Psychological correlates of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and preventive measures: Evidence from Turkey
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Psychological correlates of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and preventive measures: Evidence from Turkey Sinan Alper 1
&
Fatih Bayrak 2 & Onurcan Yilmaz 3
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract COVID-19 pandemic has led to popular conspiracy theories regarding its origins and widespread concern over the level of compliance with preventive measures. In the current preregistered research, we recruited 1088 Turkish participants and investigated (a) individual differences associated with COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs; (2) whether such conspiracy beliefs are related to the level of preventive measures; and (3) other individual differences that might be related to the preventive measures. Higher faith in intuition, uncertainty avoidance, impulsivity, generic conspiracy beliefs, religiosity, and right-wing ideology, and a lower level of cognitive reflection were associated with a higher level of belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. There was no association between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and preventive measures while perceived risk was positively and impulsivity negatively correlated with preventive measures. We discuss the implications and directions for future research. Keywords COVID-19 . Conspiracy . Individual differences . Pandemic . Preventive
As of April 2020, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has not only resulted in over 2 million cases and 130,000 deaths (World Health Organization 2020a), but also led to popular conspiracy theories regarding its origins. In the current preregistered research, we recruited a large sample (N = 1088) from an underrepresented society in psychology literature, Turkey, which also happens to be the seventh country in the world with the most COVID-19 cases, as of April 2020. We aimed to investigate (1) individual differences that might be associated with COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs; (2) whether COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs were related to the preventive measures (e.g., social distancing, wearing masks, etc.); and (3) how individual differences in several psychological variables including risk perception, uncertainty avoidance, and intuitive thinking style were related to the level of preventive measures. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00903-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sinan Alper [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Yasar University, Izmir, Turkey
2
Department of Psychology, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey
3
Department of Psychology, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey
Predictors of COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs Conspiracy theories are unwarranted beliefs that certain events are planned and carried out by secret, malevolent, and powerful organizations (Douglas and Sutton 2015; Swami and Furnham 2014). The desire to understand and control events around can be met through conspiracy theories, and so it provides satisfaction to epistemic, existential, and social motives (Douglas et al.
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