Oral Presentation by Anna Eva Andersen¹
¹ RWTH Aachen, Germany
TIME: Thursday, 16 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 2
Session: 18
Abstract
Contemporary governance research often prioritizes behavioural regulation such as compliance mechanisms, nudge architectures, and enforcement systems. This overlooks something more fundamental: the governance of interpretation itself. Under late capitalism, multi-crisis—economic instability, ecological breakdown, shifting power relations—no longer arrives as rupture but persists as condition. Governance operates less by directing conduct than by shaping sense-making in advance—determining what interpretations register as credible and which invite suspicion. This mode of governance relies increasingly on psychological categories that distinguish resilient from vulnerable cognition—particularly as informational authority becomes contested across multiple sites. This presentation examines cognitive resilience and conspiracy mindset as policy instruments in European Union crisis management, focusing on civic education and information security initiatives. Resilience now functions as normative ideal: the emotionally regulated subject who exercises epistemic caution and trusts institutional knowledge sources. EU policy documents rarely define the term explicitly. Instead it works through accumulation, marking a disposition rather than measurable capacity. Conspiracy mindset serves as diagnostic counterpart—framing particular modes of scepticism not as political disagreement but as cognitive vulnerability. Together, these concepts enable governance through psychological classification rather than direct prohibition. The analysis centres on two cases: German educational programmes teaching students to identify Verschwörungsideologien through psychological markers, and the EU’s EUvsDisinfo initiative addressing state-backed disinformation amid contested informational authority. Despite different scales and audiences, both cases illustrate how psychological expertise becomes enlisted in defining cognitive normality. These concepts are not neutral psychological descriptors but normative frameworks regulating interpretive boundaries. When institutional scepticism is understood through the lens of conspiracy thinking while adaptation to precarity becomes resilience, psychology’s traditional role shifts. The discipline finds itself defining not merely individual difference but the boundaries of acceptable political cognition.This raises questions about applied psychology’s relationship to political power in societies structured by permanent multi-crisis.