As world events occurred from the past two years beginning with COVID-19 to wars and heated topics including abortion rights and politics, more and more attention has been focused on the impacts of conspiracy theory as they affect the narrative more due to various outlets, especially social media.
Narcissism is a personality trait where one believe their superiority places their entitlement over others. Narcissism is further broken down and represented by three specific components: neuroticism, antagonism, and agent extraversion.
Neuroticism is of a trait where one has the tendency to react emotionally and irrationally to information. Deep down inside, this is rotted in low self-esteem and shame.
Antagonism is the trait of aggression towards others and their opinions to maintain the narcissist’s control.
Agent extraversion is described as aggressive or assertive behavior that often comes with elevated self-confidence and can often seem quite charming to others.
A team of researchers published a study in journal Current Opinion in Psychology describing how each one of these traits make a narcissist more vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
The neuroticism component, highlight by its paranoia nature, leads a narcissist open to conspiracy theories in order to find justification through the outlandish claims to maintain the control of their established idea of things and their own lives, leading to further antagonism when others challenge their conspiracy theories views, despite it their held conspiracy theories to be false. Their defense and inability to let go of their conspiracy theory ideas, despite the facts laid in front of them, will leads to further reinforcing those ideas.
It is very important to know yourself and how you respond to facts and idea. While it is important to be skeptical and be open to other possibilities, clinging to false ideas despite the facts to force your own reality into existence only leads to further harm to yourself and others. For instance, the conspiracy theories against the COVID-19 vaccine lead many conspiracy theorists ending up in the hospital with severe infection and/or dying from the virus, while many who got the vaccine had lower chances of dying and developing severe infections.
A Cichocka et al. Why do narcissists find conspiracy theories so appealing?. Current Opinion in Psychology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101386
OJ Watson et al. Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study. Lancet Infectious Disease (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00320-6
