We live in the age of the conspiracy theorist . The wild ideas and the people who spread them have hit the mainstream. They’ve been yanked from the shadows of the internet, ripped from late-night AM radio call-in shows about alien abductions and Bigfoot sightings, and have now been put in positions of power and dictate public policy both at home and abroad. It’s a conspiracy theorists’ utopia—but how much of this horses—t do they actually believe? That was the aim of a new study detailed by IFLScience and published in Royal Society Open Science , which found that the people who claim to believe conspiracies may not actually believe them at all. Oftentimes, they just might be messing with researchers for the heck of it. Videos by VICE Not surprising at all, considering most of them obviously seem like they’re in it for the attention and, in some cases, money.…