Abstract
The psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs is not yet well understood, although research indicates that there are stable individual differences in conspiracist ideation – individuals’ general tendency to engage with conspiracy theories. Researchers have created several short self-report measures of conspiracist ideation. These measures largely consist of items referring to an assortment of prominent conspiracy theories regarding specific real-world events. However, these instruments have not been psychometrically validated, and this assessment approach suffers from practical and theoretical limitations. Therefore, we present the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs (GCB) scale: a novel measure of individual differences in generic conspiracist ideation. The scale was developed and validated across four studies. In Study 1, exploratory factor analysis of a novel 75-item measure of non-event-based conspiracist beliefs identified five conspiracist facets. The 15-item GCB scale was developed to sample from each of these themes. Studies 2, 3, and 4 examined the structure and validity of the GCB, demonstrating internal reliability, content, criterion-related, convergent and discriminant validity, and good test-retest reliability. In sum, this research indicates that the GCB is a psychometrically sound and practically useful measure of conspiracist ideation, and the findings add to our theoretical understanding of conspiracist ideation as a monological belief system unpinned by a relatively small number of generic assumptions about the typicality of conspiratorial activity in the world.
Highlights
A conspiracist belief can be described as “the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable” (Aaronovitch, 2009, p. 5)
The results of exploratory factor analysis conducted on a large set of generic conspiracist scale items suggests that five important facets of conspiracism must be represented by a successful measure of conspiracist ideation: government malfeasance (GM) conspiracies; malevolent global (MG) conspiracies; extraterrestrial conspiracies; personal well-being (PW)-related conspiracies; control of information (CI) conspiracies
A conspiracy theory alleging that the U.S government is secretly colluding with intelligent extraterrestrials to control and harm the human population using advanced technologies merges several of the facets identified here into a single specific theory
Summary
A conspiracist belief can be described as “the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable” (Aaronovitch, 2009, p. 5). Kennedy was not the work of Lee Harvey Oswald alone (Goertzel, 1994; McHoskey, 1995), to name but a few popular conspiracy theories (see McConnachie and Tudge, 2008). Such beliefs are usually unsubstantiated and implausible, but are often regarded as harmless (e.g., Clarke, 2002). Some conspiracy theories are associated with negative outcomes; conspiracist beliefs about the origin and treatment of HIV/AIDS have been found to detrimentally affect attitudes toward preventative measures and adherence to treatment programs (Bogart et al, 2010), and conspiracist fears concerning the safety of childhood vaccinations have played a role in declining vaccination rates (Salmon et al, 2005; Kata, 2010; Offit, 2011). Other conspiracy theories can lead to social and political disengagement (Butler et al, 1995; Jolley and Douglas, 2013) and may help to foster political extremism (Bartlett and Miller, 2010)
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