The previous article in this series “Mindwars: Open, Preregistered… and Wrong Question — Pathologising Dissent in Plain Sight” examined a paper that superficially set out establish whether a link could be established between conspiracy theorising and evidence of distress in the theorists. A core instrument in this paper was based on a psychological instrument, the “Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ),” which the authors of that paper used to determine membership of this category of people.

This instalment of Mindwars exposes the hinge—the mechanism that ties together the media, academic, therapeutic, and policy threads detailed in our previous articles on the subject. As we will see, the authors of the CMQ didn’t so much discover a mentality, as manufactured one by performing a silent but monumental swap: replacing the messy, evidence-based task of truth-testing with the clean, political practice of claim-categorisation. They treated a set of claims—whose truth status is complex, contested, and, for the researcher, often unknown—as defining a stable, pre-defined category of person, thereby pathologising the act of belief itself without ever establishing what constitutes a rational basis for that belief.

This is the original sin. It’s how distrust was turned into a diagnosis, and why the debate over what’s true has been largely replaced by a campaign to manage who believes.

“When you abstract distrust away from evidence, you get pathology by design.”

Tracing the CMQ: A Foundational Instrument

As propounded in the 2013 paper “Measuring individual differences in generic beliefs in conspiracy theories across cultures: Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire”, The Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ) is a short, 5-item psychometric tool created to measure a person’s general tendency toward conspiracist thought, which they term “conspiracy mentality.” Developed by psychologists Martin Bruder, Peter Haffke, Nick Neave, Nina Nouripanah, and Roland Imhoff, its key innovation is its “generic” design. Unlike earlier scales focused on specific theories, the CMQ claims to use broad, content-free statements to tap a general worldview.

The instrument purports to measure a stable, one-dimensional personality trait—a “generalised political attitude” predisposing individuals to endorse conspiracy theories regardless of topic.

The five CMQ items ask respondents to rate their belief (0%–100% certainty) in statements about government secrecy, hidden motives, mass monitoring, covert connections between events, and secret organisations influencing politics.

The five questions are as follows:

1. “… many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about.”
2. “… politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions.”
3. “… government agencies closely monitor all citizens.”
4. “… events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities.”
5. “… there are secret organisations that greatly influence political decisions.”

Participants score their response to each question on a percentage likelihood scale.

Across four sub-studies, the Bruder et al paper documents the process used to validated the CMQ’s claim to measure a stable, clinical trait. Ostensibly, these studies demonstrated convergent validity by showing strong correlations with pre-pathologised constructs like schizotypy and paranoid ideation; they established predictive validity by proving the score accurately forecast belief in a battery of pre-labelled “conspiracy theories”; and they applied it cross-culturally, using the instrument to diagnose a significantly higher “conspiracy mentality” in Turkey compared to Western nations. At face, this rigorous process cemented the CMQ’s scientific legitimacy.

The CMQ’s role is to serve as a foundational, economical benchmark within social science, providing a master predictor for belief in specific theories and enabling the direct comparison of populations across the globe. By abstracting scepticism from any real-world context, the CMQ aims to insulate the construct from culturally or situationally specific beliefs, thereby creating a universal metric to profile individuals. Ultimately, it was designed to function as a diagnostic tool for a new administrative science, intended to guide research and policy by reliably segmenting and categorising (pathologising) a general stance of institutional distrust.

Deconstructing the Methodology: The Alchemy of Manufacturing a Mentality

In spite of the seemingly unproblematic intent of the CMQ, closer examination reveals the methodological framework of the Bruder et al. paper to be not so much a neutral testing ground but a sophisticated assembly line for producing a new category of psychological deviance. Every step—from the initial hypotheses to the final validation studies—is designed to transform a political judgment into a scientific-sounding “fact.”

Based on the literature, the authors’ core hypotheses were that the CMQ would demonstrate a distinct but predictable pattern of correlations, confirming its validity as a unique psychological construct. They specifically hypothesised that “conspiracy mentality” would be:

1. Positively correlated with established measures of pathology and maladjustment, including paranoid ideation, schizotypy, and perceptions of powerlessness and anomia (social breakdown).
2. Positively correlated with other “fringe” beliefs, such as belief in the paranormal.
3. Linked to specific political and personality profiles, showing a positive relationship with Right-Wing Authoritarianism and a negative relationship with Agreeableness.
4. The master predictor of specific conspiracy beliefs, outperforming all other personality and attitude measures in forecasting who would endorse specific, pre-labelled conspiracy theories.

