Contracting COVID-19: a longitudinal investigation of the impact of beliefs and knowledge

  1. Courtney A. Moore
  2. Benjamin C. Ruisch
  3. Javier A. Granados Samayoa
  4. Shelby T. Boggs
  5. Jesse T. Ladanyi
  6. Russell H. Fazio

Reviewed by

Read the full article See related articles

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

Recent work has found that an individual’s beliefs and personal characteristics can impact perceptions of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Certain individuals—such as those who are politically conservative or who endorse conspiracy theories—are less likely to engage in preventative behaviors like social distancing. The current research aims to address whether these individual differences not only affect people’s reactions to the pandemic, but also their actual likelihood of contracting COVID-19. In the early months of the pandemic, U.S. participants responded to a variety of individual difference measures as well as questions specific to the pandemic itself. Four months later, 2120 of these participants responded with whether they had contracted COVID-19. Nearly all of our included individual difference measures significantly predicted whether a person reported testing positive for the virus in this four-month period. Additional analyses revealed that all of these relationships were primarily mediated by whether participants held accurate knowledge about COVID-19. These findings offer useful insights for developing more effective interventions aimed at slowing the spread of both COVID-19 and future diseases. Moreover, some findings offer critical tests of the validity of such theoretical frameworks as those concerning conspiratorial ideation and disgust sensitivity within a real-world context.

Article activity feed

  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41598-021-99981-8
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.15.21255556: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsConsent: Measures: After providing informed consent, participants completed a wide range of questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
    Sex as a biological variableA total of 2,120 individuals, all US residents, completed this survey (1,031 women, 1,074 men, 15 no response; Mage = 40.39, SDage = 15.34).
    Randomization” Participants were then randomly assigned to one of four subsets of the remaining predictor variables, which were grouped according to theoretical and empirical relatedness.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.04.15.21255556v1 on medRxiv