evidence. For example, in the LDS community, a “burning in the bosom” counts as evidence of the Book of Mormon’s authenticity as a historical document. But for archaeologists, it doesn’t. This is where most disagreement over conspiracy theories happens. One community accepts a kind of evidence that another community does not.

Valuing different types of evidence means we are looking for different things. And the human brain tends to find what it’s looking for. If you are in the market for a new car, it’s amazing how many dealerships you see, how you notice the brand of every car on the road, and how many for-sale signs there suddenly are in car windows. Similarly, if we believe that the reality around us is the product of an elaborate lie, we will interpret the things around us as evidence of that lie—no matter how tenuous the connection may be. It’s kind of like the difference between the apologist and the critic of Mormonism; they may examine the same data but disagree regarding what constitutes valid evidence and thereby come up with different interpretations that correspond with their original assumptions.

What this means is that it is not so much the bad actors around us that put us in an “awful state of blindness,” but, rather, our own conspiracy theories. And, yes, both you and I have our own—and probably more than one, as we will explore in future posts.