Amelia Earhart, some people say, didn’t die when her plane crashed but secretly returned to the U.S. and lived on until the 1980s under an assumed name. Other people say she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, actually didn’t crash but were shot down by Japanese planes because Earhart was really a spy on a secret mission. Or perhaps she really made an emergency landing on a reef, where she lived for a short time as a castaway.

Along those lines, perhaps you’ve heard that Paul McCartney died many years ago and was replaced by a body double? Or that scientists in Ong’s Hat, New Jersey, invented a time machine? Many other well-known conspiracy theories, in addition to these, are less humorous or innocent: The events of September 11, 2001, have been called an “inside job,” and many people suspect that Bill Gates used the COVID vaccine to surreptitiously implant microchips in the human body.

Such beliefs can cause significant harm and even negatively affect the people you love. To do what you can for these people, it will help to use your empathy to better understand why they’re motivated to believe in ideas like these. As the Medical Journal of Australia puts it, those who are attracted to conspiracy theories are struggling to satisfy three main psychological needs: epistemic, existential, and social.

Epistemic needs address the basic human need for understanding. When tragic events occur, people often feel a strong desire to make sense of them—and to feel the stability of certainty. Conspiracy theories seem to offer this certainty by presenting a clear and simple explanation for potentially confusing phenomena. Paradoxically, this information may come with a heightened sense of validity because it seems to be withheld by those in power. Pushing away doubts and feelings of ignorance with conspiracy-themed clarity can, therefore, make people feel better informed, whereas a lack of knowledge would only foster uncertainty.

Existential needs, by contrast, represent a very human response to our lack of safety in an uncontrollable world: anxiety. Catastrophic dangers like plane crashes or strange new diseases can chip away at our feelings of security, whereas knowledge and understanding feel like sources of control. To shore up their need for safety, some people gravitate to information that feels as though it offers power over such........

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