On “Everyday Conspiracist Reasoning” and Its Radicalization: Putting the Psychology of Conspiracy Beliefs in Its Context

Structural and Political Backgrounds of Everyday Conspiracist Reasoning

Psychological research has repeatedly identified stable predictors of conspiracy mentality, including existential threat to the self or in-group (van Prooijen, 2020), system threats linked to social change (Federico, 2022; Mao et al., 2021), and feelings of anomia and deprivation (Abalakina‐Paap et al., 1999; Bowes et al., 2023; Douglas & Sutton, 2023; Goertzel, 1994; Hornsey et al., 2023). Similarly, cultural scientists underscore the nexus between conspiracy beliefs and the ubiquity of “epistemological, ontological and existential insecurity” (Aupers, 2012, p. 31) in contemporary societies.

On a structural level, insecurities have surged substantially since the onset of the neoliberal phase of capitalism around the 1980s. This era of flexible capitalist reproduction (Sennett, 2000) dismantled much of the welfare state, which had served to buffer the masses from market dependency through social benefits. The neoliberal assault on the welfare state coincided with increasingly frequent cyclical crises of capitalism, which, rather than reducing dependency, made people more reliant on social spending (Harvey, 2007). During this transformation, stagnating profit rates, global market integration, and financialization converged with rising job insecurity and the spread of atypical and precarious employment (Nachtwey, 2018). These developments resulted in growing inequalities and imposed increased demands for flexibility, self-regulation and self-optimization to survive in a relentlessly competitive labor market. The social figure of the “entrepreneurial-self” (Bröckling, 2015) embodies this work culture and socialization model, which compels individuals to adapt continuously to rapidly changing labor market conditions.

While people gained autonomy through cutbacks in direct workplace supervision, they paid for it through increased pressures driven by a regime of self-optimization, enhancement and acceleration—pressures that have led to systemic overload and exhaustion (Ehrenberg, 2016). This neoliberal dispositive extends beyond the workplace and reshapes all parts of social life, producing a new form of subjectivity (Brown, 2015; Jimenez & Schmitt, 2024; Lazzarato, 2009; Teo, 2018). Fear of social decline now permeates society, spreading from disadvantaged groups to the middle and upper classes. Failure, status loss and redundancy have become widespread threats. Downward mobility has become more likely, and the absence of a strong safety net leaves people especially vulnerable to its consequences (Nachtwey, 2018).

Mounting insecurities, anxieties, feelings of powerlessness, and the failure to meet rising expectations culminate in what Zygmunt Bauman (2001) described as the defining disease of postmodernity: “das Unbehagen der Postmoderne” (p. 43). Postmodernity intensifies the contradiction between formal individual freedom and the structural subjugation to market forces, which Karl Marx (1867 / 1978, p. 899) famously termed “mute compulsion of economic relations”. As people must perform as autonomous market actors while facing the consequences of systemic abandonment, “zones of aggrievement” (Amlinger & Nachtwey, 2025, p. 123) expand to include even those who once held privileged positions.

Within this neoliberal framework, people increasingly internalize responsibility for social outcomes. They no longer attribute social developments or personal misfortune to structural forces or power relations. Instead, they interpret success and failure as results of individual effort or shortcomings. Thus, structural contradictions appear as personal problems, precipitating psychological tensions that people direct toward themselves (Amlinger & Nachtwey, 2025; Brown, 2015; Ehrenberg, 2016) or toward individual actors. In a “society of singularities” (Reckwitz, 2020), people are more likely to personalize social power, as the collective understanding of systemic structures erodes. This shift has significant consequences for social critique: the more the notion of a “society of individuals” (Elias, 2001) prevails, the more it obscures social dependencies and the complexities of collective dynamics, reinforcing the illusion of “governance through individuals”.

These neoliberal transformations lie at the heart of contemporary existential threats and widespread insecurities. In the next section, we show how these contradictions are mirrored in people’s experiences and everyday reasoning.

