In the coronavirus “infodemic”, people are exposed to both official recommendations and to potentially dangerous pseudoscientific advice claimed to protect against COVID-19. We examined whether irrational beliefs predict adherence to COVID-19 guidelines as well as susceptibility to such misinformation. Irrational beliefs were indexed by cognitive intuition, Type I error cognitive biases, COVID-19 knowledge overestimation, and belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Participants (N=407) reported (a) how often they followed guidelines (e.g., handwashing), (b) how often they engaged in pseudoscientific practices (e.g., consuming garlic, colloidal silver), and (c) their intention to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Conspiratorial beliefs consistently predicted all three outcomes. Cognitive intuition and knowledge overestimation predicted lesser, while cognitive biases predicted greater adherence to guidelines. Cognitive intuition and cognitive biases predicted greater use of pseudoscientific practices. Our results highlight the irrational beliefs predictive of COVID-19 related health behaviors, with conspiracy theories proving to be the most detrimental.

The study aimed to investigate the role of personality, thinking styles, and conspiracy mentality in health-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e., recommended health behaviors according to COVID-19 guidelines and engagement in pseudoscientific practices related to COVID-19. Basic personality space was defined by the HEXACO model complemented by Disintegration, which represents psychotic-like experiences and behaviors reconceptualized as a personality trait. Mediation analyses conducted on a convenient sample from the general population recruited via social media or by snowballing (N=417) showed that engagement in pseudoscientific behaviors was predicted by high Disintegration. However, this relationship was entirely mediated by thinking styles, i.e., high experiential and low rational. Adherence to health practices recommended by COVID-19 guidelines is predicted by low Disintegration and high Honesty traits, but not with thinking styles and conspiracy mentality.

The paper presents a realistic and necessary improvement of the existing current-voltage model for surrounding-gate MOSFETs. The basic model exploits the closed-form solution of Poisson's equation and drift-diffusion model of carrier transport. The model proposed in this paper does not ignore the effect of mobility degradation due to electric field in the channel. The effects of channel length modulation and carriers' velocity saturation are discussed as well.

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