Media Exposure to Conspiracy vs. Anti-conspiracy Information. Effects on the Willingness to Accept a COVID-19 Vaccine.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic opened the doors for a corresponding “infodemic”, associated with various misleading narratives related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. As the way to stop the pandemic was unveiled, misleading narratives switched from the disease itself to the vaccine. Nevertheless, a rather scarce corpus of literature has approached the effects of these narratives on the willingness to take a vaccine against COVID-19. This study investigates how exposure to conspiracy narratives versus information that counter these narratives influences people’s willingness to get vaccinated. Based on an experimental design, using a sample of Romanian students (N=301), this research shows that exposure to factual information related to COVID-19 vaccines meant to debunk conspiracy theories leads to higher willingness to vaccinate. Furthermore, this study shows that young, educated Romanians consider distant others to be more influenced by conspiracy theories on this topic, and, therefore, more prone to exhibit hesitancy towards COVID-19 vaccination.

Do conspiracy theories circulating in the media or their debunking affect people’s trust in the media?

“…If such an effect does in fact exist, then it could be argued that perhaps the direction of the effect or its strength depend to a higher extent on people’s belief in such conspiracy narratives about vaccination. Even though belief in conspiracy theories has been previously investigated in the COVID-19 context, to our knowledge, this variable has only been used as predictor, for example of vaccine hesitancy (McCarthy et al, 2022; Nuzhath et al, 2020; Ullah et al, 2021) or compliance with restrictive measures (Corbu et al, 2021; Freeman et al, 2022; Murphy et al, 2022), or as a dependent variable, with the purpose of understanding its predictors (Buturoiu et al, 2021a; Jennings et al, 2021; Tonković et al, 2021; Uscinski et al, 2020). In this study, we investigate whether belief in conspiracy theories about vaccination in the COVID-19 context could moderate the effect of conspiracy narratives circulating in the media on media trust:…”