Acculturative stress is a well-known yet underestimated stressor that can be caused by misinformation.

Acculturative stressors are stressors that people are exposed to when they enter unfamiliar social and cultural environments where they are vulnerable due to poverty, lack of community connections, and language barriers. However, acculturative stressors can happen also when the local culture around indigenous people changes very rapidly. Especially in an information age environment where information and misinformation bombard us ever more constantly and completely.

Culture wars, racial prejudices, outgroup sledging, and conspiracy theories in the infosphere of the information age are also very stressful and can be very influential. The information age infosphere has enormous benefits, but is also prone to induce symbolic and material threat, stereotype threat, isolation, and anxiety (Brambilla & Butz, 2013; Riek et al., 2006; Stewart et al., 2019). These outcomes and the harm that they do to individuals also depend upon people’s specific personality types and any mental or personality disorders they may be suffering.

As the Earth experiences a climate crisis evolving into a climate catastrophe, and as groups of people respond psychologically to emerging threats in our era, Robert Sapolsky’s warnings about the dangers of constant and persistent stressors are very important (McEwen & Sapolsky, 1995; Rodrigues et al., 2009; R. Sapolsky, 2007; R. M. Sapolsky, 1988; R. M. Sapolsky et al., 1984; Robert M. Sapolsky, 1998). Every young person should be made aware of them and should also be educated in the basics of social psychology and health psychology rather than any kind of cult doctrinal dogmas.

(The social psychology alone will be far more fruitful than any religious dogma, and it is easily packaged and teachable. Psychoeducation can be very effective this way too, and this is why it is one of the few recognised highly effective evidence-based treatment methods for many mental disorders. Both social psychology and psychoeducation will have a vastly greater benefit per word or per piece of information than any religious cult doctrine. In terms of value for energy and time spent — the kid with the social psychology and psychoeducation will come out way ahead of the kid with the head full of supernaturalist myths (Bracken & Barona, 1991; Chien & Chan, 2013; Gilman & Huebner, 2006; Han et al., 2006; Magee et al., 2018; Meadows & Kellett, 2017; Wong, 2010).)

Wars and famines have always driven people — those fit and able enough to escape catastrophe — from their homes and nations. This outcome is as old as human history, and probably older. In our era, however, impending global climate collapse has become a real and imminent threat. Many of the wars that have been precipitated since the 1990s are directly linked to that threat based on displacement of populations due to conflicts caused by economic turmoil from climate collapse and water stress.

The infosphere makes everyone aware of these stressors and of the various symbolic-threat-inducing misinformational conspiracy theories and culture-war narratives that surround them.

There are many tangible causes of common widespread stressors which are presented to us through the infosphere (Floridi, 2007, 2009, 2017). These include the movement and migration of large poverty-stricken populations within and from third world nations experiencing internal chaos and economic collapse due to climate and the activities of violent, dominionistic, psychologically abusive cults like Islam. However, there are other less tangible psychological and group psychological causal pathways from global climate crisis, economic upheaval, and overpopulation to wars and further bad economic outcomes that induce unhealthy stress in people.

Start with group psychology and acculturative stress. In fact, before that, start with psychopath CEOs, disordered culture, and the infosphere.

We know that CEOs are disproportionately psychopaths (Boddy, 2017; Borgholthaus et al., 2023; Hill & Scott, 2019; Myung et al., 2017; Van Scotter & Roglio, 2020). Certainly not all CEOs are psychopaths, and there is an entire management science that seeks to address — among other things — how the performance and failure of corporations is related to the personality types and behaviour of CEOs. However, the fact remains that primary, high-functioning psychopaths are statistically overrepresented in corporate leadership. This is partly because psychopathy — although a maladaptive trait overall — can be an adaptive trait in such situations as societal collapse, warfare, violent communities, and highly competitive, dog-eat-dog situations like those associated with the business world.

We also know that there is more information and misinformation readily available to everyone at this time in the information age than ever before in history. That has an interesting effect on human beings, and it has a different effect on people based upon their resources, their circumstances, and, importantly — their personality type and mental health.

A contextually salient question to ask is: What does a psychopath CEO (or any high-functioning psychopath) do in a situation like the one we have now where large parts of the planet are experiencing elevated temperatures and the polar ice caps are rapidly disappearing? Do they patiently apply themselves to constructive solutions in cooperation with other people in a pro-social and empathetic manner? Are they good global and corporate citizens?

Or do they contribute to producing and perpetuating a global disordered culture of economic and information warfare that exposes everyone to severe, deleterious stressors like war and war-inducing economic and corporate-cutthroat competition?

Those questions are obviously somewhat rhetorical, even if the answers are not simple. For example: a given psychopath’s response will depend upon how intelligent the psychopath is and how capable they are of self-awareness, among other things.

Very powerful CEOs have access to the same information as everyone else but they also have access to 1. Far more valuable expensive information that is only attainable using significant financial resources and 2. Marketing psychology departments that literally manufacture high quality information and misinformation of various kinds.

This matters because, no matter how effective, high-functioning, individually effective, and individualistic a psychopath is, and no matter how much they benefit their organisation and its bottom line in the short term: mental disorders involving anti-social personality are almost always deleterious on some important level for both sufferer and other people. As management theorists know — this has a lot to do with toxic corporate culture and the acculturative stressors associated with it. As the culture of a corporation turns toxic due to psychopathic leadership, those who cannot adjust to the increasingly toxic culture building around them are vulnerable to serious acculturation stresses. Short term immediate commercial efficacy secured with psychopathic behaviour is likely to have bad repercussions built into it.

