5g, vaccines and videotape: belief in conspiracy theories during Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

As a major societal crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is fertile ground for conspiracy theories. This aspect of the “infodemic” might be especially dangerous since previous research consistently reported that medical conspiracy theories have been associated with a range of risky health behaviors. Our study was aimed to examine antecedents and consequences of COVID-19 related conspiracy theories, as well as their relations with other forms of irrational thinking. We developed Belief in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Scale for the purpose of our study (N = 407) which consisted of 13 items representing a sample of conspiracy theories circulating in digital media and conversations on social networks. In accordance with findings on the monological belief system, the scale was unidimensional (λ1 = 6.34) and highly reliable (α = .90). Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories correlated with measures of irrational thinking such as percentage of intuitive responses on Cognitive Reflection Test (r = .28) and frequency of type I error responses on set of heuristic-and-biases tasks (r = .33). Results also revealed that older (r = .11) and less educated (r = -.27) were more prone to believe in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, as well as those subjects who showed higher scores on measures of psychoticism-proneness (r = .27), religiosity (r = .31) and rightwing orientation (r = .36). More importantly, belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories was consistently related to each examined health-related behavior during the first wave of pandemic – it predicted adherence to COVID-19 guidelines (r = -.17), use of pseudoscientific practices (r = .31), and intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19 (r = -.53) - thus suggesting a possible effect on decisions that may lead to detrimental public health outcomes.