Conspiracy: History and Social Psychology—A Synopsis

Abstract

Social psychologists, when first introduced into the field (or rather, underground world) of conspiracy and conspiratorial conceptions, experience two kinds of surprise. First, they will be struck and then puzzled by the obvious fact that there is a large and complex field of potential social-psychological research of which they have been unaware. Neither in the broad context of the general problems of their field nor in the special domains of the attribution of guilt and blame have they come across conspiracy Not for the first time they will have to concede that there is a topic of intrinsic psychological interest that has been left to history and to other social sciences, as has happened with most social issues that could not easily be tailored into experimental size.