“Acquiescence Bias Inflates Estimates of Conspiratorial Beliefs and Political Misperceptions”, Seth J. Hill, Margaret E. Roberts2023-01-09 (politics, personality)⁠:

[cf. Lizardman] Scholars, pundits, and politicians use opinion surveys to study citizen beliefs about political facts, such as the current unemployment rate, and more conspiratorial beliefs, such as whether Barack Obama was born abroad. Many studies, however, ignore acquiescence-response bias, the tendency for survey respondents to endorse any assertion made in a survey question regardless of content.

With new surveys fielding questions asked in recent scholarship, we show that:

acquiescence bias inflates estimated incidence of conspiratorial beliefs and political misperceptions in the United States and China by up to 50%. Acquiescence bias is disproportionately prevalent among more ideological respondents, inflating correlations between political ideology such as conservatism and endorsement of conspiracies or misperception of facts.

We propose and demonstrate two methods to correct for acquiescence bias.

[Keywords: political beliefs, misperceptions, rumors and conspiracies, acquiescence-response bias, survey methodology]

…Here, we demonstrate an additional first-order challenge to measuring conspiratorial and political beliefs. We return to an old literature on “acquiescence-response bias”—the phenomenon where survey respondents are more likely to answer True, Agree, and Yes than False, Disagree, or No regardless of the question asked. We find that acquiescence-response bias can have important effects not only on estimates of the population rate of beliefs, but also on the correlation between beliefs and individual characteristics such as education and political ideology.

…In recent years, many prominent studies and news stories have reported on troubling magnitudes of conspiracy theory beliefs by ideological conservatives (eg. Garrett & Bond2021). We find that subjects who identify as very conservative exhibit larger acquiescence bias than those with less ideological identification. Our results suggest that existing conclusions are driven in part by greater acquiescence bias by survey respondents with conservative leanings. We also find greater acquiescence bias by strong liberals relative to less ideological subjects.