Measuring Belief in Conspiracy Theories: The Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale

By Robert Brotherton, Christopher C. French, Alan Pickering. Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

735 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30c8c3361d5a2222bfd19a400b463d3a445832f7

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding Conspiracy Theories (2019, background): “, Brotherton et al., 2013; Bruder, Haffke, Neave, Nouripanah, & Imhoff, 2013; Imhoff & Bruder, 2014; Lantian, Muller, Nurra, & Douglas, 2016; Uscinski & Parent, 2014) have devised scales to measure the general tendency toward conspiracy thinking rather than referring to specific events. For example,”
An examination of the underlying dimensional structure of three domains of contaminated mindware: paranormal beliefs, conspiracy beliefs, and anti-science attitudes (2020, positive): “Conspiracy beliefs were measured using items adapted from the generic conspiracy belief scale (Brotherton et al., 2013).”
Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Predict Conspiracy Beliefs? Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories (2016, methodology): “Conspiracy beliefs were measured with 11 items based on the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (Brotherton et al., 2013) used in Study 1.”
Measuring Belief in Conspiracy Theories: Validation of a French and English Single-Item Scale (2016, methodology): “At Time 2, we introduced the GCB scale (Brotherton et al., 2013) to have a reliable element of comparison.”
Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It) (2020, background): “There was also an item about conspiracy ideation adapted from Brotherton et al. (2013) and a media exaggeration item adapted from Prati et al. (2011).”
See Something, Say Something: Correction of Global Health Misinformation on Social Media (2018, methodology): “Trust in government and other institutions is also related to CI (Brotherton et al., 2013; Bruder et al., 2013; van Prooijen & Jostmann, 2013), so countries where citizens are less trustful of the government might have a harder time correcting misinformation beliefs.”
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit (2015, methodology): “We measured conspiracy ideation using a 15-item general conspiracy beliefs scale (Brotherton, French & Pickering, 2013).”
Rumors and Health Care Reform: Experiments in Political Misinformation (2015, background): “18 Brotherton, French, and Pickering 2013; Bruder et al. 2013; Oliver and Wood 2014; Wood, Douglas, and Sutton 2012.”
Data quality in online human-subjects research: Comparisons between MTurk, Prolific, CloudResearch, Qualtrics, and SONA (2023, background): “For example, the items on the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Scale [41] take more than a single second to read, much less fully comprehend.”
Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Susceptibility to the Conjunction Fallacy (2014, neutral): “Materials Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (Brotherton et al., 2013).”
Someone is pulling the strings: hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories (2016, background): “Brotherton et al. (2013) have argued that measuring conspiracy beliefs via agreement with popular conspiracy theories can be problematic because many conspiracy theories are culture-specific.”