Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a novel threat and traditional and new media provide people with an abundance of information and misinformation on the topic. In the current study, we investigated who tends to trust what type of mis/information. The data were collected in Norway from a sample of 405 participants during the first wave of COVID-19 in April 2020. We focused on three kinds of belief: the belief that the threat is overrated (COVID-threat skepticism), the belief that the threat is underrated (COVID-threat belief) and belief in misinformation about COVID-19. We studied sociodemographic factors associated with these beliefs and the interplay between attitudes to COVID-19, media consumption and prevention behavior. All three types of belief were associated with distrust in information about COVID-19 provided by traditional media and distrust in the authorities' approach to the pandemic. COVID-threat skepticism was associated with male gender, reduced news consumption since the start of the pandemic and lower levels of precautionary measures. Belief that the COVID-19 threat is underrated was associated with younger age, left-wing political orientation, increased news consumption during the pandemic and increased precautionary behavior. Consistent with the assumptions of the theory of planned behavior, individual beliefs about the seriousness of the COVID-19 threat predicted the extent to which individual participants adopted precautionary health measures. Both COVID-threat skepticism and COVID-threat belief were associated with endorsement of misinformation on COVID-19. Participants who endorsed misinformation tended to: have lower levels of education; be male; show decreased news consumption; have high Internet use and high trust in information provided by social media. Additionally, they tended to endorse multiple misinformation stories simultaneously, even when they were mutually contradictory. The strongest predictor for low compliance with precautionary measures was endorsement of a belief that the COVID-19 threat is overrated which at the time of the data collection was held also by some experts and featured in traditional media. The findings stress the importance of consistency of communication in situations of a public health threat.
Highlights
There is clear evidence that public reactions to health communications are influenced significantly by the characteristics of warning messages and that, in order to achieve optimal responses from the population, public health communications should have the attributes of specificity, consistency, certainty, clarity, accuracy and sufficiency (Mileti and Peek, 2000)
The sample had an overall high trust in authorities in handling the pandemic (M = 3.09, SD = 0.50) and distrusted misinformation on COVID-19 (M = 1.21, SD = 0.27). Participants indicated that they trusted information about COVID-19 from traditional media (M = 3.70, SD = 0.74) more than from social media (M = 2.50, SD = 1.13); t(404) = 20.68, p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.514
This study shows that there are intelligible relationships between people’s beliefs and doubts about the seriousness of the pandemic, their trust in authorities, their susceptibility to misinformation and their engagement with precautionary behaviors
Summary
There is clear evidence that public reactions to health communications are influenced significantly by the characteristics of warning messages and that, in order to achieve optimal responses from the population, public health communications should have the attributes of specificity, consistency, certainty, clarity, accuracy and sufficiency (Mileti and Peek, 2000). An example of one controversy was the variation in messages about the use of face masks by asymptomatic individuals, which spanned from being discounted as a COVID-19 myth (McLaughlin, 2020), through warnings that risks associated with using face masks might outweigh their benefits (Lazzarino et al, 2020), to including them in official recommendations (BBC News, 2020; Brooks et al, 2020; Turak, 2020) Another topic of dispute was whether COVID-19 is airborne or whether close contact with an infected person is necessary for transmission to occur (Rabin and Anthes, 2021). Blurring of the line between fact and misinformation has appeared in other COVID-19 news topics, for instance in relation to claims that COVID-19 originated from a research laboratory (Brewster, 2020; Wade, 2021)
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