Investigating Popular Representations of Postmodernism as Beliefs—A Psychological Analysis and Empirical Verification

This article is an attempt to empirically establish a new category of social beliefs defined as postmodern beliefs. They are cognitive categorizations of social and media messages regarding ways of understanding the world which are based on the basic assumptions of postmodernism, quite widely recognised as fundamental. The theoretical model adopted in the article assumes the existence of three beliefs: antifundamentalism, absolutization of freedom and relativization of truth. The hypothesised concept was operationalized as Postmodern Beliefs Questionnaire (PMBQ). Verification studies were carried out on three groups of over 600 people. The verification of the tool was carried out by using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to select the appropriate pool of statements, then data in two subsequent datasets was analysed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to empirically verify the selected set of statements and estimate relevant parameters. The tool constructed allows for investigating the distinguished beliefs at a satisfactory level of reliability and validity. It can be used to measure the extent to which the representations that make up the popular understanding of postmodernism have been recognised and built into the overall belief system about the world of the respondents. The distinguished postmodern beliefs differ in terms of relations with other social beliefs of the respondents, such as anthropocentrism, traditionalism, faith in a just world, as well as the attitude of individuals to material values or their individualistic orientation.