Misbehaving in the Corona crisis: The role of anxiety and unfounded beliefs
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Misbehaving in the Corona crisis: The role of anxiety and unfounded beliefs Nikola Erceg 1
&
Mitja Ružojčić 1 & Zvonimir Galić 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The aim of our study was to explore psychological determinants of COVID-19 responsible behavior. We focused on trait anxiety and worry about the corona crisis, knowledge and unfounded beliefs about coronavirus and thinking dispositions (cognitive reflection, actively open-minded thinking, faith in intuition and science curiosity) that should drive knowledge and beliefs. Additionally, we tested the effectiveness of a one-shot intervention based on the “consider counter-arguments” debiasing technique in changing COVID-19 unfounded beliefs. We used a convenience sample of 1439 participants who filled in the questionnaire on-line. Comparison of latent means showed that the “consider counter-arguments” intervention did not affect unfounded beliefs. Structural equation model, conducted on 962 participants with data on all variables, indicated that greater worry and weaker endorsement of COVID-19 unfounded beliefs lead to more responsible COVID-19 behavior. The relationship of trait anxiety and thinking dispositions with the criterion was mediated through the worry about COVID-19 and unfounded beliefs about COVID-19, respectively. Keywords Coronavirus . Responsible behavior . Unfounded beliefs . Actively open-minded thinking . Anxiety
Introduction The goal of this research was to investigate psychological determinants of responsible behavior in the COVID-19 (C-19) crisis. We focused on two groups of possible antecedents. The first group are feelings of worry and anxiety that accompany the perception of the situation. The second group encompasses knowledge about the situation but also unfounded beliefs that frequently thrive in crises and, thus, possibly drive irresponsible behaviors. Finally, we also tested a “oneshot” intervention, namely a manipulation of instruction, aimed at improving formation of beliefs related to C-19 crisis. A recent study showed that being exposed to C-19 information increases anxiety and worry (Sorokowski et al. 2020) and several strains of evidence show that worry and anxiety can have a positive effect on health behavior. First, both worry and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01040-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Nikola Erceg [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Ivana Lucica 3, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia
anxiety are generally related to responsible and protective health behavior. Recent reviews show that worry predicts adaptive preparation and planning, uptake of healthpromoting behaviors and seeking information in response to stressful events (Sweeny and Dooley 2017), but also increased uptake of tests to detect presence or risk of various cancers, intentions to obtain a Lyme disease vaccine or engage
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