Everyday Conspiracist Reasoning as a Symptom of Postmodern Malaise

Anxieties and insecurities have become defining sentiments in neoliberal capitalism. They are ubiquitous, but do not affect people equally; social status significantly shapes the impact of social turmoil, and it does not necessarily result in conspiracy beliefs. Roscigno (2024) for example found, that conspiracy theories also emerge among more affluent and well-educated social groups, that are considered less prone to such ideas. It follows, that while objective material conditions indeed influence the endorsement of conspiracy theories, people’s subjective perceptions and interpretations of their social position also play a critical role. Understanding how conspiracy beliefs emerge requires considering how people collectively make sense of their lived experience.

A growing body of research, drawing broadly from the sociology of knowledge and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1987) praxeological sociology, examines how worldviews and political consciousness emerge and how they are socially situated. These studies focus on “particular way[s] of ‘understanding the world’” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 253) and how these understandings relate to everyday practice. This knowledge is often implicit, historically and culturally embedded, and grounded in what scholars call “conjunctive spaces of experience” (Bohnsack et al., 2010; Mannheim, 1982). Scholars widely recognize that knowledge is socially situated and embedded, and that people construct social reality through processes deeply rooted in lived experience (Berger & Luckmann, 1991). However, these social constructions remain constrained by institutional forces or, more generally, by the reality that actions based on inadequate interpretations of social structure yield consequences (Vobruba, 2024b, p. 294).

Shared social reality relies on common sense knowledge, that is, understanding that people “share with others in the normal, self-evident routines of everyday life” (Berger & Luckmann, 1991, p. 37) and that require no further explanation. In a Bourdieuan account, common sense consists of “those things commonly known or even tacitly accepted within a collectivity” (Holton, 1997, p. 39) and includes implicit and explicit dimensions (ibid., p. 40). Beyond framing interpretations of the world, collective experiences also shape expectations, needs, and emotions (Reckwitz, 2002).

In her seminal work on middle-class citizens in Louisiana who sympathized with the Tea Party movement¹, sociologist Arlie R. Hochschild (2016) offers keen insights into how the “structural squeeze” (p. 165) translates into political views and self-perceptions. Through interviews and fieldwork, she uncovers a paradox: her participants often act against their material interests because they follow what she calls a “deep story” (p. 135)—a subjective, emotionally resonant narrative that shapes how they perceive and experience social reality. This “feels-as-if story” (Hochschild, 2016, p. 135) functions as a prism through which people make sense of their lives. Deep stories are not exclusive to the conservative right; rather, they represent a general principle whereby individuals construct reality from situated experience (see also Sawicka, 2024).

The prototypical deep story Hochschild uncovers in these social milieus, and which Kumkar (2018) also identifies among Tea Party activists, is the metaphor of “waiting in line”. According to this narrative, hardworking Americans wait patiently to receive the reward of their labor. However, elites allegedly allow immigrants and marginalized groups to “cut in line”, undermining the moral economy of merit and national identity. Those who perceive themselves as deserving of state benefits and symbolic recognition find themselves displaced, while the “undeserving” seem to reap the rewards (Hochschild, 2016; Kumkar, 2018). These expectations—based on classed ideals of effort, restraint, and fairness— reflect what Bourdieu (1985) calls a “sense for one’s own social position” (p. 18, our own translation) or what Rothmüller (2021) refers to as a “signature fantasy” (p. 36). These fantasies define what people perceive as attainable and legitimate, and they shape how middle-class groups understand their status and pursue their goals.

However, the structural squeeze and broader neoliberal transformation, as we have argued above, often block people from fulfilling these aspirations, regardless of their effort. This dissonance breeds resentment, anxiety and disappointment, as well as mistrust in political elites and the rise of paranoid political tendencies (Cramer, 2016; Giroux, 2021; Hochschild, 2016; Kumkar, 2018). Kumkar (2018) describes this condition as “disappointment without disillusionment” (p. 118): people hold on to their signature fantasies even when they fail, because those fantasies offer a fragile sense of orientation. The widening gap between expectation and reality affects economic well-being and undermines a sense of dignity. Hochschild (2016) calls this the “honor squeeze” (p. 215)—the sense of humiliation people feel when they perceive that elites have devalued their culture, values, and way of life.

