• Causality: Makes an assumption of how people, objects or events are causally interconnected
  
• Intentionality: Stipulates that the plan of alleged conspirators are deliberate
  
• Coalition: Involves a coalition or group of actors working in conjunction, meaning that there is a group of bad guys working together.
  
• Threat: Contain an element of threat, such that the alleged goal of the conspirators are harmful or deceptive
  
• Secrecy: Carries an element of secrecy and is therefore often difficult to invalidate
  

Adaption hypothesis:

• Recap adaption: functional solutions to fitness/survival evolved through natural selection
• Stipulates that conspiracy thinking is an adaptive feature of the human coalitional mind that evolved:

• to alert ancestral humans to the possibility that others were forming dangerous coalitions against them

• to stimulate appropriate actions to fend off such threats

By-product hypothesis:

• Recap by-product: the belly button, as a result of the umbilical cord → carried along with other mechanisms
• Argues that conspiracy theories are a by-product of a suite of cognitive mechanisms evolved for different reasons
• Don’t solve adaption problems or have functional properties

"If conspiracy theories were adaptive for ancestral humans, then susceptibility to such theories needs to be universal among humans" p. 776
Empirical data support the view that conspiracy theories were common before people had access to modern communication technologies.