It is also frequently statistically the case that psychopath corporate leaders are engaged in — and more statistically likely to be engaged in — criminal or fraudulent, or at least ethically highly questionable, behaviour (Adams et al., 2014; Bouncken et al., 2020; Furtner et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2013; Miller, Gentile, & Campbell, 2013; Serenko & Choo, 2020; Trombly & Zeigler-Hill, 2017). There are many reasons for this, but one of the easiest to understand is that the narcissism that is often comorbid with psychopathy is conducive to a need for attention and success. Attention and recognition for success are like an addictive drug for narcissists, who are often a comorbid mix of malignant, vulnerable, and grandiose narcissist (Asad & Sadler-Smith, 2020; Gore & Widiger, 2016; Lobbestael et al., 2014; Miller, Gentile, Wilson, et al., 2013; O’Reilly & Chatman, 2020).

There’s risk seeking, and then there’s psychopathic risk seeking. The latter is almost universally deleterious.

So — returning to our question about how psychopaths respond to copious information about global and local threats: What about groups of psychopaths?

Is it beyond reason to hypothesise that psychopaths might collectively-individually — without much collaboration, co-ordination, or organisation — react by trying to reduce the human population by any means necessary and use their financial resources and marketing psychological power to initiate such outcomes? This is hardly a paranoid hypothesis, nor an unreasonable warning, given, for example, the interdependence of most Western domestic economies with the transnational military industrial complex and its vast marketing apparatus (of which the US domestic small arms market is an integral part.)

Acculturative Stress and Information

The more informational power a person has, the more damage their psychopathy can do. CEOs often have a great deal of informational power. They can produce more influential information and misinformation with greater causal influence and reach than most other people, and often with more impact and reach than nation states. This doesn’t require some kind of grand conspiracy. It only requires certain kinds of personality with certain kinds of power and imperatives to have similar interests and similar methods for attaining outcomes they think are necessary.

Even if high-functioning primary psychopaths are not directly networked, they are likely to respond in similar ways to the same kinds of stressors (Dean et al., 2013; Del Gaizo & Falkenbach, 2008; Falkenbach et al., 2017; Saltoğlu & Uysal Irak, 2022). The infosphere presents a set of global acculturative stressors in the form of material and symbolic threats. As the world changes and the climate crisis increases, CEO’s respond by trying to fortify their corporations and themselves against such threats. However, CEOs with serious psychopathy and Dark Triad traits will respond by creating a toxic culture and often with Machiavellian motivations and strategies. Therefore, there is a kind of disjoint group psychology (and group psychopathology) happening. In other words, there is no need for conspiracy theories. It only takes the wrong kinds of personalities — and more explicitly the wrong kind of personality disorders — in the wrong places (e.g. running our largest, most powerful corporations) at the wrong time with a large amount of influence and resources, to cause serious problems for themselves and everyone else.

The overarching point is this: that psychopaths distributed throughout our information-saturated infosphere — with its copious culture war and global threat narratives — are on average more vulnerable to symbolic, stereotype, and material threat than others because of comorbid paranoia and narcissism (vulnerable, grandiose, and malignant). They are also more prone to respond to such threats pathologically in anti-social, Machiavellian, and sociopathic ways, thereby creating more acculturative stressors in numerous ways (including by indirectly and directly contributing to the displacement and persecution of people groups).

Acculturative stress and stressors are central in the psychology of caring for and managing mental health patients and clients from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Immigrants from third world nations and other nations who are fleeing from poverty, famine, war, persecution by cults, and climate disasters are often bearing the scars of both intergenerational trauma and serious abuse during formative psychosocial development in childhood (Bowden et al., 2020; Levy-Fenner et al., 2022; Poon & Lee, 2019; Raab, 2013).

However, those very tangible material stressors, and the symbolic and material threats associated with them, are associated with informational stressors prevalent in the infosphere. Language barriers and cultural prejudice are both informational in nature. However, we’re all increasingly bombarded by copious misinformation and bad news about people groups via the Internet and social media.

So here is the key overarching insight. Although acculturative stressors are usually associated with CALD populations with immediate material and language challenges, the culture wars, conspiracy theories, information-inundation presented through the Internet and social media make everyone vulnerable to constant information-induced and misinformation-induced induced acculturative stress and stressors associated with symbolic, stereotype, and material threat. One doesn’t have to move overseas to live in a new community where one experiences outgroup bias and language barriers.

The world presents global acculturative stressors to all of us via the global infosphere. Global culture with its culture wars is influenced by the effects of climate change and the material threat that it presents. It stands to reason that this can produce a vicious cycle of acculturative stressors as more and more people are displaced and rendered vulnerable to more traditional acculturative stressors. These global outcomes are presented and repackaged in the infosphere such that CALD populations themselves are presented as, and in some cases are, a symbolic and material threat.

If our captains of industry globally respond by using their informational power to influence conflicts and wars based on Machiavellian motives linked to Dark Triad personality traits, then it is reasonable to hypothesise that would drive such a vicious cycle even more. Perhaps this perspective is overly pessimistic. On the other hand, the situation in Russia suggests strongly that the hypothesis may be disturbingly prescient. In Russia now oligarchs and their polyglot, polymath cultural and social engineers — people such as Alexander Dugin — are driving nationalist and imperialist imperatives that involve denigrating liberal and democratic values and demonising people groups such as LGBT and the irreligious.

Acculturative stress arises due to cultural disparities(Kosic, 2004). This means that in Russia LGBT and irreligious people groups don’t even have to migrate to a foreign country to be rendered cultural outsiders and disadvantaged. As their own local culture descends into rigid, totalitarian imperialism, they become exposed to enormous acculturative stressors. Russia is not the only place where such in-place acculturative stressors threaten to do damage even to native populations as cultures go from accommodating to rigid and persecutory. In the US the right-wing political base has installed cult fundamentalists throughout the entire supreme court and there are states that have called for theocratic cult governance.

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