Collective delusion-like world-building in digital conspiracy movements: distributed Wahnarbeit and communicative closure
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Delusions have long served psychopathology as a paradigm of meaning-making under existential pressure. Classical accounts describe an initial phase of Wahnstimmung —a diffuse, unsettling transformation of reality—followed by a dynamic expansion of significance, the emergence of delusional intuitions, and a gradual process of concretization and systematization into an increasingly incorrigible worldview. In the digital age, comparable forms of world-building can be observed beyond the individual level, within networked conspiracy movements. This article proposes a conceptual dialogue between phenomenological psychopathology and systems theory to elucidate how delusion-like collective realities may emerge and stabilize in online environments. While individual delusion formation involves intrapsychic Wahnarbeit driven by affective urgency and the need for explanation, conspiracy world-building externalizes and distributes this interpretive labor across communities of communication. Meaning is collaboratively produced, reinforced, and immunized against correction through iterative narrative elaboration. Drawing on the notion of communicative closure, conspiracy movements can be understood as self-referential meaning systems in which disconfirming evidence is not experienced as falsification but is re-coded as further proof of hidden agency and systemic deception. The result is a resilient epistemic enclosure that persists even as individual participants may disengage. Using QAnon as an empirically grounded illustrative case, the analysis examines collaborative knowledge production, increasingly endogenous information circulation, and the reinterpretation of disconfirmed predictions. It thereby highlights structural homologies between delusion genesis and digitally mediated collective meaning-making, while emphasizing the ethical necessity of avoiding clinical pathologization of political belief. The framework offers implications for cultural psychiatry in conceptualizing contemporary forms of networked reality construction.
Source: Frontiers in Social Psychology
Author: Thomas Stompe
Institution: Medical University of Vienna
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
OpenAlex ID: W7225651482