Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world

By J. Roozenbeek, C. Schneider, S. Dryhurst, J. Kerr, A. Freeman, Gabriel Recchia, A. M. van der Bles, S. van der Linden. Royal Society Open Science, 2020

1,163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK (n = 1050 and n = 1150), Ireland (n = 700), the USA (n = 700), Spain (n = 700) and Mexico (n = 700), we examine predictors of belief in the most common statements about the virus that contain misinformation. We also investigate the prevalence of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across different countries and the role of belief in such misinformation in predicting relevant health behaviours. We find that while public belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not particularly common, a substantial proportion views this type of misinformation as highly reliable in each country surveyed. In addition, a small group of participants find common factual information about the virus highly unreliable. We also find that increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects people's self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19, as well as people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family. Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research.

Subfields: Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cee96d42d6bd1f84f806b4543b6ee7d3811fb891

How researchers see this paper

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

In Health

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking (2021, methodology): “This notion of “generalized” resistance or a “broad-spectrum” vaccine was further developed in a series of studies in the first author’s laboratory and by Roozenbeek and van der Linden (Roozenbeek & van der Linden Linden, 2018, 2019; Roozenbeek et al., 2020; van der Linden & Roozenbeek, 2020).”
Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “…Apuke and Omar 2021; Escolà-Gascón 2021; Wang et al. 2019c; Hart-ley and Vu 2020; Micallef et al. 2020; Pennycook et al. 2020b; Sharma et al. 2020; Roozenbeek et al. 2020b), environmental science (e.g., climate change) (Treen et al. 2020; Lutzke et al. 2019; Lewandowsky 2020; Maertens et al.…”