Mothers are the protagonists in a widespread narrative that emphasizes motherhood as prolonged and exclusive attention to children, accompanied by references to natural competence in child-rearing skills. The present research aimed to investigate the linking mechanisms and conditional processes underlying the perception of mothers’ competence. Cisgender heterosexual Italian participants (N = 230) read one of four vignettes describing a situation in which a mother (i.e., heterosexual biological mother, heterosexual stepmothers, lesbian stepmother, and lesbian biological mother) interacts with her two children who had misbehaved. After reading the vignette, the participants rated the depicted mother’s competence and to what extent the children’s misbehaviour was attributable to the mother. Moderated-mediation analyses indicated that all the non-traditional mothers were perceived as being less competent compared to the heterosexual biological mother, by giving them greater responsibility for their children’s misbehaviour, among participants with medium–high levels of traditional gender-role beliefs. Sexual orientation and biology relatedness were not cumulative variables, but intersecting categories creating a unique way to perceive mothers. As the number of non-traditional families grows, negative societal attitudes toward non-traditional parents and their children should be increasingly considered.
Pivetti et al. (2021a; 2021b) examined links between COVID-related conspiracy beliefs and acceptance of vaccinations in Italy and Finland in 2020. They found that moral purity negatively predicted confidence in science, whereas political orientation predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs. Confidence in science, general conspiracy beliefs, and COVID-related conspiracy beliefs were found to negatively predict support for governmental restrictions and attitudes towards vaccines, and positively predict perceptions of informational contamination. Finally, attitudes towards vaccines in general strongly predicted attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine. The current research seeks to replicate these findings conceptually on a predominately Muslim sample (N = 570, M age = 26.69, 69.8% females) in Turkey in 2021, when the COVID vaccines were widely available. Measures of religiosity and left, center, and right political orientations were added to the original instrument. Hypothesized serial mediational models were tested using structural equation modelling. Results revealed that left and center political orientations positively predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs and confidence in science. Religiosity was negatively related to confidence in science. Confidence in science and COVID-related conspiracy beliefs predicted general attitudes toward vaccines. Conspiracy beliefs predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs, which in turn negatively predicted support for government restrictions and positively predicted distrust in mainstream media. Attitudes towards vaccines were strongly and positively related to attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. [This paper was added to the Special Issue on “Conspiracy Theories about Infectious Diseases” in a post-hoc manner. Online publishing allows the addition of new papers to a published special issue, thereby permitting a special issue to grow.]
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