Measuring Belief in Conspiracy Theories: Validation of a French and English Single-Item Scale

By A. Lantian, Dominique Muller, Cécile Nurra, Karen M. Douglas. 2016

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 .

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b255d50c7ac942e1d18a63ee83f89e7cecc4a2ee

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdown on trust, attitudes toward government, and well-being. (2020, background): “…their trust in the police, general police engagement (i.e., intentions to report suspicious activity; Tyler, 2005), trust in politicians, trust in science (Hartman et al., 2017; Nisbet et al., 2015), vaccination attitudes (Lee et al., 2017), and belief in conspiracy theories (Lantian et al., 2016).”
“I Know Things They Don’t Know!”: The Role of Need for Uniqueness in Belief in Conspiracy Theories (2017, methodology): “The study took the form of a questionnaire containing a brief measure of conspiracy beliefs baseline level (with the single-item conspiracy belief measure, Lantian et al., 2016 as in Studies 1 and 2).”
Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories (2020, background): “…events “have been planned and secretly prepared by a covert alliance of powerful individuals or organizations” and quantifies agreement with the single statement, “I think that the official version of the events given by the authorities very often hides the truth” (Lantian et al., 2016, p. 10).”
Understanding Conspiracy Theories (2019, methodology): “For example, Lantian et al. (2016) employ one question while Uscinski and Parent (2014) use three.”