SUCH SNOWFLAKES:

For Vladimir Putin, no other country is greater, or more unfairly persecuted, than Russia - which stands against constant threat from Western influence.

Such rhetoric has only increased in recent months. "They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature," he declared on 24 February this year.

"The collective West is attempting to splinter our society," Putin emphasised again in March, while also expressing fear of the insiders who were turning against his country. "But any people, the Russian people especially, are able to distinguish true patriots from bastards and traitors and will 'spit them out'."

Such words seem designed to appeal to citizens' 'collective narcissism' - a phenomenon that is of increasing interest to social psychologists. Much like individual narcissism, it involves a fragile sense of unparalleled superiority that is dependent on others' admiration, and extremely hostile to anything that threatens to puncture the ego. The difference is that collective narcissism concerns people's feelings of fragile superiority towards their group's status, rather than their own. And they respond extremely aggressively to anything that may threaten their feelings of grandiosity.

Multiple studies over the past decade show that collective narcissism can predict people's voting intentions for populist movements, their prejudices against outsiders, and their tendency to fall for misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Tweet   @brothersjudd