Mindwars
A decade of papers from one conspiracy theory theorist’s circle doesn’t just “explain” why people believe conspiracies—it builds a psychometric machine that traps political suspicion inside personality scores, ready for platforms, policymakers and “resilience” programmes. Over the last ten years, if you’ve seen a sober explainer
Mindwars
Thesis: QAnon and MINDSPACE are not ideological opposites. They are mirror architectures in the same belief-management system—one captures and demobilises distrust, the other steers compliance—with Conspiracy Theory Theory (CTT) acting as the bridge that harvests fallout from the first to justify expansion of the second. Earlier Mindwars pieces
Mindwars
Thesis: Conspiracy Theory Theorists (CTTs) don’t just “study false beliefs”; they build a repeating logical fallacy pipeline—definition → measurement → intervention—that lets institutions downgrade unapproved narratives without having to adjudicate them. In the evolving Mindwars series, we’ve mapped how Conspiracy Theory Theory (CTT)—the academic field that studies
Mindwars
In earlier Mindwars articles, the main antagonist was clear: the social-psychology academics who turn “conspiracy theories” into a freestanding risk category, bolt it onto misinfo infrastructure and hand it to the managerial state as a governance tool. The generalist cluster around Douglas, Hornsey, Lewandowsky and Imhoff builds scales, harms catalogues
Mindwars
There’s a moment that captures the whole problem in one shot. In one room: senior politicians and asset managers sit down for “strategy discussions” about the economy. They are not elected, they don’t publish minutes, but they talk through what is “credible,” what “the markets” will tolerate, and
Mindwars
“You lose the person, they’re still there but you don’t recognise them.” That line sits at the emotional centre of an article in the British Journal of Social Psychology released 12 Dec 2025 about what it’s like to be romantically involved with someone who believes in conspiracy
Mindwars
How a “neutral” psychology study quietly turns climate distrust into a mental problem instead of a political one. In the last series of Mindwars instalments, we parked on the ERC project CONSPIRACY_FX as one of Europe’s central command nodes for “conspiracy-theory management”: a five-year Advanced Grant whose job
Mindwars
How the EU’s “democracy” research portfolio quietly converts popular sovereignty into a managed variable in a technocratic control system.
Propaganda
How a “neutral” academic study turns public scepticism into diagnostic criteria for social management
Propaganda
How EU-funded “conspiracy theory” research turns suspicion of power into a managed risk variable inside a post-democratic operating system.
Population Control
How a landmark review turns public suspicion into a diagnosable thought crime.
Critical Interpretation
A prospiracy-mentality mirror of conspiracy research.