Suspicious minds in times of crisis: determinants of Romanians’ beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories

ABSTRACT

The current pandemic has generated many conspiracy theories (CTs). In this paper, we investigate several determinants of COVID-19 CTs using survey data from Romania. Some of our findings are consistent with those of previous studies on other CTs: low values of social integration, open-mindedness, and analytical thinking predict conspiracy thinking as well as higher levels of collective narcissism. Other findings run counter to those of prior research on CTs. We hypothesize that this might be due to the specificity of the CTs under scrutiny and related to the Romanian context.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• conspiracy theories
• open mindedness
• social belonging
• collective narcissism
• Eastern Europe

Acknowledgements

We thank the following institutions and people for their support and/or feedback: Ipsos Interactive Services Romania, Nicoleta Constantinescu and George Gervec (from Ipsos), Jay van Buel, Oana Lup, Laura-Maria Ilie, John F. Ely, and David Mathers-Winn. We are also greatful to Dr. Yuliya Kosyakova, Editor of this issue, and to three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2019, 89.4% of Romania's population aged 16–74 years used the Internet once a week, including daily, during the last three months. We estimate that, in 2019, among individuals aged 18–70 years, Internet users (as defined above) were around 84% (NIS 2019).

2 We conducted these analyses using the WVS data from Wave 5 (2005), Wave 6 (2012), and Wave 7 (2018). Data sources: Inglehart et al. (2014) for Waves 5 and 6; Voicu (2019) for Wave 7.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cătălin Augustin Stoica

Cătălin Augustin Stoica (Ph.D. in Sociology, Stanford Univeristy) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University for Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania). His research interests center on collective memory, social change, post-communist transtion, conspiracy theories, survey methods, economic sociology, and social stratification.

Radu Umbreș

Radu Umbreș (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University College London) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University for Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania). He focuses on cognitive anthropology, with a special emphasis on trust and cooperation, folk epistemology, cognitive biases, and cultural evolution.