Conspiracy theories are dusted amid the violent videos, racist comments, and death threats that Facebook moderators face every day. That putrid flood of information can be traumatic, as The Verge’s Casey Newton found when he reported on the working conditions endured by moderators in Phoenix, Arizona. Some of the workers bombarded with conspiracy theories told Newton that they were starting to believe the ideas they were seeing.

What makes people start believing that the Earth is flat, or that 9/11 wasn’t a terrorist attack? And, in this case, did the stressful working conditions have anything to do with it? To answer some of those questions, we turned to Mike Wood. Wood, a psychologist at the University of Winchester, studies conspiracy theories, and how they spread from the fringes to the mainstream. The Verge spoke to Wood about the current research into conspiracy theories, and whether there’s anything people can do to make themselves less susceptible to them. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

You’ve done quite a bit of research into conspiracy theories. Can we start with the basics? What exactly is a ‘conspiracy theory’?

I’m not going to look into whether it’s true or not that everybody in the government is a lizard person

We’re going to start off real complicated right off the bat — nobody can agree on this. If you ask different people in different academic fields, they’re going to give you different answers. As a psychologist, I’m not going to look into whether it’s true or not that everybody in the government is a lizard person, I’m just interested in why people would accept or reject that idea. So, for me, a conspiracy theory is a secret plot by powerful people or organizations working together to advance some kind of sinister goal through deception.

If you ask other people they’ll give you other definitions, like a philosopher would say that a conspiracy theory is any theory about a conspiracy. Which I think is probably too broad, and doesn’t fit how most people would use the term.

In The Verge’s recent article on Facebook moderators, the fact that these workers started believing in the conspiracy theory videos that they were being asked to moderate really stood out to readers. Is that propagation by exposure something that you’ve seen before in your conspiracy theory research? How do these things spread?

The exposure aspect is interesting in this case. We’ve got some data on this from 9/11 conspiracy theories showing that one of the big predictors of whether or not somebody will believe a particular conspiracy theory is how much they’ve been exposed to it.

conspiracy theories can be appealing to people for a lot of reasons

The problem is that this is all cross-sectional data. We just have one point in time, and we know that the people who believe these theories have more exposure to them than the people that don’t. We don’t know if that’s because they believe them and then they seek them out because they want to know more, or if they saw this stuff and then that convinced them of it. It sounds like this might be a case where people were exposed to it for long periods of time and that actually induced them to believe in it. So there’s a causal aspect to this that we haven’t had in the research before.

But there are other studies where people do these experiments where you get people to read a conspiracy theory passage — a little passage about how Princess Diana was secretly killed by Queen Elizabeth — and you can see that that has some influence on people. It changes how they think about the issue. In the short term at least, we certainly see those effects but this is an interesting sort of long-term exposure effect that we saw in these moderators.

Other research has shown that being exposed to facts doesn’t seem to change people’s minds. Do we know why people being exposed to conspiracy theories in particular makes people believe them?

Exposing people to information is going to affect them in some way or another. We all like to think that we’re immune to this stuff, but it does have an effect. I don’t know that conspiracy theories have a uniquely powerful effect to them. Where conspiracy theories can seduce people is when you have a conspiracy theory that is very appealing to you on the basis of other things that you believe.

We all like to think that we’re immune to this stuff

Let’s say that you’re a huge supporter of Donald Trump, and you come across a conspiracy theory that says “all of the people who are his rivals — his political enemies, people that he doesn’t like — are all super evil and are working together to engage in Satanic child sacrifice.” This is something that perhaps would appeal to you because of the other things that you believe. It wouldn’t appeal to somebody who doesn’t like Donald Trump at all and is probably quite OK with his enemies just being normal people.

It has to be congruent to some extent with the other things you already believe. But conspiracy theories can be appealing to people for a lot of reasons. It could be because it makes sense of something that they had trouble to coming to grips with before. It could be a way of dealing with some type of uncertainty, feeling like they have lost control with what’s happening to them, or a rationalization of some failure they’ve had, or some defeat their side has suffered in an election.

The other aspect of this story was the mental health effects of watching horrific videos all the time. Would stress play a role in this kind of thing, if they’re being exposed to stressful videos and then have conspiracy videos thrown in?

Yeah, there is some work on this. Conspiracy theories do associate with stress. Basically, there’s been some research that’s showed that when people undergo a stressful life event — something like death of a family member, divorce, major disruption to their lives — conspiracy theories are more likely in that circumstance. So there is some indication that psychological stress can put people in this place where they’re looking around for new answers or they’re possibly trying to come to grips with the world in a new way.

We’ve got other research showing that when someone doesn’t feel in control of their life or in control of what’s happening to them, conspiracy theories seem more plausible, and that might have been what’s happening with these people. I’m not sure what their subjective psychological experience was at the time, but there is some data that suggests that can happen.

Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, but social media is a relatively new invention in the span of human history. How has it changed the way conspiracy theories spread?

It’s made them a lot more visible for sure. If you would read the local newspaper 30 years ago, you wouldn’t have the comment section at the bottom saying “this is all lies” and “that’s what they want you to think.” But if you read a lot of local news now, or you go to social media or your Twitter feed, you’ll see that. That’s a big change I think. The information doesn’t spread in such a top-down way as it did before. There’s always going to be a hierarchy of how information gets out there, but to an extent it’s more democratized now.

Given that we are online constantly, whether for jobs, or social life, is there any way to combat or insulate yourself from these kinds of misinformation or conspiracy theories? Or is it just part of the ecosystem now?

It’s hard to not come across it at all, I would say. There are steps that you can take to make sure that the information that you’re getting is as good as it can be. A lot of that is just finding reliable sources of information and making sure that you’re not classifying it as reliable just because it flatters what you already believe. Because, again, that’s where a lot of conspiracy theories come from. They play off preconceptions that people have and make them more vivid.

There are studies showing that if you get people to think carefully about things, and not just go with their gut, they’re going to be less convinced of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories tend to have a much easier time finding purchase in your mind if you have a very intuitive approach to something. If you just say “ah, that sounds right, that feels right to me,” that’s when conspiracy theories are going to be most convincing to you.

It’s really easy to believe crap because crap is appealing

People can go with their gut feeling because they are distracted or preoccupied or don’t have time to look into everything. Nobody has enough time to look into everything. You just have to find people who are good thinkers and figure stuff out, and try to do it yourself as much as you can and put in the effort.

How much effort does it take for our brains to push back on our gut?

It takes effort for sure. It’s really easy to believe crap because crap is appealing in a lot of ways. You can get into this default mode where you settle on your ideology or you settle on you beliefs and you don’t critically reflect on it. And that’s very easy to do. Fighting against that is difficult and it feels terrible sometimes, but it’s what you have to do in order to make sense of the world and make good decisions in terms of what’s true and what’s not.