Sense of personal victimhood linked to conspiracy thinking in large international study

People who are quick to see themselves as victims of unfair treatment may be more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, according to a massive international study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. The research links a stable personality trait called “victim justice sensitivity” to greater endorsement of conspiracy narratives about climate change, vaccines, and other topics.

The work was led by Daniel Toribio-Flórez of the University of Kent in collaboration with an international team of more than 70 researchers from institutions across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. Previous studies have often focused on collective victimhood — the belief that one’s group has been historically harmed — as a driver of conspiratorial thinking. But the authors argued that conspiracy theories also tend to revolve around the idea of being wronged personally.

“Many conspiracy theories are rooted in the idea that one’s group has been unfairly treated or targeted by a powerful group acting malevolently in secret,” said Toribio-Flórez, a postdoctoral research associate and member of the CONSPIRACY_FX project.

“Because of this, past research has mostly focused on how conspiracy beliefs are related to collective victimhood-that is, when people feel their social group, community, or country has been wronged or harmed by another group. However, within a specific social context, individuals differ in their tendency to perceive and react as victims of injustice, independently of their group identity.”

“We were curious whether people who show this individual tendency to see themselves as victims are also prone to believe in conspiracy theories. To investigate this, we collaborated with a multinational team of researchers and collected data from 15 countries. This allowed us to examine whether the patterns we observed held up across different cultural and societal contexts, an important step in assessing the generalizability of our findings.”

Free daily newsletter

The first phase of the research was a secondary analysis of two surveys originally conducted in Germany. These surveys had explored how personality traits shape trust in science, but they also contained relevant measures for the present investigation. In total, the combined sample included 743 participants: 370 drawn from the general public and a student population, and 373 drawn entirely from a student population. The age range was broad, spanning from teenagers to older adults, and women made up the majority of both samples.

Participants completed a 10-item scale designed to measure victim justice sensitivity — the degree to which a person tends to notice, feel angered by, and react to situations in which they believe they are personally treated unfairly. They also completed a validated five-item measure of conspiracy mentality, which captures a general tendency to suspect that important events are shaped by hidden plots. In the second German sample, the researchers also had access to other relevant traits such as dispositional mistrust, intolerance of ambiguity, and need for control, along with political orientation.

The analysis revealed a small to moderate positive correlation between victim justice sensitivity and conspiracy mentality in both samples. In the first sample, the association was statistically significant, albeit weaker, while in the second it was stronger and remained significant even after controlling for other traits and political orientation.

This indicated that the relationship between feeling like a victim and endorsing conspiratorial thinking was not simply explained by a general distrustful outlook or a desire for certainty and control. However, because both samples were from Germany, the authors noted that the findings could not yet be assumed to apply universally.

To address this, the researchers conducted a second study which expanded the scope considerably. As part of the Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism (TISP) ManyLabs project, the researchers collected responses from nearly 15,000 people in 15 different countries, including Australia, Austria, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, the United States, and Costa Rica. The samples were designed to reflect national distributions of age, gender, and education level.

This large-scale online survey measured victim justice sensitivity using a short two-item scale from the Justice Sensitivity Inventory (“It makes me angry when others are undeservingly better off than me” and “It worries me when I have to work hard for things that come easily to others”).

Participants also completed three separate measures of conspiracy belief: a general statement about authorities often hiding the truth, a climate change conspiracy statement claiming that global warming is a hoax orchestrated by scientists, and a vaccine conspiracy statement alleging that scientists conceal vaccine dangers. These were rated on scales indicating the degree of agreement.

The researchers analyzed the data using multilevel models, which allowed them to separate individual-level effects from possible country-level influences. Across the pooled data, victim justice sensitivity was consistently linked to greater endorsement of conspiracy beliefs within countries. The effect was strongest for general conspiracy belief, slightly weaker for vaccine conspiracies, and weakest for climate change conspiracies. Even after adjusting for demographic factors, political orientation, and religiosity, the link remained statistically significant for general and vaccine-related conspiracies.

“According to our data, people’s individual tendency to perceive and react as victims of injustice is positively, though weakly, related to belief in conspiracy theories, even when controlling for indicators of collective victimhood or exposure to collective violence,” Toribio-Flórez told PsyPost. “In other words, people who tend to see themselves as victims are a bit more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs, regardless of how victimized others feel in their country or of the level of collective violence their country has recently suffered.”

