The "Great Replacement" conspiracy: How the perceived ousting of White Europeans can evoke extreme anti-immigrant sentiment

The paper, in plain language

Testing the narrative behind the manifestos

The 'great replacement' is the conspiracy narrative cited in several terrorist manifestos: the claim that White Europeans are being deliberately ousted through non-Western immigration. With Milan Obaidi, Simon Ozer and Sasha Kimel, I tested what believing it actually does. Two correlational studies with White Danish participants measured replacement perceptions alongside Islamophobia, willingness to persecute Muslims, and violent intentions; a third study, with Norwegians, made the test causal.

Symbolic threat, not economic

In both Danish studies, replacement perceptions were associated with all three outcomes — and the mediation analyses were specific: threats to culture, values and identity carried the effect, while realistic threats about jobs and money did not. The Norwegian experiment then induced replacement perceptions with an edited clip from national television, citing projections that ethnic Norwegians could become a minority. The clip increased Islamophobia, again via symbolic threat — causal evidence that the narrative itself does work.

Why it matters

Counter-arguments about the economics of immigration miss the mechanism entirely: the replacement narrative works on identity, not on wallets. The findings connect to our broader work showing that a felt loss of group status — not factual loss — feeds both conspiracy belief and extremism. Caveats we state plainly: the samples were convenience samples, and we measured violent intentions, not violence itself.