Self-Objects, Self-Representation, and Sense-Making Crises: Political Instability in the 1980s

Zonis, Marvin

doi:10.2307/3791190

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…And here, again, is a theme that will become more prominent later on: that of passivity. A more rigorous, and therefore, one hopes, more powerful, explanation for the pervasiveness of conspiracy thinking is rooted in the idea that massive and rapid political and social change may disrupt the capacity of individuals to use existing cultural constructions to account for the new realities, which the first author of this paper has referred to elsewhere as a "sense-making crisis" (see Zonis, 1984). When individuals can no longer make sense of their worlds, when the realities of change outpace their capacities to rearrange the components of their cultural systems to account for those changes, such a crisis may ensue.…”

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confidence: 99%

Conspiracy Thinking in the Middle East

Zonis

Joseph²

1994

Political Psychology

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Conspiracy thinking is defined as a pattern of explanatory reasoning about events and situations of personal, social, and historical significance in which a "conspiracy" is the dominant or operative actor. While conspiracy thinking exists to some extent probably in every society, the authors note the special prevalence of this type of thinking in the Arab-Iranian-Muslim Middle East, and offer a psychoanalytically based approach to conspiracy thinking based on theories of the paranoid process. The authors also attempt to identify aspects of Arab-Iranian-Muslim culture that may predispose individuals from that culture to conspiracy thinking, especially child-rearing practices, attitudes toward sexuality, and the role of secrecy.

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confidence: 99%