Investigating conspiracy beliefs: methodological biases and experimental challenges

In recent years several studies have investigated conspiracy beliefs employing correlational designs which heavily relied on self-reported measures. While the limitations of surveys are well-known, we argue that risks of social desirability bias and survey spillover effects are peculiarly high for conspiracy studies where scales are often built on explicit conspiracy cues that may trigger stigmatization and/or priming effects, resulting in beliefs misreporting. These limitations call for a shift towards a laboratory-based methodology, but a survey-free experimental paradigm has not emerged yet; and it might be for good reasons. In fact, there is something inherently contradictory in studying conspiracy beliefs, as the subject of the study itself is antiscientific. In the light of this contradiction, this paper’s aim is two-fold: first, we will review the limitations of self-reported measures for studying conspiracy beliefs; second, we will discuss the challenges of investigating such an ambiguous phenomenon in an experimental setting.