Happy Sunday − and welcome to the best of The Conversation U.S. Here are a few of our recently published stories:

• I’ve spent decades overseeing relief operations around the world, and here’s what’s going wrong in Gaza
• US is way stingier with maternity leave and child care than the rest of the world

My first encounter with a conspiracy theory came when I was a kid and was told that the Freemasons controlled the world – and that most of the Founding Fathers were members of the all-powerful group. I’ve learned about many more over the years, from those swirling around the JFK assassination to the Sandy Hook school shooting, all of which have captured the imaginations of people I know and love. While it may be easy to raise an eyebrow or two at some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories, the rub of the matter is that there are, in fact, actual conspiracies involving powerful people, companies or organizations trying to game the system.

So how do you tell which are real and which are total bunk?

In one of the clearest answers to that question I’ve read, social psychologist H. Colleen Sinclair describes seven steps you can take to vet a conspiracy theory making the rounds on the internet or among your friends and family.

“Real conspiracies have been confirmed because there was evidence,” Sinclair writes in Step 1. “But unfounded conspiracy theories reveal their lack of evidence and substitute instead several elements that should be red flags for skeptics.”

She goes on to explore the other red flags you can look for in a conspiracy theory that may be more nonsense than sense. It’s definitely worth a read.