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Conspiracy theories widely influence our social and political lives. A recent example is the broad impact such theories had on government's efforts to halt the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that context, public's compliance and willingness to get vaccinated was found to be substantially and negatively affected by the belief in conspiracy theories, among various factors. In the present study, we tested whether some countries are more susceptible to conspiracy theories than others. We examined, for the first time, the idea that the degree of intensity of conflict predicts the degree of belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. A multilevel analysis across 66 countries (N = 46,450) demonstrated that people living in countries with higher conflict intensity tended to be more susceptible to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. These findings are the first large-scale comparative evidence of the profound psychological effects of conflicts on the involved societies. Public Significance StatementThe belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories has severe implications on public's health. Thus, it is important to better understand the reasons behind such beliefs. The present study provides new information which helps to better understand the contexts in which conspiracy belief thrive.

Members of historically advantaged groups are often unwilling to support actions or policies aimed at reducing inequality between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, even if they generally support the principle of equality. Based on past research, we suggest a self-affirmation intervention (an intervention in which people reflect on a positive trait or value in order to affirm their positive self-image) may be effective for increasing the willingness of advantaged group members to address inequality. Importantly, while self-affirmation has been only operationalized as a written exercise in the past, in this project, we adapt it into video messages for use in public campaigns. In Study 1, we experimentally tested an initial video adaptation of self-affirmation and found that it was effective in increasing the willingness of advantaged group members to address inequality in the context of Jewish–Arab relations in Israel. Based on this study, two NGOs developed a real campaign video and used it in their public campaign, and we tested this applied intervention (in Study 2) and found it to be effective compared to a control condition that only presented information about inequality. Together, these studies represent the first implementation of self-affirmation in real-world campaigns and indicate that it can be an effective way to increase support for action to address inequality.