Why do people believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories?

By J. Uscinski, A. Enders, Casey A. Klofstad, Michelle I. Seelig, John Funchion, C. Everett, S. Wuchty, K. Premaratne, M. Murthi. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020

383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As conspiracy theories about COVID-19 take root in the United States, understanding the psychological foundations of conspiracy beliefs is increasingly critical. Our research shows that beliefs in two popular variants of COVID-19 conspiracy theory are the joint product of the psychological predispositions 1) to reject information coming from experts and other authority figures and 2) to view major events as the product of conspiracies, as well as partisan and ideological motivations. The psychological foundations of conspiracy beliefs have implications for the development of strategies designed to curtail their negative consequences

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67cb7de28b4ec52467cdb651a94eec837b667887

How researchers see this paper

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

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Joanne M. Miller
2. Daniel Romer
3. William Yang Wang
4. Kathleen Hall Jamieson
5. J. Uscinski
6. Casey A. Klofstad

In Health

1. Joanne M. Miller
2. Daniel Romer
3. Kathleen Hall Jamieson

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Joanne M. Miller
2. Kathleen Hall Jamieson
3. Daniel Romer
4. J. Uscinski
5. Casey A. Klofstad
6. A. Enders
7. Christina E. Farhart
8. William Yang Wang

Citations in the corpus

• The different forms of COVID-19 misinformation and their consequences (2020, background): “Numerous conspiracy theories have attempted to tie the COVID-19 pandemic to nefarious intentions and scapegoat the supposed conspirators (Uscinski et al., 2020).”
• The Truth is Out There: Investigating Conspiracy Theories in Text Generation (2021, background): “, 2015), or pertain to events occurring after the release of GPT-2 (Ahmed et al., 2020; Uscinski et al., 2020).”
• Psychological, Political, and Situational Factors Combine to Boost COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs (2020, methodology): “Independent was coded such that Independents = 1 and everyone else = 0.”
• Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. (2020, result): “Our proportions are also in line with those observed by Uscinski et al. (2020) who also did not allow a not-sure response, and the findings of Oliver and Wood (2014) who surveyed other conspiracy theories related to health outcomes.”
• Gender Differences in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs (2020, background): “To 2 Our results diverge from Uscinski et al. (2020), who find no effect of their gender control variable on two COVID-19 CT beliefs.”