“I Heard That COVID-19 Was...”: Rumors, Pandemic, and Psychological Distance

Abstract

The spread of misinformation through a variety of communication channels has amplified society’s challenge to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing studies have examined how misinformation spreads, few studies have examined the role of psychological distance in people’s mental processing of a rumor and their propensity to accept self-transformed narratives of the message. Based on an open-ended survey data collected in the U.S. ( N = 621) during an early phase of the pandemic, the current study examines how psychological distance relates to the transformation and acceptance of conspiratorial narratives in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two instances of misinformation are examined, both of which were widely heard at the time of data collection: the role of (a) Bill Gates and (b) government during the outbreak of the pandemic. This study uses topic modeling techniques to capture distinctive topical attributes that emerged from rumor narratives. In addition, statistical analyses estimate the psychological distance effects on the salience of topical attributes of a rumor story and an individual’s propensity to believe them. Findings reveal that psychological distance to the threats of COVID-19 influences how misinformation evolves through word-of-mouth, particularly in terms of who is responsible for the pandemic and why the world finds itself in the current situation. Psychological distance also explains why people accept the message to be true. Implications for misinformation and rumor psychology research, as well as avenues for future research, are discussed.

Self-Control, Openness, Personal Need for Structure and Compensatory Control Change: A Serial Mediation Investigation

“…This inclination is reflected in a range of compensatory behaviors that aim to introduce order and structure into the environment, such as embracing conspiracy beliefs, preference for order-providing scientific theories, moral arguments and irrational hoarding [17][18][19]. During the pandemic, several compensatory control behaviors were observed, including the sharing of conspiracy theories on social media, believing and spreading misinformation about the virus and stockpiling food and toiletries [20][21][22].…”

Physicians’ Online Writing Language Style and Patient Satisfaction: The Mediator of Depth of Physician–Patient Interactions

“…Psychological distance refers to how far people perceive things from them temporally, spatially, socially, and hypothetically [35]. Psychology-related literature suggests that people's processing of information (i.e., the way they encode or decode information) changes systematically with their perception of the psychological distance of a message, thus affecting the assessment of its authenticity [36,37]. When the mental distance is distant, people usually abstractly understand messages, presenting greater uncertainty.…”

“…To avoid topic drift, previous literature has focused on the role of psychological distance in how the interacting parties encode information [36,37]. This view suggests that when people interact at a psychological distance, they tend to understand the information abstractly and discuss topics that tend to be more macro and casual, and conversely, when psychological distance is close, people understand the information more concretely.…”

Framing of Information, Psychological Distance, and Belief in Health Related Information under Time Pressure in Older Adults

“…Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010) makes new predictions about the emergence of a negativity bias in truth judgments because it predicts how individuals process information, and more specifically, how different elements of information are weighted. Psychological distance provides some explanation to why individuals accept the message as true (Kwon et al, 2022). Psychological distance refers to a subjective perception of what is close or far away from the self, here, and now, where the "self" serves as a reference point to proximities in terms of social, spatial, and hypothetical (Trope & Liberman, 2010).…”