Today’s post is by Brady Wagoner, Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University, Denmark. He published a recent article in Current Opinion in Psychology, together with Maja Sødinge Jørgensen and Kirstine Pahuus, titled “Conspiracy theories through the lens of collective memory”.
Brady Wagoner
In psychology, conspiracy theories are often treated as symptoms of faulty thinking: cognitive shortcuts gone wrong, paranoia, or failures of information literacy. This article develops an alternative approach through the lens of collective memory, which refers to the socially shared ways groups reconstruct the past to make sense of the present and anticipate the future. This perspective focuses on what conspiracy theories do, rather than what is wrong with those who believe them. It shifts attention from individual cognition as such to how thinking is embedded within history, culture, and social relations.
The article begins with the familiar observation that conspiracy theories tend to flourish in moments of crisis. Pandemics, wars, economic shocks, and revolutions disrupt everyday expectations and generate uncertainty, fear, and loss of control. In these conditions, conspiracy narratives offer coherence in the midst of chaos. They transform diffuse anxiety into intelligible stories with agents, intentions, and moral stakes. Crucially, these stories do not vanish once the crisis passes. They linger, becoming part of how societies remember what happened and how they interpret subsequent disruptions.
A collective memory perspective brings this temporal dimension into focus. Conspiracy theories are not free-floating ideas; they are anchored in shared histories of distrust. Suspicion toward governments, scientific institutions, or elites is rarely abstract. It is shaped by remembered experiences of exclusion, marginalization, and betrayal. The article shows how this plays out across different contexts. Medical conspiracy theories among African Americans, for example, cannot be separated from the historical memory of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Vaccine conspiracies in parts of the Global South draw on colonial legacies of population control and exploitation. In these cases and others, distrust reflects historically sedimented social relations rather than individual pathology.
This historical grounding also helps explain why certain conspiracy theories resonate while others fail. Conspiratorial claims gain traction when they draw on familiar narrative forms and symbolic resources already embedded in collective memory. Contemporary conspiracies often recycle older motifs: hidden cabals, corrupted elites, forbidden knowledge, and the idea of an enlightened minority confronting a deceived majority. Claims about 5G causing Covid-19, global resets, or shapeshifting alien overlords may appear novel, but they typically recombine long-standing symbols with present-day grievances. Digital media intensifies this process, allowing narratives to merge, mutate, and circulate across different communities and domains at remarkable speed.
One of the article’s most important contributions lies in its implications for how conspiracy theories are studied and addressed. By treating them as culturally and historically situated meaning-making practices, it resists the temptation to reduce them to cognitive deficits or irrationality. This does not mean taking conspiracy claims at face value or ignoring their real social harms. Rather, it suggests that corrective strategies focused solely on debunking falsehoods or inoculating against them is likely to fall short when beliefs are rooted in collective memories of mistrust and injustice. Ignoring those histories risks deepening the very antagonisms such interventions aim to resolve.
Seen through the lens of collective memory, conspiracy theories appear less as mental errors and more as contested narratives about power, history, and belonging. They express attempts to make sense of uncertainty, articulate grievances, and locate oneself within a longer story of harm and distrust. Understanding their appeal and persistence requires looking beyond what is going on inside the head of individuals, to explore how this is conditioned by broader cultural and historical frameworks. At their core, conspiracy theories are tools constructed from the past that people use to make meaning of personal and social suffering.