What Drives Belief in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories? Examining the Role of Uncertainty, Negative Emotions, and Perceived Relevance and Threat

ABSTRACT

As conspiracy theories around COVID-19 pose a big global challenge to public health and well-being, this study seeks to identify how and when people are likely to activate conspiratorial thinking and believe in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. Based on a U.S. national two-wave survey (W1: N = 1,119; W2: N = 543), this study found partial support for direct effects of uncertainty on conspiratorial thinking and support for indirect effects through threat perception. We also found some evidence of direct effects of uncertainty on conspiracy beliefs and indirect effects through threat perception and serially mediated through threat perception and negative emotions. Findings suggest that effects – either direct or indirect – of uncertainty on conspiratorial thinking/conspiracy beliefs are moderated by perceived relevance to COVID-19, personal experience of the disease, and social media use. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Good Systems Grand Challenge Research effort at The University of Texas at Austin and a project of UT Austin’s Digital Media Research Program (DMRP).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Some studies failed to find the relationship between anxiety and conspiracy beliefs; however, they examined the anxiety in general, not anxiety provoked by specific situations (e.g., Swami et al., 2016) or did not find support for the relationship due to other stronger predictors, considering that the bivariate correlations between them were moderate (Šrol et al., 2021).

2. It is worth noting that social media use does not always lead individuals to hold misperceptions such as conspiracy beliefs (e.g., Lee et al., 2022) because the nature of information one encounters on social media could vary depending on the size or structure of one’s social networks. However, we do not argue social media are a channel that unconditionally fosters conspiracy belief here. Instead, we assume that the direct and indirect associations between uncertainty and conspiracy beliefs could be stronger for those who use social media frequently than those who do not, considering that most misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 were distributed through social media (Brennen et al., 2020).

3. As the distribution of conspiracy beliefs was positively skewed, we also conducted logistic regression analyses using conspiracy beliefs as a dichotomous variable (1=believe at least one of the conspiracy theories about COVID-19; 0=other). The results are almost identical to those reported in Table 1. (See online Appendix C for details).

4. Model 92 did not support any moderated mediations tested in this study.

5. The bivariate correlation between conspiratorial thinking and COVID-19 conspiracy belief was positive and significant (r = .22, p < .001, see Online Appendix B).

6. Logistic regression models using each conspiracy belief as a dependent variable showed that significant predictors slightly differed depending on the claim tested. However, some common predictors were similar to the original models. Notably, uncertainty was not a significant predictor of any individual claim. See Online Appendix E for more details.