Crucially, they also hypothesised that despite these correlations, the construct would remain distinct, with no correlation so strong as to suggest it was merely a reflection of a pre-existing clinical or political category.

However, the methodological framework of the CMQ does not constitute a neutral testing ground but a sophisticated assembly line for producing a category of psychological deviance. The entire process rests on an unstated, pre-emptive judgment: the researchers’ decision to place specific claims into the “conspiracy theory” bin, a social and political act that bypasses the essential task of evidence-based adjudication.

This foundational sleight of hand enables a seven-step alchemical process that transforms a political stance into a clinical trait:

• First, the research begins with a pathologising axiom, hypothesising correlations with clinical constructs like paranoia and schizotypy, thereby framing the inquiry as a search for pathology from the outset.
• Second, an illusion of neutrality is created by presenting participants with a non-judgmental definition of conspiracy theories, inviting honest responses that are subsequently pathologised by the analytical framework.
• Third, the core of the circular logic, where measurement is conflated with definition; the CMQ’s “generic” items are validated against specific, pre-labelled “conspiracy” items, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where the instrument predicts the very behaviours used to define its target.
• Fourth, the vaunted “content-free” design acts as a political filter, decontextualising statements about power and secrecy to universalise a Western-centric bias, a flaw starkly revealed by the “Turkey problem” where the model strained to pathologise rational, context-dependent distrust.
• Fifth, consistency is confused with pathology, as high test-retest reliability is presented as evidence of a stable personality trait, effectively reifying a potentially coherent political worldview into a clinical symptom.
• Sixth, a pathologising network is constructed through “validation by association,” linking the CMQ to pre-existing clinical scales without considering that those scales might themselves be measuring rational responses to a threatening world.
• Lastly, the process concludes with a tautological seal, where the CMQ is “validated” by its near-perfect correlation with another conspiracy mentality scale, creating an impenetrable, self-referential loop.

In essence, the methodology does not discover a new type of person; it operationalises a mechanism for defining and policing the boundaries of legitimate political belief.

The Certification Racket and the Epistemic Veto

The “narrative immune system” of Detect, Tag, Contain and Clear operates on an unspoken foundation: The Power to Certify. This creates a rigged epistemic game where institutions being scrutinised serve as ultimate arbiters of reality. Scepticism remains “premature” until forced institutional confession—whether through whistleblowers, leaks, or official investigations—transforms it into validated truth. The CMQ provides the clinical language for this certification racket, pathologising those who are merely ahead of the official timeline while ensuring the burden of proof forever remains on the sceptic.

The fundamental flaw lies in what the instrument actually measures. The CMQ’s “content-free” design pathologises political premises rather than verifiably false beliefs. Its items represent broad assertions about power dynamics—from political secrecy to institutional monitoring—that require agreement with institutional transparency as the default “healthy” position. This constitutes an epistemic veto: by medicalising foundational questions about power, the framework removes them from political debate and places them in the clinical domain.

The moral justification for this enterprise—preventing the alleged dangers of “conspiracy theorising”—collapses under comparative analysis. As mentioned above, where is the “Religious Credulity Questionnaire” measuring belief in virgin births or divine commands? Such beliefs have inspired historical violence—from the Crusades to witch burnings—that dwarfs the harms of modern political scepticism. Yet religious credulity remains culturally sanctioned while political scepticism toward secular power is pathological. This selective enforcement reveals the CMQ’s true function: not harm reduction, but the medicalisation of specific political heresy.

The Iraq WMD debacle (Duelfer ISG report to Congress, October 2004, plus end of ISG search January 2005) exemplifies this selective certification. Those who trusted the false official narrative faced no psychological profiling for their “institutional credulity,” while sceptics were dismissed as paranoid—until official certification retroactively validated them. The system’s credibility reset instantly, strengthening the machinery to pathologise future scepticism. This creates a world where trust in repeatedly failed institutions remains the default rational position, while scepticism—regardless of its eventual validation—is systematically treated as disorder. The CMQ thus enforces not truth, but an official timeline of belief, ensuring institutional power to define reality remains unchallenged.

