A Bioweapon or a Hoax? The Link Between Distinct Conspiracy Beliefs About the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak and Pandemic Behavior

By R. Imhoff, P. Lamberty. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 2020

552 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the coronavirus disease pandemic rising in 2020, governments and nongovernmental organizations across the globe have taken great efforts to curb the infection rate by promoting or legally prescribing behavior that can reduce the spread of the virus. At the same time, this pandemic has given rise to speculations and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy worldviews have been connected to refusal to trust science, the biomedical model of disease, and legal means of political engagement in previous research. In three studies from the United States (N = 220; N = 288) and the UK (N = 298), we went beyond this focus on a general conspiracy worldview and tested the idea that different forms of conspiracy beliefs despite being positively correlated have distinct behavioral implications. Whereas conspiracy beliefs describing the pandemic as a hoax were more strongly associated with reduced containment-related behavior, conspiracy beliefs about sinister forces purposefully creating the virus related to an increase in self-centered prepping behavior.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e5d6ec3fcb1eb3f741bc72dfd4e391f71b86bf0

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Citations in the corpus

Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation (2021, background): “…outcomes (Enders et al., 2020; Roozenbeek et al., 2020b), such as affecting people’s willingness to comply with evidence-based health regulations (Imhoff and Lamberty, 2020), support for violence (Jolley and Paterson, 2020) and vaccine uptake intentions around 1Department of Psychology, School…”
Conspiracy Theories and Their Societal Effects During the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Believing in conspiracy theories is known to undermine prosocial behavior and trust in authorities (Imhoff et al., 2018; Jolley & Douglas, 2014b).”
The different forms of COVID-19 misinformation and their consequences (2020, background): “…there may be a structure to these dubious ideas, as they seem to vary in their content (Brennen et al., 2020), causal antecedents (Cassese et al., 2020; Uscinski et al., 2020), popularity (Miller, 2020), and behavioral and attitudinal consequences (Imhoff & Lamberty, 2020; Jolley & Paterson, 2020).”
Psychological, Political, and Situational Factors Combine to Boost COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs (2020, background): “For example, Imhoff and Lamberty (2020) find that belief that the seriousness of COVID-19 is being exaggerated is negatively correlated with self-reported preventative behaviours such as hand washing and social distancing, and belief that the virus was intentionally created by humans is positively…”
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.”
Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world (2020, background): “Similarly, although we have modelled misinformation as a predictor of vaccine hesitancy consistent with prior work in this area [39,41,42], we note the likely possibility that causality can run both ways: being vaccine hesitant may, in turn,”