The school of hard knocks and conspiracy theory

A study out of the University of Leicester points to a mechanism by which citizens of authoritarian governments may be more prone to conspiracy theory. According to the study:

People who have suffered life's hard knocks while growing up tend to be more gullible than those who have been more sheltered, startling new findings from the University of Leicester reveal.
A six-month study in the University's School of Psychology found that rather than 'toughening up' individuals, adverse experiences in childhood and adolescence meant that these people were vulnerable to being mislead.
The research analysing results from 60 participants suggest that such people could, for example, be more open to suggestion in police interrogations or to be influenced by the media or advertising campaigns.

A reaction to the lack of trust developed in one's opinions could be a hyperfocus on eliminating internal inconsistency.

Conspiracy theories rely upon a particular narrative form that prioritizes internal consistency and coherence over perfect correspondence to some referential, observable truth. Since they do not operate according to a scientific method, dictums of falsifiability by external verification (a la Karl Popper) do not apply. Instead, conspiracy theories can only be disproved through the demonstration of their logical inconsistency or through the elaboration of a further conspiracy theory that encompasses the original.
... as Evans-Pritchard showed for Azande witchcraft accusations, conspiracy theories do not question the fact that trees fall and that people are killed; they speculate only on why that particular tree fell or why this particular village was massacred. Indeed, the conspiracy genre presupposes and even fetishizes highly "modern" categories of causality and agency. It searches incessantly for causal chains linking the actions of intentional agents. It denies structural indeterminacy and inscrutability. As such, the conspiracy genre represents a completely modern phenomenon with a hypertrophied, rather than atrophied, rational structure.

A path to understanding and reconciliation?

A Harvard neuroimaging study of prejudice has singled out regions which appear to be used in gauging similarity and difference, contributing to the mechanism for discerning social in-groups and out-groups.

The researchers found that the ventral mPFC region was, indeed, more engaged when subjects considered the target person like them, and the dorsal mPFC region was more engaged while considering the target unlike them.
The researchers also gave the subjects a set of questions designed to reveal how similar to or different from the target people the students considered themselves. The researchers found that the more similar the subjects considered themselves to either target, the greater the response in the ventral mPFC. Conversely, the more dissimilar they considered themselves from the target person, the greater the activity in the dorsal mPFC...
"Without a self-referential basis for mentalizing about outgroup members, perceivers may rely heavily on precomputed judgments--such as stereotypes--to make mental state inferences about very dissimilar others.
"This view suggests that a critical strategy for reducing prejudice may be to breach the arbitrary boundaries based on social group membership by focusing instead on the shared similarity between oneself and outgroup members," concluded Mitchell and his colleagues.

Note that an inability to comprehend the cognition of the other person lends itself to the fallback use of prejudice. Extending this, then prejudice may also be overcome by improving the ability to model how the other person thinks, thus enabling self-referential cognition.

This model seems to fit that of the experience of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From a article on the book Overcoming Apartheid:

Whether or not the TRC succeeded in its mission has been an issue of intense debate, but Gibson is the first to provide rigorous scientific evidence documenting precisely how the truth and reconciliation process made critical contributions to the nation's healing process. For example, responses to his survey provide compelling testimony that the TRC succeeded in getting its version of the truth about the country's apartheid past accepted by all types of South Africans.
"The most important lesson promulgated by the TRC is that both sides in the struggle over apartheid did horrible things," claims Gibson. "If one accepts shared blamed, one might come to see the struggle over apartheid as one of "pretty good" good against "pretty bad" bad, not as absolute good versus infinite evil. Because all sides did horrible things during the struggle, all sides were compromised to some degree. It then becomes easier to accept the complaints of one's enemies about abuses they experienced under the apartheid system."
In fact, Gibson's survey shows that South Africans who embrace the TRC view of the nation's apartheid past are more reconciled with their fellow South Africans.

Building a shared consensus history assisted in sharing similarity. That may have been key to permitting each side to better understand the other, and thus engage the ventral mPFC.

Headbashing statistics

In a recent article in New Scientist, there was a curious statistical inconsistency:

From 4000 to 3200 BC, Britons had a 1 in 14 chance of being bashed on the head, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying from their injuries...
Schulting and Wysocki have so far identified and studied the remains of about 350 skulls, mostly from southern England. The pair found healed depressed fractures in 4 to 5 per cent of the skulls, and unhealed injuries in about 2 per cent - suggesting the person died from their wounds, or at some point in the attack.

That should be approximately a 28% chance of dying from their injuries from or soon after the attack. The 1 in 50 statement implies a far lower lethality than is evidenced.