Effects of misinformation on COVID-19 individual responses and recommendations for resilience of disastrous consequences of misinformation
By Zapan Barua, Sajib Barua, S. Aktar, Najma Kabir, Mingze Li. Progress in Disaster Science, 2020
323 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms is faster than the spread of Corona Virus Diseases (COVID-19) and it can generate hefty deleterious consequences on health amid a disaster like COVID-19. Drawing upon research on the stimulus-response theory (hypodermic needle theory) and the resilience theory, this study tested a conceptual framework considering general misinformation belief, conspiracy belief, and religious misinformation belief as the stimulus; and credibility evaluations as resilience strategy; and their effects on COVID-19 individual responses. Using a self-administered online survey during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study obtained 483 useable responses and after test, finds that all-inclusive, the propagation of misinformation on social media undermines the COVID-19 individual responses. Particularly, credibility evaluation of misinformation strongly predicts the COVID-19 individual responses with positive influences and religious misinformation beliefs as well as conspiracy beliefs and general misinformation beliefs come next and influence negatively. The findings and general recommendations will help the public, in general, to be cautious about misinformation, and the respective authority of a country, in particular, for initiating proper safety measures about disastrous misinformation to protect the public health from being exploited.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1572de3fc21f74b386ef47ca284b11813c6a431e
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Citations in the corpus
- Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. (2020, background): “Although other work has suggested that COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs hindered the adoption of some preventive behaviors (Barua et al., 2020; Imhoff and Lamberty, 2020), their reliance on small cross-sectional convenience samples limits their interpretation and generalizability.”