Context Breach: The Turkey Stress Test

In Bruder et al’s original cross-cultural study, the one-factor CMQ model appeared to travel well on paper. The authors reported “measurement equivalence” across English, German, and Turkish versions. However, a critical crack in this façade emerged—one that the authors themselves acknowledge but systematically downplay.

The statistical model enforcing full structural equivalence (where the latent construct itself is assumed to be identical across groups) showed a significantly worse fit. The data revealed that the underlying “conspiracy mentality” construct was not as coherent or one-dimensional in Turkey as it was in the Western samples. Specifically, the model’s fit improved dramatically when the constraint on the latent factor’s variance was released for the Turkish group.

This is not a trivial footnote. It is a fatal rupture in the core assumption of the CMQ. It signals what the field refuses to say aloud: the meaning of “distrust” is context-dependent.

In a country like Turkey, with a distinct history of military coups, deep state operations (derin devlet), and a fundamentally different state-citizen relationship, higher endorsement of CMQ items does not necessarily indicate a psychological pathology. It can reflect institutional realism—a learned and rational understanding of how power actually operates in that specific environment.

• Agreeing that “government agencies closely monitor all citizens” is not a symptom of paranoia in a state with a pervasive security apparatus; it is a statement of fact.
• Believing that “secret organisations greatly influence political decisions” is not a delusion in a context where shadowy networks have historically shaped the political landscape; it is historical literacy.

The “Turkey problem” is the sound of reality breaking the model. The CMQ attempts to impose a universal, acontextual psychology onto a landscape of radically different political histories. Where the model bends, it reveals not a flaw in the subjects, but a flaw in the instrument. It proves that the CMQ does not measure a stable mental trait; it measures a dynamic political perception, one that is entirely rational when viewed from within its proper context. The “pathology” is an artifact of decontextualisation.

“The CMQ doesn’t describe people who believe false things; it defines false believers.”

The Unasked Question: What is the Epistemic Standard?

The fatal flaw in this research, then, is not that it studies people who believe unusual things. The flaw is that it pathologises them based on a moving and unexamined epistemic standard.

Consider the extended list of questions adopted in the Do Stress, Depression, and Anxiety Lead to Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories? (Fox et al, 2025)—seven monthly testing waves across AUS/NZ/UK, only 1/15 preregistered effects supported (anxiety → belief), no reverse distress effects. Underlaying that null result, the reader is expected to accept on faith that the eleven items used to determine whether someone believes in conspiracy theories are self-evidently false or indicative of psychopathology. But has the researcher done the decades of investigation that partisans on either side of the GMO debate (#11) or the 5G safety debate (#3) have? Almost certainly not. They are relying on a consensus of institutional credibility, not personal mastery of the evidence.

This becomes starkly clear when we apply the same methodological lens to other domains of contested belief, for instance:

• A “Religious Mentality Questionnaire” could pathologise belief in the Virgin Birth, divine revelation, or reincarnation.
• Its “predictive validity” would be “proven” by showing that people who believe in one miracle are likely to believe in others.
• It would correlate strongly with measures of “magical thinking” and “schizotypy.”

And it would be rightly criticised for its circularity and for pathologising a worldview without engaging its internal logic or evidence. The CMQ does the same, but for political, rather than theological, heterodoxy. The researcher’s own position—credulous acceptance of institutional pronouncements—is the invisible, unexamined baseline from which all “deviance” is measured.

The methodology of the CMQ is a case study in the manufacture of a scientific fact. Through a series of circular definitions, decontextualised measures, and pathologising associations, it successfully transforms a complex political stance—Generalised Distrust—into a clinical personality trait—“Conspiracy Mentality.” The resulting instrument does not discover a new type of person; it operationalises a mechanism for defining and policing the boundaries of legitimate political belief, creating the very “conspiracy-minded” subject it claims to find.

Bruder’s Discussion Section: The Consolidation of a Paradigm

The discussion section of the Bruder et al. paper transcends a mere summary of findings; it is a masterful, performative act of scientific and rhetorical closure. It functions as the final, crucial stage in the manufacturing process, systematically neutralising counter-arguments, strategically re-framing weaknesses as strengths, and firmly installing the “conspiracy mentality” construct as a legitimate, necessary, and portable tool for diagnosing and managing modern political discourse. This section is where the instrument is polished, packaged, and presented for export to the wider realms of media, policy, and academia.