In conclusion, middle-class orientations intertwine deeply with signature fantasies of the American Dream and perceptions of its collapse (see also Leeds, 2024). People increasingly believe that elites are denying them the fruits of their labor while marginalized groups receive unearned recognition. They also feel ignored, abandoned, or betrayed by political elites. Other research confirms that such interpretations are not exclusive to the middle class but are also common among working-class groups (see Dörre et al., 2018; Silva, 2021).

These frameworks correspond with a type of everyday reasoning that feels self-evident within conjunctive spaces of experience. For those who are embedded in these spaces, these narratives require no further explanation (Berger & Luckmann, 1991). Feelings of neglect, injustice, and betrayal—often intertwined with vague suspicions of elite deception—reflect “implicit[ly] shared knowledge that is intrinsically embedded in [the actors] immediate, everyday practice” (Przyborski & Slunecko, 2009, p. 141). We propose conceptualizing these interpretations as everyday conspiracist reasoning—a form of cognitive and emotional background noise that subtly informs how people perceive and feel the social world. Or put differently: The case of Tea Party activists shows how everyday orientations and interpretations of social reality are infused with notions of conspiracy and feelings of distrust and contempt towards political ‘elites’. While not yet full-blown conspiracy beliefs, these narratives and aversive “affective grooves” (Leeds, 2024, p. 109) signal an openness to such thinking because they structurally align with everyday interpretations.

This reasoning is rife with distrust and resentment, closely tied to everyday experience, toward governments, state institutions, transnational corporations, the media, and science. Rather than attributing one’s own misery to systemic transformations, people often frame it as the result of elites misusing institutions for personal gain, thereby undermining vested claims to recognition. Initially, everyday conspiracist reasoning remains depoliticized and untethered to specific political movements. Yet, ‘paranoid’ political movements can mobilize it (Giroux, 2021; Neumann, 2017). Among Tea Party supporters, such reasoning has already become politicized and linked to explicit conspiracy narratives. Still, conspiracy thinking does not entirely reshape their worldview; it remains fragmented, influencing only certain aspects of social reality.

Outlines of Everyday Conspiracist Reasoning

In summary, five defining features characterize everyday conspiracist reasoning. First, it does not remain confined to the margins of society. Rather, it is a widely shared background noise of intuitive skepticism toward institutions of power. As Knight (2000) observes, assumptions of conspiracy “[…] form part of everyday patterns of thought. Conspiracy has become the default assumption in an age which has learned to distrust everything and everyone” (p. 3). This distrust derives from the conditions of postmodernity (Bauman, 2001) and the anxieties and disruptions produced by the neoliberal era.² Everyday conspiracist reasoning serves as cultural and interpretative repertoire that can be mobilized and instrumentalized by political actors, especially in times of upheaval (see Bergmann, 2025).

Second, everyday conspiracist reasoning depends on its social context. We can only understand its spread and appeal by analyzing the specific confines of shared spaces of experience. Only then can we properly understand its function for individuals as part of these shared experiences. This mode of reasoning offers a heuristic that reveals how lived experiences—and the disruptions they entail—translate into a worldview marked by distrust and implicit assumptions of ongoing conspiracies. While we propose that everyday conspiracist reasoning marks a pervasive mode of sense-making in neoliberal societies, its form can differ depending on the specific conjunctive spaces of experience it is undergirded by.

Third, everyday conspiracist reasoning reflects the compounded impact of economic pressures and moral injuries. It emerges when people feel denied their culturally ingrained entitlement to a certain social status or perceive the devaluation of traditional lifestyles. These interpretations of social reality simultaneously express a form of social critique (Kumkar et al., 2026) or dissensus (Parmigiani, 2021). They function as an “ordinary sense of justice” that responds to the gap “between the social world as it is and as it should be in order to satisfy people's moral expectations” (Boltanski, 2011, p. 30).

