Many conspiracy theories appeared along with the Zika outbreak. While the virus is still circulating, motives underlying Zika conspiracy beliefs remain underexplored. National narcissism has been shown to be a robust social motive predicting conspiracy beliefs about other public health crises. This relationship has been interpreted as conspiracy beliefs protecting one's idealistic national image from the crisis by externally attributing any potential threatening factors. We seek to provide an additional account by proposing that such external projection of grievances is rooted in the ethnocentric tendency to frame one's nation's suffering as central to the crisis. We argue that this inflated perception of victimhood, which we operationalized through exclusive victimhood, legitimizes national narcissists’ expression of their (conspiracy) view of the crisis, hence managing their identity. Based on a representative sample of the French population (N = 1,104), results confirmed that national narcissism was related to Zika conspiracy beliefs, and that this relationship was mediated by the belief that French people suffered uniquely and more than others from the Zika outbreak. These results held even when controlling for potential confounding variables. We discuss the possible functions of exclusive victimhood in times of global threats, and the defensive role played by conspiracy beliefs.

随着寨卡病毒的爆发，出现了许多阴谋论。虽然病毒仍在传播，但寨卡阴谋信念背后的动机仍未得到充分探索。民族自恋已被证明是一种强有力的社会动机，可以预测对其他公共卫生危机的阴谋信念。这种关系被解释为通过外部归因任何潜在的威胁因素来保护一个人的理想主义国家形象免受危机影响的阴谋信念。我们试图提供一个额外的解释，提出这种对外部不满的投射植根于将一个国家的苦难视为危机核心的民族中心主义倾向。我们认为，这种夸大的受害观念，我们通过排他性受害来运作，使民族自恋者对危机的（阴谋）观点的表达合法化，从而管理他们的身份。基于法国人口的代表性样本（N  = 1,104），结果证实民族自恋与寨卡阴谋信念有关，并且这种关系是由相信法国人在寨卡病毒爆发中遭受的独特且比其他人更多的信念所调节的。即使在控制了潜在的混杂变量时，这些结果也成立。我们讨论了在全球威胁时期排他性受害的可能功能，以及阴谋信念所起的防御作用。