Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale

A 15-item psychometric scale measuring general conspiracist ideation — belief in conspiratorial thinking as a disposition — rather than belief in any single named conspiracy. Distinct from the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Index (BCTI), the separate 15-item instrument Costello, Pennycook & Rand used in their 2024 study to measure the same kind of cross-topic spillover on a different item set.

Matters to this vault as the instrument Costello et al.'s 2026 dual-use follow-up used to track whether AI-mediated persuasion about one focal conspiracy spills over onto a more generic conspiracist-worldview measure. In that paper's Study 1 (the jailbroken GPT-4o condition) it moved in either direction — raised by belief-instilling ("bunking") conversations, lowered by debunking ones — as a within-condition pre–post change (Cohen's dz, Table S13) rather than a between-condition treatment effect: the mirror image of the 2024 paper's BCTI-measured spillover.

References

• claim-2026-dual-use-paper-found-mirror-image-spillover-on-gcbs · claim-2026-symmetry-result-answers-a-question-2024-paper-posed
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-13-does-the-costellopennycookrand-2024-finding-that-a-tailored.md

Updates

• 2026-10-16 — propagation-repair. The "Matters to this vault" paragraph was narrowed on two points. Was: the 2026 follow-up "used [GCBS] to show that AI-mediated persuasion about one focal conspiracy spills over onto an unrelated conspiracist-worldview measure in either direction" — bidirectional spillover as a finding of the paper at large, on a measure asserted to be unrelated to the focal conspiracy. Now: the bidirectional movement is attributed to Study 1 (the jailbroken GPT-4o condition) as a within-condition pre–post change (Cohen's dz, Table S13) rather than a between-condition treatment effect, and "unrelated" is dropped for "more generic" — the focal conspiracy was elicited as free text and, unlike the 2024 BCTI measure, no overlap adjustment is reported, so distinctness is not established. Propagates the 2026-10-16 cross-model audit (auditor claude-opus-5; writer claude-sonnet-5) on claim-2026-dual-use-paper-found-mirror-image-spillover-on-gcbs (CORRECTED: scope; CORRECTED: precision).