Abstract
In times of uncertainty, people often seek out information to help alleviate fear, possibly leaving them vulnerable to false information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we attended to a viral spread of incorrect and misleading information that compromised collective actions and public health measures to contain the spread of the disease. We investigated the influence of fear of COVID-19 on social and cognitive factors including believing in fake news, bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, and problem-solving—within two of the populations that have been severely hit by COVID-19: Italy and the United States of America. To gain a better understanding of the role of misinformation during the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also investigated whether problem-solving ability and socio-cognitive polarization were associated with believing in fake news. Results showed that fear of COVID-19 is related to seeking out information about the virus and avoiding infection in the Italian and American samples, as well as a willingness to share real news (COVID and non-COVID-related) headlines in the American sample. However, fear positively correlated with bullshit receptivity, suggesting that the pandemic might have contributed to creating a situation where people were pushed toward pseudo-profound existential beliefs. Furthermore, problem-solving ability was associated with correctly discerning real or fake news, whereas socio-cognitive polarization was the strongest predictor of believing in fake news in both samples. From these results, we concluded that a construct reflecting cognitive rigidity, neglecting alternative information, and black-and-white thinking negatively predicts the ability to discern fake from real news. Such a construct extends also to reasoning processes based on thinking outside the box and considering alternative information such as problem-solving.
Highlights
“If it bleeds, it leads” cites a well-known mantra of journalism
In light of previous studies showing that stress, high risk-taking and anxiety of running out of time deteriorate creativity, and problem-solving performance (Salvi et al, 2016a; Salvi and Bowden, 2019; Duan et al, 2020) we hypothesized that the problem-solving performance would relate to a greater likelihood of detecting fake news, whereas fear of COVID-19 would lead to worse problem-solving performance
In support of our hypothesis that COVID-19 fear would predict likelihood to share news, we found that COVID-19 fear positively correlates with willingness to share both COVID-19 [r = 0.15, 95% CI = (−0.05, 0.35), p = 0.01] and neutral [r = 0.17, 95% CI = (0.07, 0.45), p = 0.01] news in the American sample
Summary
“If it bleeds, it leads” cites a well-known mantra of journalism. When a story involves deaths or injury of some kind, it is more likely to be discussed on the media, to receive a higher number of clicks on the internet and be shared. In this study, we sought to understand the potential role of a range of emotional, social, and cognitive factors underlying the infodemic during the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic To this end, we investigated how fear of the COVID-19 pandemic is related to information seeking and proactive health behavior, fake news detection and sharing, propensity toward pseudo-profound beliefs, overclaiming false information, and problem-solving. The participants included a set of news headlines split by news-type (COVID-19-related or neutral) and veracity (fake or real); a series of questions to assess COVID-related fear and information-seeking proactivity; problem-solving tasks including the CRT and a set of visual and semantic puzzles (i.e., Rebus puzzles: MacGregor and Cunningham, 2008; Salvi et al, 2015a,b); and a series of scales measuring bullshit receptivity, propensity toward overclaiming, political ideology, xenophobia, and absolutism (See Figure 1 for a summary of the experimental hypotheses)
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