The paper “Validation of the Spanish Version of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale” by Angelo Fasce, Diego Avendaño, Neil Dagnall, Andrew Denovan, and Álex Escolà-Gascón published in The Spanish Journal of Psychology has been chosen as the Editor’s Choice Article for December 2022.

The study of conspiracy beliefs has flourished in recent years due to their key role in many populist, authoritarian, and anti-scientific movements. Behavioral scientists have strived to understand the complex determinants of conspiracist ideation from various methodological approaches. For example, we know that conspiracy beliefs tend to be more prominent in the right wing and, at the same time, to show a characteristic U-shaped relation to the political spectrum (i.e., there are more conspiracy beliefs at the poles). These beliefs are also fueled by perception of intergroup threat and weave a rabbit hole in which one conspiracy theory leads to another. Psychological research has also observed robust associations between conspiracy beliefs and a range of negative attitudes and subclinical traits, such as science denial, collective narcissism, vaccine hesitancy, prejudices toward marginalized groups, schizotypy, and paranoid ideation.

The study of conspiracy beliefs faces three challenges at the most basic level. First, analogously to the age-old philosophical discussion on the distinction between science and pseudoscience, it is necessary to establish a well-founded conceptual demarcation for conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies exist and it would not be desirable to receive any conspiratorial explanation in derogatory terms. Second, the measurement of conspiracy beliefs presents important technical issues, which have given rise to a multiplicity of scales exhibiting different psychometric approaches. For instance, should we ask for specific conspiracy theories and risk bias related to participants’ background knowledge, or for more general domains at the expense of specificity? A third challenge concerns the study of conspiracy beliefs in more diverse cultural contexts. As often happens in the behavioral sciences, studies on conspiracy beliefs have mainly focused on a handful of highly developed countries, with many of the most extensively studied conspiracy theories coming from the U.S.—e.g., theories around the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 terrorist attacks or, more recently, Pizzagate and QAnon.

To help close some of these gaps, we have recently validated the Spanish version of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale, the most widely used measure of overarching thematic categories without reference to specific conspiracy theories. Conspiracist ideation has played an important role in the political rhetoric of Latin America. One of the oldest examples, which dates back to the end of the 19th century, states that the United Kingdom actively participated in the War of the Pacific in favor of Chile. The Argentine military dictatorship popularized a conspiracy theory according to which there would be a secret plot, the Andinia Plan, for the creation of a Jewish state in Patagonia. A plethora of conspiracy theories emerged after the death of Hugo Chávez (former president of Venezuela) and Alan García (former president of Peru), and the attempted assassination of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (former president of Argentina). Colombian right-wing politicians have recently promoted the idea that the São Paulo Forum—a real conference of left-wing political organizations from the Americas—is responsible for an international plot to infiltrate democratic institutions in Latin American countries to favor left-wing candidates who would implement socialism. Conspiracist political rhetoric is also present in Spain (e.g., ETA’s authorship of the 2004 Madrid train bombings) and have become a recurring actor in the Spanish political scene. Spanish-speaking countries offer a unique context for the study of these beliefs, offering a wide and diverse cultural landscape, which would allow us to explore, among other things, the presence of conspiracy beliefs in indigenous populations and megacities with high levels of inequality.