Fourth, everyday conspiracist reasoning is underpinned by emotional attunement to social reality. Emotional reactions such as anger, despair, and resentment that arise from the dissonance between expectations and lived experience do not emerge in isolation. These responses are embedded in social contexts and reflect broader political and structural conditions rather than merely resulting from individual psychological conditions.

Fifth, everyday conspiracist reasoning is a specific mode of interpretation that helps individuals to navigate an increasingly complex and destabilized society. It is a practice of and collective repertoire of meaning-making (see Wagoner et al., 2026). Therefore, it provides a sense of agency and security, and thus functions as a coping mechanism in psychological terms. However, it fails to eliminate existential insecurities altogether (see Vobruba, 2024a).

We propose treating everyday conspiracist reasoning as the underlying structure that supports a more vocal and thus more visible form of conspiracism. Vocal conspiracism represents an intensified, generalized and closed expression of everyday interpretations of the social world.

Vocal Conspiracism and Anxiety

We identify two main drivers that radicalize everyday conspiracist reasoning. First, although this mode of reasoning provides orientation in an increasingly opaque social world, it ultimately fails to eliminate existential insecurities (Liekefett et al., 2023; Vobruba, 2024a). For instance, while the “waiting in line” metaphor may offer temporary orientation within a troubling social reality, the structural and political forces driving inequality, what Hochschild (2016) dubbed the “structural squeeze” (p. 165), continue unchecked. Hopes and expectations remain unfulfilled, while disappointment, anger, powerlessness, and shame intensify, reinforcing a destructive emotional cycle (see Salmela & von Scheve, 2017). Individuals who conform to dominant social norms, especially those who internalize the “signature fantasy”, receive no compensatory rewards for their sacrifices.³ Consequently, emotions once kept in check begin to overflow in destructive ways (Pfaller, 2022).

Second, crises and social upheavals act as catalysts (Federico, 2022; van Prooijen & Douglas, 2017), transforming diffuse, tacit mistrust into vocal and all-encompassing conspiracy beliefs. This transformation becomes especially likely when disruptions threaten people’s identities, orientations and livelihoods, thereby destabilizing everyday life (Vobruba, 2024a, p. 98). It also occurs when the hidden fragility of the social world, normally masked by routine, suddenly becomes visible (Klimasch, 2021, p. 77).

As we have argued, everyday conspiracist reasoning functions as a practical means of orientation within an unstable society and as a coping mechanism for the social anxieties that instability produces. As long as people can maintain a sense of normalcy, this reasoning helps keep existential fears in check. However, in moments of acute personal or collective crisis, such as job loss, the end of a relationship, bereavement, pandemics, inflation, or geopolitical conflict, this stabilizing function breaks down. These second-order crises are “objective power[s] depriving a subject of part of his normal sovereignty” (Habermas, 1973, p. 643) and thus amplifying material threats like unemployment and financial insecurity as well as moral injuries. These aggravated strains are compounded by reawaked neurotic anxieties that individuals had previously suppressed.

Psychoanalysis distinguishes neurotic anxieties from real ones by identifying the former as rooted not in external dangers but in unconscious psychological conflicts (Freud, 1935). These conflicts, shaped by socialization conditions such as class, gender, and race, take form through individual life trajectories and coalesce into what Mühlhoff (2019) calls “affective dispositions” (p. 119). These dispositions—repositories of affective traces from past relations and experiences—condition how people react to present-day events. When individuals perceive that “normality” is falling apart, these past emotional injuries resurface. During major social crises, i.e., second-order crises, real external threats and unconscious inner conflicts converge. The orientation and coping strategies that once managed insecurity and provided a sense of certainty collapse, exposing underlying fragilities and triggering real and neurotic anxieties.

These affective responses relate to real threats but often exceed a rational response. They evoke deep existential fears rooted in personal histories. Understanding the severity of these emotional responses requires attention to both sides of this dynamic. Neumann (2017) explains that “persecutory anxiety” arises when “external dangers which threaten a man meet the inner anxiety and are thus frequently experienced as even more dangerous than they really are. At the same time, these same external dangers intensify the inner anxiety” (p. 615).

