Are Conspiracy Theories Harmless?

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the consequences of conspiracy theories and the COVID-19 pandemic raised this interest to another level. In this article, I will outline what we know about the consequences of conspiracy theories for individuals, groups, and society, arguing that they are certainly not harmless. In particular, research suggests that conspiracy theories are associated with political apathy, support for non-normative political action, climate denial, vaccine refusal, prejudice, crime, violence, disengagement in the workplace, and reluctance to adhere to COVID-19 recommendations. In this article, I will also discuss the challenges of dealing with the negative consequences of conspiracy theories, which present some opportunities for future research.

Political discourse, denialism and leadership failure in Brazil's response to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges for healthcare systems and political leaders across the globe. In this case study of Brazil, we argue that leadership failings at the highest level contributed to Brazil's relatively high and escalating death rates during 2020. Drawing on an analysis of a large amount of textual documentation drawn from media reports, we emphasise the role and consequences of President Jair Bolsonaro's political discourse and prioritisation of the economy. We focus on the first wave that swept across the globe between January and late June of 2020, arguing that Bolsonaro underplayed the seriousness of the epidemic, leveraged misinformation as a political strategy, promoted pseudoscience, and undermined the Ministry of Health. He also confronted subnational governments for adopting lockdown measures - a move that enabled him to blame regional governors for the short-term economic costs of COVID-19 related restrictions. We suggest that his denialist approach to climate change paved the way for his subsequent denialism of the seriousness of COVID-19 and for his undermining of social distancing, mask-wearing and other preventative responses supported by science. These sobering findings highlight the role that national leaders can play in undermining scientific approaches to both public health and the environment.

The cognitive science of COVID-19: Acceptance, denial, and belief change.

Because the spread of pandemics depends heavily on human choices and behaviors, dealing with COVID-19 requires insights from cognitive science which integrates psychology, neuroscience, computer modeling, philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics. Cognitive models can explain why scientists adopt hypotheses about the causes and treatments of disease based on explanatory coherence. Irrational deviations from good reasoning are explained by motivated inference in which conclusions are influenced by personal goals that contribute to emotional coherence. Decisions about COVID-19 can also be distorted by well-known psychological and neural mechanisms. Cognitive science provides advice about how to improve human behavior in pandemics by changing beliefs and by improving behaviors that result from intention-action gaps.

[Coronavirus: Predictive brain and terror management]. / Coronavirus : cerveau prédictif et gestion de la terreur.

Emerging infectious diseases like Covid-19 cause a major threat to global health. When confronted with new pathogens, individuals generate several beliefs about the epidemic phenomenon. Many studies have shown that individual protective behaviors largely depend on these beliefs. Due to the absence of treatment and vaccine against these emerging pathogens, the relation between these beliefs and these behaviors represents a crucial issue for public health policies. In the premises of the Covid-19 pandemic, several preliminary studies have highlighted a delay in the perception of risk by individuals, which potentially holds back the implementing of the necessary precautionary measures: people underestimated the risks associated with the virus, and therefore also the importance of complying with sanitary guidelines. During the peak of the pandemic, the salience of the threat and of the risk of mortality could then have transformed the way people generate their beliefs. This potentially leads to upheavals in the way they understand the world. Here, we propose to explore the evolution of beliefs and behaviors during the Covid-19 crisis, using the theory of predictive coding and the theory of terror management, two influential frameworks in cognitive science and in social psychology.

[Consequences, visibility and denial of a pandemic: processes of self-care]. / Consecuencias, visibilizaciones y negaciones de una pandemia: los procesos de autoatención.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown - once again - the decisive and structural importance of health/disease/care-prevention processes, as it has generated consequences and reactions in all areas of collective and individual life in ways that no other process could. That being said, it was expected that the intelligentsia would focus their attention on these processes; however, figures such as Agamben and Zizek leaped at the opportunity to frame the pandemic in terms of their perennially unfulfilled socio-ideological prophecies rather than attempting to understand the reality of the pandemic as a health/disease/care-prevention process. Taking these dominant tendencies among contemporary intellectuals as a starting point, in this article I analyze the self-care processes of micro-groups related to disease, which have informed health policies in all countries. In other words, the core strategy for combatting COVID-19 has been and continues to be self-care, which constitutes one of the basic structures that micro-groups generate in order to live and to survive, but that biomedicine has coopted as a "policy" of its own making, thereby masking once again the true locus of power in containing the pandemic.

