Assessing complex belief structures with the triads task: Reliability and validity

Research on attitudes and beliefs often relies on assessing people’s agreement with several explicitstatements. We promote a different approach, focusing on the interconnectedness of beliefs andtheir cognitive and affective components. Here, we present the triads task as a procedure tomeasure complex belief networks. Leaning on similarity and difference judgments for threeconcepts at a time, the triads task allows us to derive similarity scores for each pair of concepts ina topic domain, which provide insights into belief networks of individuals and groups.Furthermore, we propose a procedure to translate similarity scores into belief networkvisualizations, inspired by cognitive-affective maps (CAMs). For a sample of 56 participants, weshow that similarity scores are retest reliable in a two week interval (averaged individual retestcorrelation: r = .78) and that participants communicatively validate our visualization procedure.We highlight the benefits of the triads task in measuring belief networks and further discuss thisprocedure with regards to its potential as a research and intervention tool.