Psychological, Political, and Situational Factors Combine to Boost COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs

By Joanne M. Miller. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 2020

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are not solely the domain of extremists and paranoids. They cut across demographic and political differences (Uscinski and Parent, 2014) and can have negative social/political consequences. 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 correlated with self-reported hoarding of food, sanitary products, and gasoline/oil, as well as stocking up on weapons.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2597f6005922423f448205fd9fc9cd16d7a1f24a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. A. Enders
2. J. Uscinski
3. Casey A. Klofstad

In Sociology and Political Science

1. A. Enders
2. J. Uscinski
3. Casey A. Klofstad
4. Joanne M. Miller

Citations in the corpus

• 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).”