La pandemia de COVID-19 evidenció, una vez más, la importancia estructural y decisiva de los procesos de salud/enfermedad/atención-prevención, dado que ha generado consecuencias y reacciones en todos los ámbitos de la vida colectiva e individual, como ningún otro proceso podría generar. En función de ello, se esperaba que la intelligentzia focalizara el papel de este tipo de procesos, pero una vez más los Agamben y los Zizek buscaron de inmediato en la pandemia sus profecías socioideológicas nunca cumplidas, en lugar de tratar de entender la realidad que estaba generando la pandemia en tanto proceso de salud/enfermedad/atención-prevención. Sobre la base de estas tendencias dominantes en la intelectualidad actual, en este texto realicé un análisis de los procesos de autoatención de los padecimientos, basados en los microgrupos, que han constituido el eje de las políticas de salud en todos los países. Es decir, el núcleo básico para enfrentar al COVID-19 ha sido y sigue siendo la autoatención, que constituye una de las estructuras que los microgrupos generan para poder vivir y sobrevivir, pero que la biomedicina ha manejado como "política" propia, ocultando una vez más dónde está el real poder de contención de esta pandemia.

Political storms: Emergent partisan skepticism of hurricane risks.

Mistrust of scientific evidence and government-issued guidelines is increasingly correlated with political affiliation. Survey evidence has documented skepticism in a diverse set of issues including climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and, most recently, COVID-19 risks. Less well understood is whether these beliefs alter high-stakes behavior. Combining GPS data for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with 2016 U.S. presidential election precinct-level results, we examine how conservative-media dismissals of hurricane advisories in 2017 influenced evacuation decisions. Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters (34% versus 45%), a gap not present in prior hurricanes. Results are robust to fine-grain geographic controls, which compare likely Clinton and Trump voters living within 150 m of each other. The rapid surge in media-led suspicion of hurricane forecasts-and the resulting divide in self-protective measures-illustrates a large behavioral consequence of science denialism.

"I Was Wrong": A Surgeon's First-Person Account of His COVID-19 Illness.

A surgeon failed to heed his own misgivings on taking a family vacation cruise. Despite scrupulous hand-washing and antiseptic precautions with anything within reach, he contracts COVID-19. His anxiety increased as his condition became increasingly serious: uncontrollable dry coughing spells, spiking fevers, and his worst symptom, progressive dyspnea and chest pain. From what he knew about the disease, he feared admission to the intensive care unit, a step that portended a significantly worse prognosis. After a week-and-a-half of illness, misery, and fear, he began to improve: first, his fevers diminished, breathing came more easily, and coughing spells occurred less frequently, if still unpredictably. Now with his strength slowly returning, he contemplated returning to work but was frustrated when tests showed he was still shedding active virions. Under quarantine and with time to reflect, he cautions against complacency with regard to the infectiousness of COVID-19. His own denial led to the loss of his health and livelihood. At home but still separated from his wife and children in a basement bedroom, the bittersweet circumstances of his reunion with them is a reminder of the preciousness of life and love of family.

The contagion of mortality: A terror management health model for pandemics.

The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, proliferates as a contagious psychological threat just like the physical disease itself. Due to the growing death toll and constant coverage this pandemic gets, it is likely to activate mortality awareness, to greater or lesser extents, depending on a variety of situational factors. Using terror management theory and the terror management health model, we outline reactions to the pandemic that consist of proximal defences aimed at reducing perceived vulnerability to (as well as denial of) the threat, and distal defences bound by ideological frameworks from which symbolic meaning can be derived. We provide predictions and recommendations for shifting reactions to this pandemic towards behaviours that decrease, rather than increase, the spread of the virus. We conclude by considering the benefits of shifting towards collective mindsets to more effectively combat COVID-19 and to better prepare for the next inevitable pandemic.