The Shaping of a story: Narrative construction task as a tool to measure conspiracy-proneness.

Abstract

Conspiracy theories are complex narratives that causally link multiple events and actors together. Believers tend to achieve their narrative coherence by establishing higher-order beliefs that can encompass even the specific contradictory conspiratorial claims. In spite of the complex structure of conspiracy beliefs, and an active role that a believer takes in producing them, previous studies have mostly ignored this and assessed it by single Likert- type statements. In this study, we adapted and validated a narrative construction task to assess conspiracy proneness. To this end, we first presented the respondents with a bogus event, ambiguous enough that it can be interpreted in a conspiratorial or non-conspiratorial manner (“rounding down” clients’ bank accounts). We then presented a list of potential claims related to it, divided into three groups — non-conspiratorial, mildly and extremely conspiratorial (12 for each group). Their task was to construct a coherent narrative by selecting and then organizing the supplied items. We also included contradictory information (4 pairs for each group), to check if participants’ would include them in their narratives. We derived indices of proneness to conspiratorial interpretation by counting the proportion of conspiratorial claims in the final narrative; we also tracked the number of chosen contradictory claims. A total of 218 participants completed all the materials. To validate the narrative measure, participants also filled in three questionnaires of belief in conspiracies — conspiracy mentality, the belief in specific and contradictory conspiracies scales, as well as a measure of proneness to endorsing incompatible beliefs — doublethink. The proportion of conspiratorial claims included in the narratives was on average 60%, while hardly any contradictory claims were selected (M = 1.6; SD = 1.1). Regression with measures of conspiracy beliefs as predictors showed that conspiracy mentality was the only significant predictor of the proportion of conspiratorial claims in the narrative (F(3, 214) = 2.768, p = .04; R 2adj = .024, partial r = .154). We discuss potential explanations for the inconsistent relations with traditional measures and offer guidelines for improving the task. We also address the reasons for the fact that, when asked to build a causal explanation, respondents predominantly opted for the conspiratorial claims even though they were offered more “mundane” causes for the event.