Therefore, subjective experiences of crises depend on one’s objective social position and on how current events revive earlier traumas and anxieties. This interplay between past and present, real and neurotic anxiety, generates “painful tension[s]” (Neumann, 2017, p. 15) that demand a remedy. We propose interpreting the radicalization of everyday conspiracist reasoning into vocal conspiracism as an attempt to restore psychological sovereignty and regain a sense of orientation (Knasmüller et al., 2023; van der Tak & Harambam, 2024). Paradoxically, individuals achieve this by conjuring images of evil and persecutory powers that resemble paranoia, however, not in a pathological sense. Clinical paranoia centers on the individual believing that they are a personal target of external forces, whereas political paranoia, as Hofstadter (1965) observes, directs that belief toward broader collectives: “a nation, a culture, or a way of life” (p. 4).

Restoration of Sovereignty by Means of Vocal Conspiracism

From the perspective of psychoanalytic social psychology, the process of restoring sovereignty and agency in response to external and inner crises involves a fundamental contradiction. People regain control over their emotions through defense mechanisms such as splitting and projection. They alleviate inner tensions by displacing and projection of unwanted feelings such as anxiety, powerlessness, aggression, hate or envy onto imagined conspirators. These external targets in effect represent and embody the disavowed affects, allowing individuals to attack and manage them symbolically. In effect, people wage a kind of proxy war against the very powerlessness and underlying social conditions they struggle to acknowledge (see Brunner, 2016).

This form of defiance through vocal conspiracism has an invigorating quality: although conspiracy theorists feel overwhelmed with anxieties, they do not remain passive. Instead, they actively resist perceived threats by building communities, organizing protests, creating and sharing online content, gathering information, or by trying to “wake up sheeples” in their social circles (van der Tak & Harambam, 2024). As Neumann (2017) suggests, “anxiety can have a cathartic effect; man can be strengthened inwardly when he has successfully avoided a danger or when he has prevailed against it” (p. 616). By projecting intolerable feelings and rejected aspects of the self onto external enemies, individuals distort their perception of reality. Yet, this distorted view helps them regain orientation, if only temporarily. As Chaudhary (2022) puts it, the “subject masters an original unease, and […] [it] aids in orienting oneself in the world, however temporarily” (p. 111).

These patterns of perception function in a paranoid mode, not pathological but structural, and thus help restore everyday orientation within a hostile, unstable world (Brunner, 2016; Pohl, 2003). This contradictory dynamic resembles Freud’s account of psychosis, where delusional formations serve not as pure pathology but as “an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction” (Freud, 1911, p. 70). Although vocal conspiracism conjures a world rife with harm and deceit, it still provides a structure that enables individuals to “once more live in it“ (Freud, 1911, p. 70). Paradoxically, it is the invocation of impending doom that compensates for and alleviates persecutory anxieties triggered by immediate crises (see also Hessel, 2020) and reawakened affective dispositions.

Through what Freud (1921) called “crooked cure” (p. 141), individuals avoid being overwhelmed by anxiety and burdening conflicts. Rather than confronting the psychological and social roots of their distress, they externalize and discard their fears, mastering them phantasmatically. We propose understanding crooked cure as a way to reinstate disrupted everyday orientations without directly challenging the social order. Vocal conspiracism helps to mend a broken social reality: In treating the social world as a chimera that covers up a true, hidden reality, it allows people to hang on to a notion of reality that seems manageable (Kumkar, 2018). People can retain a clear sense of orientation and normalcy, because they deny a hostile reality that constantly threatens their livelihood and identity. This process does not reflect pathology but constitutes a form of self-recuperation (Chaudhary, 2022, p. 106), which succeeds only when embedded in virtual or real collectives (Brunner, 2016; Pohl, 2000; Simmel, 1946). Community formation under the banner of being “awakened”—as a self-proclaimed political avant-garde against looming conspiracies—empowers individuals by drawing on the collective. Within these groups, individuals experience a subjective sense of aggrandizement and empowerment (see also Leithäuser, 1988). Adorno (1997) referred to this process as collective narcissism. Empirical studies support this association by showing that collective narcissism, defined by exaggerated in-group esteem and perception of external threat, correlates strongly with conspiracy beliefs (see Golec de Zavala et al., 2022).

