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Abstract
The recent intense interest in conspiratorial thinking is fuelled by the perception that belief in conspiracies is highly irrational. However, there have been few studies that have examined the associations of conspiracy belief with a comprehensive battery of rational thinking tasks that tap both epistemic and instrumental rationality. The Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) provides an opportunity to do just that because one of the subtests on the CART assesses the tendency to believe false conspiracies. That subtest is in the part of the CART that measures the presence of contaminated mindware—stored declarative knowledge that embodies poorly justified beliefs. Converging analyses (N = 747) using the 18 subtests and four thinking dispositions measured on the CART indicated that three variables were key predictors of conspiratorial thinking: superstitious thinking, actively open-minded thinking, and probabilistic reasoning. Theoretical consideration of these best predictors, and of the variables that predict the endorsement of true conspiracies, led us to rethink the classification of conspiracy belief as contaminated mindware and move instead towards a conception of conspiratorial thinking as a cognitive style.
Acknowledgements
This paper is dedicated to our dear friend and collaborator, Richard F. West, who passed away on 5 June 2023. David Moshman and two anonymous reviewers are thanked for their discerning comments on the original manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Although our anti-science subtest was nowhere near as biased as previous scales of this type, we now believe that the scope for bias on such measures is just too large (see Stanovich, Citation2021, Citation2023).
2 The global warming item was also an outlier when the item characteristics of the Conspiracy Beliefs subtest were examined. The item-rest correlations of the other 23 items ranged from .53 to .73. The global warming item was an outlier on the low end, having an item-rest correlation of only .39.
3 The actively open-minded thinking scale taken from the supplemental dispositional measures of the CART, displayed a correlation with false conspiracy belief (−.41) higher in absolute value than the roughly .20–.30 observed in previous investigations (Bowes et al., Citation2023; Pennycook et al., Citation2020; Stanovich & Toplak, Citation2019). Newton et al. (Citation2023) found a correlation (−.48) that was more similar to what we found in the present study (−.41). We conjecture that the correlation that we observed here, as well as that in Newton et al. (Citation2023), is higher because both studies used conspiracy scales that amalgamated the endorsements of many specific false conspiracies. In contrast, when Pennycook et al. (Citation2020) used the generic GCB scale of Brotherton et al. (Citation2013), they found lower correlations of −.36, −.20, and −.25. Additionally, Stanovich and Toplak (Citation2019) demonstrated how the word “belief” in AOT items leads to misleadingly high correlations of AOT scales with political ideology and religiosity. It is possible to construct versions of the scale without this problem (Pennycook et al., Citation2020; Stanovich & Toplak, Citation2019, Citation2023).
4 It is important to note that the AOT is not the same concept as openness in the Big Five model of personality (nor does it map on to openness to experience in the HEXACO model). The AOT, as conceptualized in the rational thinking literature, is much more specifically focused on belief revision and the treatment of new evidence. It does not tap facets such as openness to fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, and actions that are measured on more broad-based scales of general openness.
5 Another potential problem with the widely used CMQ scale is that two of the five items refer to undetected plotting in the government/political domain, but none refer to secret agendas in corporations, the military, or the police. This imbalance in the items may explain the small but significant tendency for this scale to correlate positively with conservative ideology (Imhoff et al., Citation2022).
6 Dentith (Citation2021) points to the culturally contingent aspects of our evaluation of the rationality of particular levels of conspiracy mentality. The former communist polities such as Romania provide a stark example, as the population has lived through a litany of government-led conspiracies and corruption. It would seem less than rational for a Romanian then, not to display a considerable amount of conspiratorial mentality as a cognitive style.