Speaker
Description
Conspiracy theories attempt to explain the underlying causes of major socio-political events by attributing them to secret plots. This suggests the importance of tackling conspiracy beliefs from a multidimensional perspective and moving beyond explicit methods, which often fail to capture the complexity and implicit nature of conspiracy beliefs. To address this issue, two conceptualizations were developed to provide a solid theoretical foundation for constructing an implicit measurement instrument. The first conceptualization links conspiracy beliefs to social-existential motives, focusing on intergroup phenomena and interpretations of the social world; the second is about individual-epistemic motives, viewing conspiracy beliefs as rooted in perception and subjective interpretation of reality. By adopting the first conceptualization, the present study focuses on the development of the Conspiracy Theories Semantic Misattribution Procedure (CT-SMP), a novel implicit tool adapted from the Semantic Misattribution Procedure (SMP), which itself is a variant of the Affective Misattribution Procedure. The CT-SMP presents participants with semantic primes at suboptimal exposure durations, followed by ambiguous Chinese pictographs. These prime stimuli selectively activate semantic associations in individuals with a higher predisposition toward conspiracy thinking. They are derived from four semantic dimensions identified through an analysis of the literature about conspiracy beliefs: intentionality, malevolence, secrecy, and epistemic superiority. These categories were later organized into two separate groups, namely intentionality-malevolence, and secrecy-epistemic superiority. Participants are required to judge whether each pictograph suggests an “evil purpose” and a “hidden truth”. This paradigm captures spontaneous evaluative responses, enabling implicit assessment of conspiracist ideation beyond the limitations of explicit self-report methods.
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