This repo provides code to replicate the factor analysis in the Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2012) paper “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”.
That study purported to measure belief in various conspiracy theories, and had participants complete an online questionnaire asking about 14 different conspiracies. Incredibly, the authors reported the identical factor loading – .742 – for all ten items in their main conspiracy belief factor. This means that the loadings are false, since they cannot be identical – it's not mathematically possible.
With this code, you can see the actual factor loadings. It turns out the conspiracy belief latent variable presented by Lewandowsky, et al. doesn't exist. Few of the items load heavily on any factor, and participants generally didn't endorse the conspiracies. Therefore, the paper is false and should be retracted.
Moreover, the titular link between believing that the moon landings and climate science are hoaxes does not exist – the authors fabricated it. In the sample of 1,145 participants, only ten (10) participants thought that the moon landings were a hoax – effectively zero – and most of those ten did not believe that climate science was a hoax (though we can't do anything with 10 of 1,145 participants anyway – it wouldn't matter if all ten thought climate science was a hoax). Thus, there's no link between the two beliefs in this study – there wasn't even any significant data/endorsement for the moon landing belief. (The moon landing item is one of the items that did not load in the factor analysis or PCA, at .217 and -.048, respectively. Like all the other items, the authors reported it as having a loading of .742.)