We view the protests against the “new normal” (see Manuti et al., 2022) during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of this dynamic. As people recognized that the virus and related public health measures would profoundly alter daily life, the term “new normal” quickly became a contested symbol of transformation. Protesters interpreted this term not as an adaptive necessity but as evidence of hidden elite agendas, accusing political and economic powers of exploiting the crisis to implement a hostile takeover under the guise of the “Great Reset” (see Christensen & Au, 2023; Vieten, 2020).

In response to the perceived encroachment of a threatening new reality, protesters invoked a nostalgic vision of pre-pandemic normality. Although this earlier condition was never free of conflict or inequality, many perceived it as a stable foundation for everyday orientation. Restoration of sovereignty in this context reflects a desire for re-normalization: an urge to resist the normalization of social and affective emergency. Protesters strived to restore a romanticized pre-pandemic condition that never existed in the first place.

In this light, conspiracy beliefs express a longing for a “lost paradise” (Buchmayr & Krouwel, 2025, p. 14)—not a return to an actual past, but a return to the sense of orientation, stability, and agency that people associate with that imagined time.

Stabilization of Vocal Conspiracism

While many scholars conceive of conspiracy mentality as the result of a stable psychological disposition, our discussion takes a different direction. We acknowledge that vocal conspiracism can intensify and stabilize into a closed worldview that interprets all social subsystems through the lens of hidden conspiracies. However, we emphasize that such stabilization is not inevitable. When such trajectories occur, we can speak of conspiracy mentality in an emphatic sense, and it becomes important to monitor these stabilization processes as they appear. Political mobilization and action play a crucial role in this respect. The more political actors replace rational crisis management with rhetoric that stokes neurotic, persecutory anxieties, the more likely vocal conspiracism will stabilize (Neumann, 2017).

However, different trajectories are possible: When immediate threats and distress recede because societies mitigate crises or because individuals and communities develop ways to manage real and neurotic anxieties, the social and psychological pressures that drive people toward conspiracist responses begin to fade (see Brunner, 2025). As a result, people often return to familiar modes of reasoning and orientation. Conspiratorial suspicions may persist, continuing to shape how people interpret the social world and their place within it, but they become less dominant. Their presence recedes to the level of the background noise, what we call everyday conspiracist reasoning.

British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (2002) described the oscillations between psychological states—some marked by splitting and projection and others by tolerance for ambivalence and anxiety—as shifts between the paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions. Drawing on this, Webb and Rosenbaum (2023) propose that people commonly fluctuate between these positions when they experience psychological threat or distress. As they note, “there can be times when we long to abandon the complexities inherent to critical reflection and, instead, retreat into the simplicity of the binary worldview” (p. 70). Yet this longing does not preclude the return to more deliberative coping strategies once social reality is re-stabilized.

The radicalization of everyday conspiracist reasoning depends on the stability of social conditions and the micro-level of social systems, and the group dynamics surrounding vocal conspiracism. As people become more involved in conspiracy theory milieus, they often grow increasingly dependent on and loyal to these communities, sometimes at the expense of relationships outside these groups. Group dependencies activate dynamics that bind the individual’s psychological bond to the group. The desire to belong to the “enlightened” inner circle may produce fears of exclusion or rejection, especially when members consider straying from the group’s ideological path. Feelings of guilt and shame, especially stemming from aggressive behavior, can also prevent individuals from withdrawing. These emotional burdens, alongside the affective benefits of group belonging, often compel individuals to resort to defense mechanisms like splitting and projection to protect the collective identity and their place within it (see Freud, 1921; Neumann, 2017).

Such group dynamics facilitate radicalization and perpetuate conspiracy worldviews. To leave the group would mean confronting the very emotional burdens these mechanisms help suppress, making the emotional and psychological incentives to uphold shared beliefs even stronger (Brunner, 2016, 2025).