ABSTRACT
The association between collective narcissism and conspiracy theories is robust and comprises conspiracy theories of very varied, often contradictory content. Collective narcissism predicts a generic conspiratorial mindset, a content-free predisposition to seek hidden patterns and secretive plots. This association illustrates collective narcissism as motivated social cognition. It allows interpreting collective narcissism as an investment in the ingroup's image that generates biased information processing aiming not at the most accurate understanding of the intergroup reality but at understanding that satisfies psychological motives. Conspiracy theories satisfy specific motives (to arrive at a certain conclusion) and nonspecific (to arrive at any conclusion rather than face cognitive inconsistency) motives generated and expressed by collective narcissism. Theories attributing conspiracies to specific outgroups satisfy the desire to arrive at a specific conclusion that the ingroup is exceptional despite not being universally recognized as such. Conspiracy theories explain that the lack of recognition can be attributed to jealousy and evil plots of outgroups. Conspiracy theories also satisfy the need to arrive at the conclusion that the ingroup's violence is defensive, provoked by others, and righteous. Conspiracy theories attribute hostile intentions to outgroups to justify hostile responses. Conspiracy theories that do not directly pertain to intergroup contexts satisfy a nonspecific motivation to engage in meaning-making activity that follows violation of a committed belief (that the ingroup is extraordinary) by another belief (that nobody recognizes it).
