Scientists discover the reason people believe in conspiracy theories

As easy as it would be to dispel this as something only low IQ / low capacity for development people would fall for, teleological thinking tends to slant towards schizophrenia-spectrum nervous systems. If you plot schizophrenia on a continuum from subclinical (one symptom) to clinical (threshold for diagnoses) you see teleological thinking / religious zealotry / conspiracy and paranoia in all parts of the spectrum, where it mostly gets worse as it progresses to clinical levels. Those of us on the autism spectrum tend to have the opposite neurology, with a low capacity for teleological thinking and more capacity for reductivism. Neurodiversity is interesting because whether you fall into one camp or the other (or somewhere in between) doesn't change much through your life, or affect IQ or other conventional measures of development capacity. The future is going to be interesting as evolution selects for more extreme traits in each of these domains.