Question: Conspiracy Theorists, in *my* opinion, are people I don't like except for some exceptions. However, this question will not be answered with my irrelevant opinions on said people..

Now, here is the question:

* Why do conspiracy theorists become conspiracy theorists?
* Why do they get the ideas that they do?
* Are they looking for attention?
* What are the mechanics behind their minds/thought process?

Some conspiracies:

* "Tupac is still alive, he will come back in year 20(12,13,14)"
* "The New World Order is going to take over the world."

Do these people warp things like the Illuminati into a conspiracy? What is behind the minds of these people? Is there any prevalence of mental (conditions, disease) among them? Is there any different type of parenting or environment they are raised in?

All of these questions don't need to be answered, but those are the questions running through my mind.

Answer: 
In my opinion the main reason of conspiracy theory is lack of information. As in rumors.
In this wikipedia page you can find a lot of research on rumors:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumor>. When people dont have enough information they tend to confabulate because of Gestalt princioles.

But also there is quality of conspiracy theory and amount of truth, not all conspiraci theories are bogus.
If you are looking for an insight into the mind of a conspiracy theorist, there was a very long "suicide note" printed by some guy who successfully committed suicide.[Wikipedia says this is the longest note, but it does not seem like the right one](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_longest_suicide_note_in_history) I cannot find it now, but remember that it was about 1000 pages long. 

naturally, I cannot read a 1000 pages, so I wrote a perl script that pulled the most used words within that note. Most of these were very negative, but what struck me as odd is that many world war 2 related terms were up there, like nazis, Jews, etc. **I got a feeling that his mind was going in circles around those topics and could not escape.**