1. The Pre-emptive Defence: Framing Competitors as Complements: The authors begin not by defending their territory, but by diplomatically annexing it. They acknowledge the existence of other, more detailed scales, such as Brotherton et al.’s Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale, but immediately neutralise this potential threat by framing them as harmonious “complements.” This move is both strategic and revealing. In their justification, they make a stunning, unforced admission: they concede that specific items on other scales (e.g., about technology suppression) might reflect “appropriate scepticism and low gullibility” in certain political contexts, such as autocracies. This is a direct, if unintended, validation of the core critique—that scepticism is context-dependent and often rational. Yet, their proposed solution is not greater nuance, but its utter elimination. They argue their “generic” scale avoids this problem of context, but this is the heart of the epistemological deception. Their method is not to understand context, but to erase it, stripping scepticism of its real-world grounding so it can be universally treated as a decontextualised symptom. They explicitly trade accuracy for portability, creating a tool that is equally and indiscriminately applicable everywhere, thereby ensuring its utility for a globalised research and policy agenda.
2. The “Turkey Problem” Revisited: From Model Failure to Research Agenda: When confronted with the critical crack in their universalising model—the failed structural equivalence in Turkey—the authors perform a brilliant rhetorical sidestep. They admit that “questions remain” about the construct’s one-dimensional coherence in the Turkish context, a significant statistical warning sign. However, they immediately pivot, declaring: “Our scale helped to identify a need to examine the structure of conspiracy beliefs in the Middle East.” This is a profound act of alchemy. It transforms a critical failure of their model—its inability to adequately capture the meaning of distrust in a specific culture with a distinct history of state power—into a triumphant justification for more research using the very model that just failed. The tool that proves inadequate for the task is rhetorically reframed as the essential diagnostic that identified the task. The flaw is not a flaw; it is repackaged as a prescient feature, ensuring the CMQ remains at the centre of the investigative paradigm it helped create.
3. The Circular Validation, Re-stated as Fact: The discussion confidently reiterates the “ample evidence” for the CMQ’s validity, resting on the same circular pillars established in the methodology. The high correlation (r=0.82) with another “Conspiracy Mentality Scale” is presented not as tautological validation—a self-referential loop where one measure of heresy simply confirms another—but as robust “convergent validity.” Similarly, the CMQ’s power to predict the 33 specific, pre-labelled conspiracy beliefs is repeatedly highlighted as its crowning achievement, its predictive validity. This ignores the fundamental circularity: the instrument is being validated against the very behaviours that were used to operationally define the phenomenon it purports to measure. The CMQ is declared the best predictor of who believes in the things that have been pre-judged as evidence of the mentality the CMQ is supposed to measure. This circular engine is not questioned; it is re-stated as settled fact, sealing the construct in a self-justifying logical loop.
4. The Control Paradox: A Revealing Admission: Perhaps the most theoretically revealing section is the discussion of the “control” findings. The authors found a clear link between low socio-political control and CMQ scores, but no relationship with low personal control. Their explanation is a masterpiece of unwitting self-critique. They argue that when a lack of control is internally attributed (to personal failure), conspiracy theories are not functional. But when it is externally attributed (to socio-political forces), they are. This is a near-perfect description of a coherent political worldview, not a clinical pathology. They have empirically demonstrated that the CMQ tracks a person’s tendency to attribute societal outcomes to powerful, external actors and institutions—the very essence of a critical political analysis, from libertarianism to Marxism. Yet, they frame this rational, externally-attributed stance not as ideology or political science, but as a “conspiracy mentality.” In doing so, they pathologise the foundational act of blaming powerful institutions for societal ills, a cornerstone of democratic accountability.
5. The Limitations Section: The Illusion of Scrupulousness: The limitations paragraph is crafted to create an aura of scientific humility and scrupulousness, but it systematically downplays each critical issue. The use of non-representative, WEIRD samples is noted, but this concern is immediately dismissed by emphasising the large, cross-cultural sample size, as if quantity could compensate for a fundamental lack of representativeness. More tellingly, they admit the scale is not perfectly “content-free,” singling out the item on government monitoring. This is a minimal, calculated concession that serves to protect the broader, fraudulent premise of genericity. By voluntarily admitting a small, manageable flaw, they inoculate the instrument against accusations of its core deception, shielding the larger premise from scrutiny. It is a rhetorical gambit designed to demonstrate rigor while avoiding a substantive reckoning.
6. The Coda: The Mission Statement for a New Science of Governance: The final “Coda” leaves the realm of disinterested science entirely and enters the realm of political mission-setting. It paints a vivid picture of a chaotic, hyper-competitive world flooded with dangerous ideas that bypass the traditional “filter of mainstream media.” In this landscape of epistemic chaos, the CMQ is positioned as the essential tool for a new administrative elite. It is framed as the instrument needed to “reliably assess the general tendency” and “guide the next steps.” This is the ultimate reveal: the CMQ is not merely a research tool for academic journals. It is presented explicitly as a diagnostic instrument for governance, a way to profile, segment, and manage populations in an age of disruptive digital dissent. The “exciting endeavour” is no longer just understanding a psychology; it is the project of using that psychological profile to understand and, by clear implication, to pre-empt and control the political beliefs of citizens.

