>I had previously not understood how people could get themselves so deep into conspiracy theories.
To put it simply, it is contrarianism at the core. The more someone pushes the more you push back. The only fix for such a mindset is for the push to stop, but since the push works for the majority of non-contrarians it's worth the pushing. You can apply this to just about anything controversial in society/politics: gun rights, abortion, sexuality, religion, taxation, medication, etc.
The best thing you can do at an individual level is pull -- that is, agree with them as much as you can, be compassionate and empathetic with their views, but be firm in your own beliefs and highlight the overlap, then draw them closer to that overlap.
I think you need citations for everything you wrote there. We do have a lot of research into how people come to believe conspiracy theories and (to a lesser extent) how to break them out of it.
Most of what I've read agrees that pushing those people and/or treating them without empathy is the wrong approach. But the cause is not always contrarianism, and vaccine skepticism is not a perfect analog for the other controversial issues you mentioned. Tellingly, vaccination wasn't a political or controversial issue for many decades in the US.
> Tellingly, vaccination wasn't a political or controversial issue for many decades in the US.
That's because we've never gone from "a vaccine doesn't exist for this disease" to "literally everyone in the world needs to take this new vaccine right now" so quickly before.
To put it simply, it is contrarianism at the core. The more someone pushes the more you push back. The only fix for such a mindset is for the push to stop, but since the push works for the majority of non-contrarians it's worth the pushing. You can apply this to just about anything controversial in society/politics: gun rights, abortion, sexuality, religion, taxation, medication, etc.
The best thing you can do at an individual level is pull -- that is, agree with them as much as you can, be compassionate and empathetic with their views, but be firm in your own beliefs and highlight the overlap, then draw them closer to that overlap.