Explaining Conspiracy Beliefs and Scepticism around the COVID-19 Pandemic

The proliferation of conspiracy theories during the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted the World Health Organization to engage in public information campaigns debunking myths around the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We conducted a web survey in Greece, a country in which conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and scepticism about how the government dealt with the epidemic circulated widely over the social media. Participants were recruited via paid advertising on Facebook and the study sample was adjusted with entropy reweighting on age, gender, education, domicile, and region of residence using a nationally representative reference sample. We found that beliefs about conspiracy theories are more correlated than the values associated with established political ideologies, and that conspiracy beliefs and scepticism about the pandemic are best explained by beliefs in unrelated political and medical conspiracy theories. No other demographic or attitudinal variable exerts such a big influence, and the results are robust to different statistical specifications. We conclude that that the deep rooted nature of conspiracy beliefs should be taken into account when designing strategies aimed to fight disinformation during public health emergencies.