The strength of the relationship varied across nations. In countries such as the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, the association between victim justice sensitivity and conspiracy beliefs was notably stronger. In others, including Costa Rica, Chile, and Colombia, it was minimal or non-existent for some conspiracy measures.

The researchers explored whether country-level factors — such as wealth, income inequality, personal freedoms, corruption perceptions, institutional trust, or cultural orientation toward individualism versus collectivism — explained these differences. They also considered historical exposure to violence, such as armed conflicts or political repression. None of these indicators consistently moderated the association. The one tentative exception was that the relationship appeared stronger in more individualistic societies, but this pattern did not replicate across all cultural indices tested.

“While we observed this pattern in most countries, the strength of the relationship between individual victimhood and conspiracy beliefs varied,” Toribio-Flórez said. “We explored whether economic, sociopolitical, cultural, or historical factors might explain these differences, but we didn’t find clear answers. So we still don’t fully understand why the connection is stronger in some contexts than in others.”

The study, like all research, includes some caveats. The studies were correlational, meaning they cannot determine whether victim justice sensitivity leads to conspiracy belief or vice versa — or whether the relationship is bidirectional.

“We cannot say for certain whether an individual’s tendency to feel like a victim makes people more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, or if it’s the other way around,” Toribio-Flórez explained. “While some studies suggest that conspiracy beliefs might increase individual perceptions of victimhood, more experimental work is needed to understand the direction and nature of this relationship.”

“I hope it encourages other researchers to examine victimhood at both the personal and group levels when studying conspiracy beliefs. While group identity has often been the focus, our findings suggest that an individual sense of victimhood also plays a meaningful role.”

“I would like to highlight the growing international collaboration in the social sciences and other research fields,” Toribio-Flórez added. “More and more, researchers are teaming up across countries to get a broader, more accurate picture of human behavior across different contexts. In this case, the Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism (TISP) ManyLabs project, led by Dr. Viktoria Cologna and Dr. Niels G. Mede, provided the platform that made this research project possible.”

The study, “Victims of Conspiracies? An Examination of the Relationship Between Conspiracy Beliefs and Dispositional Individual Victimhood,” was authored Daniel Toribio-Flórez, Marlene S. Altenmüller, Karen M. Douglas, Mario Gollwitzer, Indro Adinugroho, Mark Alfano, Denisa Apriliawati, Flavio Azevedo, Cornelia Betsch, Olga Białobrzeska, Amélie Bret, André Calero Valdez, Viktoria Cologna, Gabriela Czarnek, Sylvain Delouvée, Kimberly C. Doell, Simone Dohle, Dmitrii Dubrov, Małgorzata Dzimińska, Christian T. Elbaek, Matthew Facciani, Antoinette Fage-Butler, Marinus Ferreira, Malte Friese, Simon Fuglsang, Albina Gallyamova, Patricia Garrido-Vásquez, Mauricio E. Garrido Vásquez, Oliver Genschow, Omid Ghasemi, Theofilos Gkinopoulos, Claudia González Brambila, Hazel Clare Gordon, Dmitry Grigoryev, Alma Cristal Hernández-Mondragón, Tao Jin, Sebastian Jungkunz, Dominika Jurgiel, John R. Kerr, Lilian Kojan, Elizaveta Komyaginskaya, Claus Lamm, Jean-Baptiste Légal, Neil Levy, Mathew D. Marques, Sabrina J. Mayer, Niels G. Mede, Taciano L. Milfont, Panagiotis Mitkidis, Jonas P. Nitschke, Mariola Paruzel-Czachura, Michal Parzuchowski, Ekaterina Pronizius, Katarzyna Pypno-Blajda, Gabriel Gaudencio Rêgo, Robert M. Ross, Philipp Schmid, Samantha K. Stanley, Stylianos Syropoulos, Ewa Szumowska, Claudia Teran-Escobar, Boryana Todorova, Iris Vilares, Izabela Warwas, Marcel Weber, Mareike Westfal, and Adrian Dominik Wojcik.