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Brillyant comments on Open thread, September 22-28, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Not entirely sure.
There seems to be a pattern recognition malfunction that takes place. "Conspiracies" happen all the time (i.e. people lie, governments have covert programs, office politics, etc.) and people seem to want to avoid being naive about the "real" reasons and cause for significant events like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.
It might just help to resolve cognitive dissonance between (a) powerful forces (like the gov't) are generally in solid control, pulling a lot of strings and not being entirely up front about it and (b) major stuff happens that the gov't couldn't/didn't prevent.
Also in both the examples above the official explanation is politically inconvenient for a lot of people. For example, people like to think of JFK as a left wing martyr, thus him being killed by a communist is rather inconvenient to this narrative.
In 2013 there was a poll about conspiracy theories. They provide contingency tables that show relationships between beliefs in various conspiracy theories and voting in 2012 US presidential election, political ideology, gender, party affiliation, race and age. Looking at these tables it seems that belief in JFK conspiracy is somewhat similar across the political spectrum, and, maybe surprisingly, it was very liberal people (and not very conservative ones) who were most likely to agree with the official explanation. Obviously, grouping all JFK conspiracy theories into one option loses a lot of information, as liberals and conservatives would probably differ in which ones they find the most appealing. Moreover, neither liberals, nor conservatives are homogeneous groups, and this poll does not show differences among the subgroups (e.g. geographical or some other kind) that might exist.
I wonder how many of them know Oswald was a communist.