Comments | social_psy: Unconventional Thinking

anan_ab in social_psy

Unconventional Thinking

Apr 16, 2007 01:39

I am currently working on a third study that aims to further establish validity of a scale that I have developed which assesses individuals' propensities to believe in unconventional ideas (e.g., conspiracies and the paranormal). I am considering adding another dimension to this validation package that compares people's scores on my scale to their ( Read more... )

Comments 5

firemosa April 16 2007, 19:09:04 UTC

Whoa, I have been for a long time thinking of alot of creative experiments which would make great use of such a scale.

One professor I know is pursuing a line of experiments which messes with people's willingness to believe that luck is affecting their outcome on a variety of tasks. I wanted to do some stuff relating to beliefs about luck in cards, beliefs about esp, ect. Anyways, I can't help you with references here but I can tell you that if you created such a scale, I'd love to be be using your scale and citing you in my papers!

anan_ab April 16 2007, 19:18:57 UTC

I have already created the scale and am in the middle-to-late stages of validation studies that need to be conducted before I publish it. What are some of the general ideas you have been thinking about for your experiments? Maybe I can try to include information regarding properties and relationships that could play into those studies (and presumably similar ideas that others may be considering).

firemosa April 16 2007, 19:43:41 UTC

Copy and pasted verbatim from an "idea sheet" that I used to keep ( ... )

okitsaj April 16 2007, 22:38:56 UTC

What are you thinking of in terms of the actual content of these "mainstream" beliefs ( ... )

anan_ab April 17 2007, 04:14:07 UTC

To be entirely honest, I didn't get much of what you said in that first paragraph. Maybe I'm unintelligent when it comes to scale development and social psychology considering my limited number of publications and projects being prepared for submission, but I definitely find the commentary confusing. I'm not certain what you might mean by "an invariant or inherent tendency to conform to traditional modes of thought, rather than a situationally influenced conformity to some thoughts." I suppose you may be driving at some conception of right-wing authoritarianism, but even that is a stretch. I am not interested in situationally-induced propensities to conform becuase this is a scale validation procedure, not an experiment ( ... )