“If you want to engage someone on conspiracy theories, you have to start from a place of trust.”

People who believe in conspiracy theories are not a lost cause, explains Colin Dickey. The first step is to recognize that conspiracies do exist and that people are often engaging in conspiratorial thinking as a way to understand the world. “My goal is usually to press the believer’s own recognition of internal contradictions so that the belief itself gets harder to sustain.”

How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist