National Survey Finds Men Most Likely to Believe COVID Conspiracies
By: Mina Mohammadi
Men are more susceptible to believing fake news and misinformation about COVID-19 than compared to women, according to a new national survey led by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern and Rutgers universities.
These findings — released on Wednesday — fall against a backdrop of what scholars and public health officials have described as a “misinfodemic: a parallel epidemic of misinformation” around COVID-19.
The 21,196 survey participants across the 50 states were shown six false claims about COVID-19 related conspiracies or risk factors and whether they believed the claims were accurate.
Among many survey discoveries, respondents willingness to believe in false claims was strikingly split amongst gender identity.
“Overall male respondents have a 15% chance of believing a given false claim, compared to a 12% chance for female respondents,” read the study.
The study also stated that a possible explanation for this phenomenon is that men are more willing than women to express opinions, citing overconfidence bias.
A New York Times article back in August titled “Are New Yorkers Wearing Masks?” seems to support these findings. The study conducted in the article found that on average those ignoring the mask rule are nearly twice as likely to be men as women.
The study also found that people who believed most of these false claims recorded a lower likelihood of following mask-wearing guidelines, falling in line with the New York Times piece.
In an interview with Northwestern Now, James Druckman, the Payson S. Wild Professor of political science at Northwestern University cited the main concern of the study.
“This misinformation may in turn have dire consequences when it comes to individual behaviors and group attributions [including mask-wearing],” said Druckman
