Daniel Roberts had not been vaccinated since he was six years old. His parents taught him that vaccines were dangerous and when the coronavirus arrived, they argued it was an invention. The real threat, they assured him, was the vaccine.
So when this 29-year-old from Tennessee was vaccinated against COVID-19 at a Walmart store last month, it really was a personal milestone. A break with the past.
“Five hundred thousand people died in this country. It’s not an invention, ”said Roberts, speaking of the conspiracy theories that many of his family and friends believe. ‘I don’t know why I don’t believe in all those things. I think I would rather believe the facts.
As the world tries to contain COVID-19, psychologists and disinformation experts are analyzing why the pandemic has generated so many conspiracy theories that people refuse to wear masks, keep their distance and get vaccinated.
They note a link between belief in falsehoods about COVID-19 and reliance on social networks as a source of information.
And they come to the conclusion that conspiracy theories make people more in control of a situation that scares them.
“We need to learn from what happened and make sure we can prevent it from happening again,” said former United States Secretary of Health Richard Carmona, who under George W. Bush Jr. served. The masks have become a symbol of your political party. People say vaccines are useless. The average person is confused. Who do you believe?
In the United States, one in four people believe the pandemic was caused deliberately, according to a Pew Research Center survey from June last year. Other conspiracy theories focus on economic restrictions and vaccine safety.
False claims are increasingly causing real problems.
In January, anti-vaccine activists forced the closure of the vaccination center at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for a day. In Europe, dozens of mobile phone signal towers were burned for the false claim that 5G technology signals were infecting humans. Elsewhere, a pharmacist destroyed doses of COVID vaccines, medical personnel were attacked and hundreds of people died after ingesting toxins presented as drugs, all as a result of falsehoods about COVID-19.
The most popular conspiracy theories help explain complex events in which it is difficult to accept the truth, said Helen Lee Bouygues, founder and president of the Reboot Foundation in Paris, which researches and promotes critical thinking in the Internet age.
These theories generally spread after major events, such as the moon landing, the September 11, 2001 attacks, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when many people refused to accept that a single deranged person could have murdered a president.
“People need big explanations for big problems, big events,” said John Cook, a cognitive scientist and conspiracy theorist at Monash University in Australia. “Simple explanations – such as that bats spread the virus – are not psychologically satisfying.”
The need for something bigger is so great, Cook said, that people often believe conflicting conspiracy theories. Roberts said his parents, for example, initially thought COVID-19 was linked to the phone towers, only to later decide it was all a sham. The only statements they did not take into account were those of medical experts.
Mistrust in science, institutions and traditional news sources often leads to conspiracy theories and belief in pseudosciences.
The mistrust is encouraged by leaders like Donald Trump, who repeatedly downplayed the virus and undermined experts in his own administration.
An analysis by Cornell University researchers found that Trump was the main propagator of false claims about COVID-19. Other studies agree that conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and spread misinformation about the virus.
Facebook, Twitter and other platforms have been criticized for allowing the spread of false information. They are more determined to contain misinformation about COVID-19, which suggests that Cook says they could do more to avoid misinformation around other issues.
“The solution to all this is education,” said Bouygues. “COVID has shown us how dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories can be.”