Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

General description


 * Misinformation about COVID-19: Psychological Insights : "The emotional response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a crucial factor to consider for understanding the believability and spread of misinformation. People tend to be strongly motivated to maintain a sense of control and understanding over their lives, and when this sense is under threat, it results in heightened feelings of anxiety. In an attempt to reduce this anxiety and regain their sense of control, people “compensate with strategies that lead to greater acceptance of misconceptions”. These strategies include sense-making mechanisms, whereby information is obtained from various sources in order to make sense of a complex and unfamiliar situation, as well as having someone or something to blame and project feelings of anxiety towards."

Psychological Mechanisms
 * Confirmation bias - Misinformation about COVID-19: Psychological Insights :


 * - "There is a growing body of research that links political ideology to the societal response to the pandemic, with political differences having been found to be the most significant factor predicting policy preferences and the adoption of health behaviors. Political ideology has also been found to underlie susceptibility to believing and sharing misinformation, making it a crucial factor to consider in understanding the COVID-19 infodemic. When an individual is faced with information that conflicts with either of these, they are likely to experience cognitive dissonance. When in cognitive dissonance, people engage in thought processes that serve to minimize this discomfort. People are more likely to believe that which reinforces their pre-existing beliefs (confirmation bias) and reject those which undermine their pre-existing beliefs (disconfirmation bias). Therefore, pre-existing ideological and partisan attitudes and beliefs might prevent people from fact-checking information, and lead to higher levels of engagement with ideologically concordant information. "


 * Sense-making - Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation About COVID-19 :
 * - "Typical stress levels associated with the pandemic have even appropriated the introduction of a new syndrome called “COVID stress syndrome” (Taylor et al., 2020), which has been consistently found to be linked to feelings of depression and anxiety in the general population (Barzilay et al., 2020; Salari et al., 2020). That elevated levels of (sudden) stress activate feelings or symptoms of depression is a well-documented process in the psychological literature. In order to alleviate the feelings of stress and to regain a sense of control of the situation in which people find themselves today, one could experience the need to cognitively project personal feelings of threat and stress to a social out-group or power (Poon et al., 2020). This is where narratives and the sense-making function of conspiracy theories come into play."
 * - "Although sense-making mechanisms (e.g., obtaining information from different types of sources to make sense of the COVID- situation) are intended to reduce anxious or depressive feelings, they often actually result in a higher susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs (van Prooijen and Douglas, 2017; van Prooijen, 2017; Šrol et al., 2021). Conspiracy beliefs are then a “feature of the mind” that help shape certainty and control in times of uncertainty and stress (Kossowska and Bukowski, 2015; Moulding et al., 2016), which makes people with depressogenic schemata extra susceptible for this “feature.”"


 *  Depression - Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation About COVID-19
 * - "Feelings of depression were more strongly associated with conspiracy or misinformation beliefs across countries. In all countries/regions, except Canada and the Philippines, a higher score on the PHQ was associated with greater conspiracy and misinformation beliefs. The results of a robustness analysis of all countries combined (Supplementary Tables A6, A7) showed that these indicators also mediated the effect of exposure. Direct effects indicated that exposure to traditional media was strongly and negatively associated with both anxiety and depression and that exposure to digital media and personal contacts was positively associated with anxiety and depression."


 * Fear - (Calvi, C. et al. (2021)) : "From an evolutionary framework, fear makes people more sensitive to potential threats (Ohman and Mineka, 2001; Schaller et al., 2003; Balzarotti and Ciceri, 2014). Our cognitive system is particularly tuned toward potential sources of threat such as negative events, which, in most situations, are “more salient, and generally efficacious than positive events” (Rozin and Royzman, 2001, p. 297). A pandemic is a prototypical scenario that engenders a great deal of unresolved fear and anxiety that can leave people in a constant state of high alert. Importantly, the positive correlation indicates that COVID-19 fear relates specifically to willingness to share real news above and beyond fake news, contrary to our hypothesis that fear would make people more likely to share fake news."


 * Need for information - (Calvi, C. et al. (2021)) : "A second factor involved in the proliferation of news is the need for information, which is especially pertinent during global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The limited amount of reliable scientific information during the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak likely encouraged people to search for explanations that did not yet exist as the science underlying the biology and spread of the virus was still being investigated. This void of scientific consensus may have opened a wide avenue for the spread of pseudoscientific and outright false information. In the context of threat, where feelings of uncertainty and fear make it difficult to anticipate or plan actions, people compulsively search for explanations and tend to base them on readily accessible pieces of information (Hogg and Adelman, 2013; Kossowska and Bukowski, 2015)."