Basic beliefs – Artur Nilsson

To understand personality completely, we need to take the most basic beliefs at the core of the personal worldview into consideration. Nevertheless, previous research is fragmented, consisting of a plethora of largely isolated strands of research in many different fields. In this talk, I will present a research program that seeks to integrate the literature. Based on an interdisciplinary review, we initially identified 36 candidate beliefs concerning human nature, society, metaphysics, and epistemology. We constructed a questionnaire with items that were selected from around 60 instruments, along with new items. Based on responses from a first sample, we made further revisions to improve scale homogeneity and comprehensiveness, increasing the number of dimensions to 60. Factor analyses of the scales indicate that there are several robust higher-order factors of basic belief. Furthermore, a follow-up study suggested that basic beliefs are weakly associated with the Big Five traits, weakly to moderately associated with values, and yet approximately as stable over six months as dispositional traits and values. Finally, a specific example of how models of beliefs can be useful is that we have found that beliefs about the nature of truth predict receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit and conspiracist ideation over and above other well-known predictors