Contextualized Knowledge Reduces Misconceived COVID-19 Health Decisions

Abstract

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre -including this research content -immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Scientific and Folk Theories of Viral Transmission: A Comparison of COVID-19 and the Common Cold

“…Why these correlations obtained is not yet clear. Nonetheless, the findings provide further support for the suggestion that interventions to encourage greater adherence to public health recommendations likely will need to target a range of factors that contribute to distrust of scientific evidence (e.g., Chinn et al, 2021 ; Kubin et al, 2021 ; Murray et al, 2021 ), in addition to misconceptions and informational gaps in lay theories ( Weisman and Markman, 2017 ).…”

“…The data also revealed complexities in people’s reasoning, consistent with individuals appealing to multiple explanatory frameworks, including the co-existence of viral and non-viral explanatory accounts; multiple stances or modes of construal wherein viruses were variously characterized as biological, psychological, and/or mechanical entities; and at times a reliance on placeholder concepts that gestured toward an explanation without providing a mechanistic account. The presence of multiple frameworks supports a growing body of evidence that lay understandings of science may be fragmentary, conflicting, and/or inconsistent (see also Chinn and Brewer, 1993 ; Di Sessa et al, 2004 ; Keil, 2006 ; Koslowski, 2013 ; Shtulman and Legare, 2020 ; Murray et al, 2021 , for fuller discussion). As a consequence, this may foster disengagement with public health recommendations, due to a lack of understanding of how changes in behaviors can result in more positive outcomes ( Prochaska, 2020 ), as for example when people hold erroneous beliefs regarding vaccine safety and/or efficacy.…”

“…We probed these understandings, and the language used to express them, by means of a rich set of open-ended questions and “why/how” questions in order to elicit participants’ in-depth reasoning and explanations. This provides complementary evidence to methods such as reaction times ( Shtulman and Valcarcel, 2012 ), mouse-tracking ( Murray et al, 2021 ), or neuroimaging ( Masson et al, 2014 ), which focus on rapid, real-time processing of multiple explanatory accounts.…”

“…Although much of this work is not directly relevant to causal theories (e.g., focusing instead on behavioral consequences of quarantining, remote schooling, and mask-wearing), studies that have examined beliefs about viral transmission suggest that adults in the U.S. hold a mixture of accurate and inaccurate beliefs, and that their beliefs relate to perceptions of risk, health-related decision-making, and interest in being vaccinated (see DeJesus et al, 2021 ; Leotti et al, 2021 , for research on children’s beliefs). For example, in a sample of U.S. residents tested in October/November of 2020, Murray et al (2021) assessed people’s knowledge about germs, asking them to judge as true or false a range of statements either consistent with scientific theory (e.g., “Being depressed can make a person sick”; “Germs enter the body through the eyes”) or inconsistent with scientific theory but consistent with naïve theory (e.g., “Water kills germs”; “Vitamins and minerals can cure viruses”). They found that individuals who had more knowledge about viral disease were more likely to make decisions consistent with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and expressed less cognitive conflict.…”

Effects of health misinformation on misbeliefs: understanding the moderating roles of different types of knowledge

“…Scholars and professionals concur that health promotion programs need to increase people’s awareness of health issues and equip them with the knowledge that will help them make better individual choices and support public health decisions (National Cancer Institute, 2012). Studies have established empirically that knowledge about health helps people process conflicting information and adapt to updated guidelines for health behaviors (Murray et al , 2021).…”