Well, wait a second. If you didn't experience this, then how can you make the presumption that it is research that leads to conspiratorial mindsets?

Certainly you're not conflating correlation with causation?

if your investigations require you to think in conspiracy terms, guess what? You're gonna start thinking in conspiracy terms, even when you shouldn't.

But what about when you should? Conspiracies exist, which is why it's a legal classification of a crime. And more than that, we've seen in even just very recent years that there have been quite grand conspiracies that turned out not to be mere theories (or paranoia which is what most people actually mean when they say conspiracy theory). Whether we're looking at Epstein's connections, and to whom he was catering his underage sex slaves, or we look at the GME exposure of the Wall St cartel (another word for group of co-conspirators), or even the revelation from a few years ago that the FDA was being bribed by sugar lobbies to use fake studies that push the idea that fats were unhealthy and sugar was fine, when in fact, it turns out, increasing fats and decreasing simple sugars in the diet is much healthier for most people.

I completely agree that communities, such as this one, tend to attract the conspiracy-minded, but I would argue that is an effect, not a cause. I also agree that there are many (though I wouldn't say most) on this board who are conspiracy hammers (that is to say, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail), and tend to go down spirals lead by blind intellect -- but not any more-so than the vast majority of modern "scientists" where they are constantly changing theories (as it should be) but every year when it changes, stating with the foolish confidence rivaling the most zealous religious bigot, that they have finally cracked it with absolute certainty.

Asking questions is important, and trying to understand things, not taking status quo for granted, should be revered, not shamed. Perhaps if there wasn't such a pompous backlash to simply asking questions, many of the "flat-Earthers" would have finally learned something more about the nature of Earth and realized that it is, indeed, a Globe. Their theories and experiments to anyone who does understand something about astronomy, geology and physics, are obviously lacking, but that doesn't mean that there is nothing to learn from their investigations. They are right to question the current models, because clearly our current models are incorrect (or lacking data at the very least) in many areas or there wouldn't be things such as gravitational anomalies. Investigations into dark matter have been long and fruitless, and it would be beneficial to reexamine much of the scientific models we take for granted.