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Conspiracy theories have recently come under the scrutiny of social psychology. While some theorists have treated them as a deficient way of thinking, others have considered them as a form of political rhetoric with important social implications. We focus on conspiracy theories in the context of online public deliberation on legislation allowing registration of self-defined gender in Greece. Employing the tools of Critical Discursive Psychology, we analyse comments posted on the Ministry of Justice's website created for public consultation about the law change. We focus on the mobilization of conspiracy theories by people who oppose Law 4491/2017 ("Legal Recognition of Gender Identity – National Mechanism for the Development, Monitoring and Evaluation of Action Plans on Children's Rights and Other Provisions"). These commentators often argued that powerful groups are behind the proposed legislation, aiming at decreasing Earth's population, disrupting moral order, and violating humanness. We demonstrate how these constructions helped participants to perform various tasks, such as delegitimizing the legislation while at the same time avoiding the stigma of prejudice, promoting far-right political practices, and rebutting accusations of political partisanship. The results are discussed in relation to conspiracy theories' role in countering "gender ideology" and in promoting cisgenderism and heteronormativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Prejudice reduction has been an important concern within social psychology both in theory and applied research. According to the premises of Social Identity Theory, redrawing of the category boundaries is often considered a necessary step in order to battle prejudice, because in-group favouritism when the category boundaries change is diffused to the previously distinct identities. The present paper offers a review of the relevant research, and following a discourse analytic perspective argues that recategorisation can also be viewed as a rhetorical resource that people use in verbal interaction in order to achieve certain rhetorical ends. This point is exemplified using interview data from Greece with Greek participants who mobilise common in-groups between themselves and the immigrants in Greece. Different common in-groups were mobilised on the basis of common human nature, common ethnic descent and through the use of the common experience of migration that many Greek people have because Greece has been an emigrant sending country for the biggest part of the 20th century. Occasionally, these category constructions were used to differentiate between immigrants of different ethnic descent claiming that only certain immigrant groups can integrate to Greek society, whereas on other instances, these common in-groups were used in order to inoculate speakers of accusations of prejudice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two decades Greece has become a multicultural society due to the influx of immigrants mainly from the Balkans and East Europe. At the same time Greece became fully integrated to the European Community. Within this context the relation of Greek national identity to Europe and to the immigrant 'Other' becomes a topic of everyday conversations and a focal point of social scientific research. This study following a discourse analytic perspective (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) attempts to explore the way Greek people construct Greek national identity in relation to immigration and European integration within an interview context. It is argued that participants strategically managed stereotypes about immigrants in order to avoid accusations of prejudice, while stereotypes about the European seemed to be informed by the ambivalent positioning of Greece between East and West (Bozatzis, 1998; Herzfeld, 1987). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]