Through this sophisticated discussion, the authors successfully seal the paradigm. By re-framing weaknesses as strengths, admitting minor flaws to conceal major ones, and culminating in a grand vision for the instrument’s application, they complete the alchemical process of manufacturing a scientific fact. The “conspiracy mentality” is no longer a debatable hypothesis; it is an operationalised, ready-to-export construct. The discussion performs the final, crucial act of transmutation, transforming a politically loaded questionnaire into a neutral tool for science and governance. The circle is thus closed: the instrument designed to find a problem successfully defines the problem, and then authoritatively presents itself as the only viable solution.

Denouement: The Ultimate Circularity

In sum, the ultimate circularity at the heart of the CMQ exposes its true nature. It does not measure a clinical pathology; it calibrates a political alignment.

Its apparent “validity” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, built on a foundation of circular logic. The tool correlates with paranoia not because sceptics are ill, but because our clinical instruments cannot distinguish between a delusion of persecution and a rational assessment of a threatening power structure. The CMQ baptises this conflation as science.

But this leads to the devastating, unanswerable rebuttal, captured in the old adage:

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

This simple truth shatters the CMQ’s entire validation structure. It highlights the fatal epistemological flaw of conflating the origin of a belief with its validity. A belief arrived at through a cognitive style that shares features with paranoia can still be factually correct. History is littered with “paranoid” claims—about institutional corruption, state surveillance, and corporate malfeasance—that were later certified as truth. The CMQ would have pathologised the prescient.

This is why the CMQ’s function extends far beyond the academic journal. It is a propaganda weapon in a soft war of cognition. Its primary utility is rhetorical. It provides a seemingly neutral, scientific lexicon to:

1. Pathologise Dissent: It discredits the speaker rather than engaging their claims, performing a clinical ad hominem.
2. Insulate Institutions: It frames the demand for evidence as a symptom of the very “conspiracy mentality” the questioner is investigating.
3. Control the Timeline of Truth: It pathologises those who are chronologically ahead of official certification, branding prescience as pathology.

The CMQ’s greatest success has been to convince people that the most rational posture is one of institutional credulity. It teaches that trust, despite being repeatedly broken, is the default “healthy” state, while scepticism—the engine of science and accountability—is a mental disorder.

The question is no longer whether the CMQ is valid, but why we have embraced an instrument designed to diagnose the one cognitive style that power fears most: the unwillingness to take its word at face value.

Stop diagnosing dissent. Start publishing the documents.

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Notes: This article critiques the instrument design and usage of the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (Bruder et al., 2013) and its downstream application. It does not deny that some specific claims people theorising about the world maybe false; it denies that a one‑axis trait score can settle which ones, or why. It asserts that the authors of these instruments have not even attempted to ascertain the truth or quality or extent of debate (scientific or otherwise) surrounding of these positions.

Published via Journeys by the Styx.
Mindwars: Exposing the engineers of thought and consent.

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Author’s Note
Produced using the Geopolitika analysis system—an integrated framework for structural interrogation, elite systems mapping, and narrative deconstruction. Assistance from Deepseek for composition and editing.