Abstract
We designed, in French and in English, a single-item scale to measure people’s general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. The validity and reliability of this scale was assessed in 3 studies (total N = 555). In Study 1 (N = 152), positive correlations between the single-item scale and 3 other conspiracy belief scales on a French student sample suggested good concurrent validity. In Study 2 (N = 292), we replicated these results on a larger and more heterogeneous Internet American sample. Moreover, the scale showed good predictive validity—responses predicted participants’ willingness to receive a bi-monthly newsletter about alleged conspiracy theories. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 111), we observed good test-retest reliability and demonstrated both convergent and discriminant validity of the single-item scale. Overall these results suggest that the single-item conspiracy belief scale has good validity and reliability and may be used to measure conspiracy belief in favor of lengthier existing scales. In addition, the validation of the single-item scale led us to develop and start validating French versions of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale, the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, and a 10-item version (instead of the 15-item original version) of the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory.
Highlights
We designed, in French and in English, a single-item scale to measure people’s general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories
Study 1 has shown that the single-item conspiracy belief scale shares satisfactory variance with other validated instruments intended to capture belief in conspiracy theories
Materials and Procedure The materials and procedure of Study 2 were the same as Study 1 with four exceptions: (1) all of the material was in English, (2) because we no longer used a French sample, we provided the complete version of the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory (BCTI) (15-item version) instead of the 10-item version, (3) three attention check items were added throughout the study to detect non-diligent participants, such as “so we can be sure that you are reading the questions carefully, please answer “Completely True” to this question” (Jolley & Douglas, 2014b), (4) thanks to Qualtrics software options, all of the possible order combinations of the four measures of conspiracy belief could be presented, giving a total of 24 possible orders
Summary
In French and in English, a single-item scale to measure people’s general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. According to a recent Ipsos survey for Fleuve Editions conducted in France in 2014 (N = 1500), 20% of respondents believed that the Illuminati are pulling the strings of international economic activity (Longuet, 2014) Another survey resulting from a collaboration between Counterpoint, Political Capital, the Center for Research on Prejudice, the Institute for Public Affairs, and the Zachor Foundation showed that in France, Hungary, and Slovakia, respectively 51%, 42%, and 63% of respondents answered “totally agree” or “rather agreed” to the statement “it is not the government that runs the country: we don’t know who pulls the strings” (Gombin, 2013; Gyárfášová, Krekó, Mesežnikov, Molnár, & Morris, 2013). It means that conspiracy belief is generally considered as a unidimensional construct and can be seen as a more general indicator of cognitive functioning or conspiratorial mindset (Dagnall et al, 2015)
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