Different paths to COVID-19’s conspiratorial beliefs for the religious and spiritual: The roles of analytic and open-minded thinking (preprint)

With the threat of COVID-19, conspiratorial beliefs have proliferated, and people’s religiosity has risen. However, religiosity may only capture a narrow range of people’s meta-physical beliefs, spirituality may capture other aspects, and both of which may be associated with conspiratorial beliefs differently. To better understand the distinction between these traits, in a community sample of 662 Poles, we examined the correlations between them and misperceptions about COVID-19 (i.e., conspiracy and false factual beliefs) and the mediating role of analytic thinking and a tendency to be open-minded about evidence. Religiosity and spirituality were associated with misperceptions—directly and indirectly—but the associations were positive in the former and negative in the latter. The research points to the importance of studying both religiosity and spirituality in the context of cognition and misperceptions.