Psychology Today says conspiracy theories can be adaptive and logical

Group narcissism research continues to proliferate while recapitulating the same old Freudian errors.

Black Sociology Man (pic unrelated)

A post in Psychology Today advertising a forthcoming psychology paper suggests that “historical trauma” leads to victimization and powerlessness, which in turn leads to a rational belief in conspiracy theories, even if the conspiratorial claims are unsubstantiated. While cloaked in the language of individual psychological trauma and psychology, the post is actually an analysis of individuals who perceive or believe in a narrative of historical trauma and not an analysis of people who are actually traumatized.

The post begins by defining historical trauma:

The term historical trauma describes cumulative and collective trauma—in most cases resulting from systematic violence and deprivation—experienced across generations by individuals who share a common group identity.

Typical examples include war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, enslavement, racial segregation, occupation, economic deprivation, cultural devaluation, and dispossession.

Note that they don’t just use the term trauma because then their scope of subjects would only be people who have actually experienced trauma. Instead, they use a multigenerational conceptual definition related to a common group identity. The reason for this can only be that the author conceives of historical trauma as something that you can inherit even if you don’t personally experience the trauma, simply by virtue of sharing a common group identity, which in the final analysis can only mean sharing a common belief in a specific group self-image.

The experience of historical trauma is associated with feeling oppressed, powerless, victimized, exploited, and deprived of vital resources. And becoming suspicious and paranoid. [Emphasis added]

From this approach, we can conclude for example that an affluent and non-traumatized member of a group can experience historical trauma, because narcissists often feel persecuted even when they aren’t.

The paper describes the reasoning process that follows from an “experience of historical trauma”

After all, a likely reason why the aggressors succeeded in their malicious intent is that they were able to fool their victims and keep their true intentions concealed for a long time (e.g., using propaganda techniques).

Of course, the victims eventually realized the extent of the crimes perpetrated by those conspiring against them. So, having been fooled once, many became hypervigilant.

But, the authors caution, this reasoning could lead to belief in erroneous conspiracy theories (as opposed to true conspiracy theories).

The authors suggest that the modernization process – living in an environment where a group isn’t subjected to trauma – increases the likelihood of “false positives”. This is consistent with the modernization theory of John Murray Cuddihy.

False positives are even more likely when historically traumatized people move to better environments, to places that are peaceful and flourishing financially. Or when traumatized societies attempt to reestablish democracy and work toward prosperity.

As stressed above, a key component here is that even in the absence of actual trauma, we’re supposed to believe that historical trauma is a form of trauma, when in fact it’s a historical narrative tied to a group self-image. The authors’ own studies confirm that the connection between historical trauma and conspiracy theories is really a connection between a perception of trauma or powerlessness and a perception of conspiracy.

The authors point to one study showing a

consistent positive correlation between...[beliefs in Jewish conspiracy] and economic deprivation: people who felt that their economic situation was deteriorating and their country’s economy was collapsing were more likely to believe in Jewish control over politics, media, and economy. [Emphasis added]

And again

Research suggests feelings of powerlessness, particularly loss of political power, engender conspiracy theories: Traumatized people often “attribute exaggerated influence to enemies as a means of compensating for perceptions of reduced control over their environment.” A study by the author found that among the British and Poles, “lack of control [predicted] beliefs in a Jewish conspiracy.” [Emphasis added].

(As an aside, much of the research on group narcissism comes out of Poland and focuses on belief in Jewish conspiracy theories, as I discussed in this post. This is consistent with older Freudian studies of group narcissism discussed in the same post.)

The authors find a connection between a victim mentality and a belief in conspiracies among those who strongly identify with their country:

Victim mentality promotes conspiracy beliefs, particularly among those who identify strongly with their country. For example, in one study, the French people who felt they “suffered uniquely and more than others from the Zika outbreak” were more likely to endorse Zika-related conspiracy theories (e.g., Zika as an attempt at population control).

(The hyperlinked study in the Psychology Today post explicitly refers to “national narcissism.”)

Curiously, although the studies themselves only measure perceptions or feelings of status degradation and powerlessness, the authors conclude that, to avoid conspiratorial thinking like Covid-19 skepticism or anti-semitism, we need to validate those feelings and perceptions:

The good news is that when the victims of historical trauma feel in control and feel empowered again, they become less likely to suffer from health consequences or endorse conspiracy theories. [Emphasis added by Psychology Today]

How can we help the victim get there and become empowered? Perhaps the journey toward healing needs to begin by validating the experiences of historical trauma—experiences that have caused the victims to feel powerless and their descendants to live in fear of conspirators.

Maybe we should start there.

In other words, to avoid conspiratorial and paranoid thinking among group narcissists, we should validate group narcissistic perceptions of “historical trauma” regardless of whether those perceptions are themselves based upon other narcissistic defenses, which, as I documented here and here, include confabulation and embellishment. Vicarious group narcissism becomes a self-defeating tool to ameliorate the harmful effects of one category of erroneous group narcissistic reasoning (Lasch’s Gnostic Theologies or conspiracy theories).

And again, the other issue with this kind of research is the elision of historical narratives of trauma into trauma itself such that belief in a group self-image that is reinforced by a grandiose history of victimization (which might be true) is conflated with an individual group member being traumatized today. This overlooks the experiences of groups with histories of group trauma like the Japanese, Mormons, or ancient Greeks (with respect to Roman state-sponsored oppression), each of which did not make its “historical trauma” an essential component of its group identity. It also overlooks the very obvious fact that everyone on earth descends from a group that experienced “historical trauma”.

The Psychology Today post and much of the contemporary research on group narcissism continue to fall into the errors I detailed in this post on contemporary group narcissism research. These errors entail, for example, that their research never touches upon the persistence of western state-sponsored conspiracy theories like white supremacy or “systemic” non-psychological theories which nonetheless structurally mirror conspiracy theories, like theories of systemic racism and white privilege.