Psychological science currently finds itself caught in paradoxical demands: having to serve as a source of certainty while simultaneously being the object of critiques concerning its unreplicated findings. Drawing on systems psychodynamics (Hirschhorn & Barnett, 1993), we analyse what is being sought when psychological science is asked to provide trust guarantees such as “open science badges” (Grahe, 2014), and what underlies the forms of “trust” produced and defended through contemporary scientific practices. We argue that these attempts to “restore trust” in psychological science function as substitutes for a more difficult confrontation with the uncertainty that lies at the heart of psychology’s ontology—namely, that our “inner world” can never be directly accessed or fully exposed.

Building on psychoanalytic accounts of fetishism (Freud, 1927) and psychodynamic analyses of organisational defences (Menzies, 1960), we suggest that method comes to be invested as a social defence against the anxiety linked to the specific nature of psychology’s object, and becomes fetishised insofar as it promises protection against epistemic contingency. In the configuration we describe as methodological bureaucratism, and consider applicable beyond psychology, uncertainty is managed through traceability and accountability, while trust is externalised into procedures, all the while denying the core tension at the heart of any psychological inquiry.

We underline how this defensive reorganisation individualises failure rather than acknowledging structural conditions of knowledge production (Chater & Loewenstein, 2023), and marginalises forms of knowledge that do not conform to bureaucratised standards of validity—such as psychoanalytic, qualitative, critical, or situated approaches—thereby reproducing epistemic injustice under a discourse of rigour.

Our presentation addresses the conference theme by examining how framing trust in psychological science as a methodological problem can function as a social defence against anxiety, and how the proceduralisation of trust risks closing psychological science rather than opening it to the world.

In an increasingly administered world, where the subject is shaped by impersonal, standardized, and automated institutions, psychological crises are ultimately rooted in political ones. This was one of the central claims of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As Theodor Adorno emphasized, a society’s emancipatory potential is measured not by its ability to imagine a yet-unrealized freedom, but through its ability to confront the reality of its dehumanizing conditions.

Adorno, inverting Hegel’s idealism in which truth is contained within the whole, asserts that “the whole is the false.” Thus, a semblance of truth is only generated in the process of reckoning with incompleteness. One can only critique coercion from a position outside its grasp, and one can only describe a freedom that requires defence. For Adorno, thinking itself occurs from a position of overwhelming marginalization: as resistance to dominant power.

This paper reframes the value of the mistrust generated by conspiracies (etymologically derived from the Latin con-spiro, to breath, live, or intend together). This paper suggests that suspicion and paranoia are not only markers of individual pathology, nor only the consequences of an exploitative attention economy, frequently described as an era of ‘post-truth.’ As we have increasingly seen (e.g. anti-vax movements, 9/11 truthers, etc.), yesterday’s delegitimized knowledge can be readily absorbed and leveraged by today’s dominant powers. This paper suggests that conspiracy thinking is defined not through stable content, but through a relation of knowledge to power. Like the psychoanalytic symptom’s relation to the unconscious, conspiracy thinking expresses impossible fantasies of seamless unfreedom. In so doing, conspiracy thinking enables us to discover the seams through which a previously unimaginable freedom might be glimpsed.

This paper will explore the relationship between trust, conspiracy theories and ideologies. While conspiracy theories are often depicted as a way of thinking fostering mistrust (particularly against institutions), recent empirical research paints a more complext picture. The relationship between conspiracy theories, the social world they explain and the trust/mistrust they generate is mediated by ideology. Depending on their ideological framing, conspiracy theories might actually support the status quo and lead to distrust against social groups critical of it. This paper explores the political ramification of the interaction between conspiracy theories and ideology and how the trust/mistrust they generate affect political life and social conflict.

The paper will thus touch upon key themes of conference such as the political trust, mistrust and distrust, feelings of powerlessness and the possibilities of agency. Trust, agency and their relation to the dynamics of rupture and repair.The portrayal of issues related to trust in popular cultur. Trust in the media and mediatised mistrust.