2025/07/17 by Daniel Toribio‐Flórez, Marlene Sophie Altenmüller, Karen M. Douglas +64 · 3 voices · 7 citations
Computer Science · Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Collectivism #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Individualism #Injustice #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Perspective (graphical) #Political science #Prosocial behavior #Psychology #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/ejsp.70008
published in European Journal of Social Psychology 55(7), 1252-1269 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2025/07/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
ABSTRACT Conspiracy beliefs have been linked to perceptions of collective victimhood. We adopt an individual perspective on victimhood by investigating the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and the individual disposition to perceive and react to injustice as a victim, i.e., victim justice sensitivity (VJS). Data from two German samples (Ns = 370, 373) indicated a positive association between VJS and conspiracy mentality beyond conceptually related covariates (e.g., mistrust). In a multinational sample from 15 countries ( N = 14,978), VJS was positively associated with both general and specific conspiracy beliefs (about vaccines and climate change) within countries, though these associations varied across countries. However, economic, sociopolitical and cultural country‐level factors that might explain the cross‐country variability (e.g., GDP, Human Freedom Index, individualism–collectivism), including indices of collective exposure to direct violence, did not moderate the studied associations. Future research should investigate the relationship between victimhood and conspiracy beliefs, considering both intraindividual and intergroup perspectives.