The global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sparked a great interest in psychological factors that determine or explain peoples' responses to the novel threatening situation and the preventive measures (e.g. wearing masks, social distancing). In this study, we focused on contaminated mindware (conspiracy and paranormal beliefs) and investigated its relationship with both acceptance of and adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures, along with other variables from the domains of emotion (trait anxiety, fear), traditional personality traits (Big 5, locus of control, optimism/pessimism) and motivation (self-control, dispositional regulatory focus). A total of 22 variables were measured in an online survey ( N = 374) that took place during the second wave of COVID-19 (Nov. 2020 – March 2021) in Switzerland. Of all variables, the endorsement of specific COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs was most strongly associated with lower acceptance and adherence to the preventive measures, together with mistrust in science and a more right-wing political orientation. In contrast, fear of COVID-19 and prevention regulatory focus were positively associated with acceptance and adherence. Our results therefore highlight the importance of fighting (conspiratorial) misinformation and of increasing the perceived credibility of science in reducing the spread of the coronavirus. Moreover, when acceptance was used as predictor for adherence, agreeableness and dispositional prevention regulatory focus still explained unique variance in adherence, suggesting that such personality and motivational variables play an important role in adhering and regulating preventive behaviour independent from the attitude towards the preventive measures themselves.

Just as perceptual heuristics can lead to visual illusions, cognitive heuristics can lead to biased judgements, such as “illusory pattern perception” (i.e., seeing patterns in unrelated events). Here we further investigated the common underlying mechanism behind irrational beliefs and illusory pattern perception in visual images. For trials in which no object was present in the noise, we found that the tendency to report seeing an object was positively correlated with the endorsement of both COVID-19 specific conspiracy theories and paranormal beliefs. The present results suggest that the cognitive bias to see meaningful connections in noise can have an impact on socio-political cognition as well as on perceptual decision making.

This pre-print-version reports the results of survey-data (n = 374). Information regarding methodology can be found in the document. Abstract:

Previous research indicates that irrational beliefs (Paranormal beliefs & conspiracy theory endorsement) are associated with the perception of patterns in noise, but the previous findings do not conclusively describe this relationship. This study aims to disentangle the underlying parameters of this association by applying a signal detection theory approach, thus allowing to distinguish illusory pattern perception (false alarms) from perceptual sensitivity and response tendencies—while also taking base rate information into account. Results from a large sample (N = 723) indicate that paranormal beliefs relate to a more liberal response bias and a lower perceptual sensitivity, and that this relationship is driven by illusory pattern perception. Such a clear pattern could not be observed for conspiracy beliefs, for which the increase in false alarm rates was moderated by the base rate. The associations between irrational beliefs and illusory pattern perception were however less substantial compared to other sources of variance. Implications are discussed.

This pre-print-version reports the results of survey-data (n = 374). Information regarding methodology can be found in the document. Abstract: