A New Questionnaire Measures Gaslighting Victimization

Source: Photo by RDNE Stock project, courtesy Pexels

Gaslighting is when someone manipulates you into doubting yourself — your thoughts, your memories, and even your perception of reality. The term gaslighting has become quite popular, including here at Psychology Today. In fact, in 2022, it was one of Merriam-Webster Dictionary's words of the year. You may be surprised to learn that while there is a history of psychologists theorizing about gaslighting, there hasn't been as much actual scientific research on the topic of gaslighting. This has caused some psychologists to be skeptical of the term's recent surge in popularity and extensive use on social media. In a new study just published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Tair Tager-Shafrir at The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel and her colleagues set out to create a questionnaire to measure gaslighting and determine how experiences of being gaslit relate to relationship satisfaction and other forms of abuse.

Gaslighting involves manipulating an intimate partner by invalidating, denying, or minimizing that partner's experiences in a manner that makes them doubt their feelings, abilities, and memory. Reviewing the literature on how gaslighting is defined, Tager-Shafrir and colleagues identified six features of gaslighting behavior:

1. Denial of their prior behaviors or statements
2. Creating self-doubt by questioning the partner's memory or understanding of events
3. Creating self-doubt by blaming the partner
4. Evoking guilt or shame
5. Causing the partner to doubt their abilities
6. Making the partner feel that their thoughts and feelings are illegitimate.

Gaslighting is often described in gendered terms that cast women as the victim and men as perpetrators. However, some have argued that gaslighters can be any gender, even if women are more likely than men to be victims due to their lower social power in most cultures.

Prior researchers did develop some measures of gaslighting. However, there are several important issues with these questionnaires. First, they weren't subject to rigorous analysis to ensure their validity and reliability. Second, some of the measures focused more on people's potential reactions to gaslighting, rather than on whether or not they experienced the behaviors themselves. Finally, the gaslighting measures that focused on romantic relationships only surveyed female participants.

The New Research on Gaslighting

Tager-Shafrir and colleagues surveyed 500 Israeli participants in one study, and 395 American participants in another. Each participant completed the newly developed gaslighting questionnaire and questionnaires measuring relationship satisfaction and depression. They also completed a questionnaire that assesses experiences of intimate partner violence victimization, including physical assault, psychological abuse, economic control (e.g., restricting a partner's access to shared funds), and negotiation (using more positive strategies to resolve conflict).

This is the full gaslighting scale, from Tager-Shafrir et al. (2024):

Instructions: Please rate how often the following statements are true regarding your relationship with your partner: (Scale: 1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = sometimes, 4 = often, 5 = always).

1. My partner makes me doubt things I said.
2. My partner makes me think that everything I do is wrong.
3. My partner often denies saying things that I remember him/her saying.
4. My partner makes me think that I don’t understand situations in our relationship.
5. My partner makes me question my memory about things that happened between us.
6. My partner makes me feel like I’m in the wrong.
7. My partner makes me feel like I’m impossible to get along with.
8. My partner makes me think that I don’t understand him/her.
9. My partner makes me think that I’m distorting things.
10. My partner makes me think that I’m blowing things out of proportion.
11. My partner often accuses me of all kinds of things.

In both studies, the average score was around 2 out of 5, which corresponds to answering "rarely" for each item. In addition, fewer than 20% of participants averaged a score of 3 (equivalent to "sometimes") or higher. This suggests that most participants were not experiencing high levels of gaslighting. (This can also help you put your own score in context.)

Gaslighting experiences were also strongly correlated with experiencing other types of psychological abuse, but only weakly correlated with experiencing physical or economic abuse or the partner's use of fewer positive conflict negotiation strategies. Not surprisingly, the more participants experienced gaslighting, the less satisfied they were with their relationship and the more depressed they were. In addition, women reported experiencing more gaslighting than men.

Conclusion

This new research provides a more reliable and valid way of measuring the level of gaslighting that people experience in a relationship. This questionnaire is limited because it depends on the subjective perspective of the person reporting their partner’s gaslighting behavior, but it will nonetheless be a valuable tool for those who want to study and better understand gaslighting experiences. It is also important for readers to note that while it is not designed to diagnose gaslighting in individual relationships, it can be a helpful tool to compare your own experiences with those of others.