Daniel Roberts has not been vaccinated since he was six years old. His parents taught him that vaccines were dangerous and when the coronavirus arrived, they argued that it was an invention. The real threat, they assured him, was the vaccine.
That’s why when this 29-year-old from Tennessee was vaccinated against COVID-19 at a Walmart store last month, it was a real personal milestone. A break with the past.
“Five hundred thousand people died in this country. It’s not an invention,” Roberts said of conspiracy theories that many of his family and friends believe in. “I don’t know why I don’t believe in all these things. I guess I preferred to believe in the facts.”
At a time when the world is trying to contain VOCID-19, psychologists and misinformation experts are analyzing why the pandemic generated so many conspiracy theories, which make people refuse to use mouthguards, to keep distances already vaccinated. if.
They note a relationship between the belief in falsehoods around COVID-19 and reliance on social media as a source of information.
And they are coming to the conclusion that conspiracy theories make people feel more in control of a situation that scares them.
“We need to learn from what has happened, make sure we can prevent it from happening again,” said former U.S. Secretary of Health Richard Carmona, who served under the government of George W. Bush’s son. “Mouthpieces 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 created intentionally, according to a study by the Pew Research Center in June last year. Other conspiracy theories focus on economic constraints and vaccine safety.
False claims create more and more real problems.
In January, anti-vaccine activists forced the closure of a vaccination center installed at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles for a day. In Europe, dozens of towers that transmit cell phone signals were burned by the false claim that 5G technology signals were infecting people. Elsewhere, 1 pharmacist destroyed doses of COVID vaccines, medical personnel were attacked and hundreds of people died after ingesting toxins presented as a cure, all due to falsehoods about COVID-19.
The most popular conspiracy theories help to explain complex events, in which it is difficult to accept the truth, according to Helen Lee Bouygues, founder and president of the Paris Reboot Foundation, which researches and promotes critical thinking in the age of ‘Internet.
These theories generally proliferate after major events, such as the alienation, the September 11, 2001 attacks, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when many people refused to accept that a single individual was disturbed. may have killed a president.
“People need big explanations for big problems, big events,” said John Cook, a cognitive scientist and expert on conspiracy theories at Monash University in Australia. “The simple explanations – as the bats spread the virus – are not satisfactory on a psychological level.”
The need for something bigger is such, Cook said, that people often believe contradictory conspiracy theories. Roberts said his parents, for example, initially thought the COVID-19 was tied to telephone towers, only to later decide it was all a hoax. The only explanations they did not take into account were those that came from medical experts.
Distrust of science, institutions, and traditional news sources often generates conspiracy theories and beliefs in pseudoscience.
Distrust is encouraged by leaders like Donald Trump, who has repeatedly downplayed the virus and undermined experts in his own government.
An analysis by Cornell University researchers determined that Trump was the main propagator of false claims about COVID-19. Other studies agree that conservatives are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and spread misinformation about the virus.
Facebook, Twitter and other platforms have been criticized for allowing the dissemination of false information. They have acted with more determination to contain misinformation about COVID-19, suggesting that they could do more to prevent misinformation around other issues, according to Cook.
“The solution to all of this is education,” Bouygues said. “COVID showed us how dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories can be.”