Government COVID-19 Communication and Conspiracy Theories
Creators: name: Skali, Ahmed
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Economics
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: Summary We ask whether early government communication campaigns about COVID-19 can help stem the increase in conspiratorial beliefs. Specifically, we will examine the correlation between the date of implementation of the first communication campaign at the country level, as captured by variable H1 (Public information campaigns) in the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) dataset, and conspiracy beliefs from the International COVID-19 Study on Moral and Social Psychology (ICSMP, van Bavel et al. 2020), which measures conspiratorial ideation in a sample of over 44,000 individuals in 67 countries. Have any data been collected for this study already? No data on conspiracies has been collected for this project. Data on government communication is captured by variable H1 (Public information campaigns) in the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) dataset. What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? The main hypothesis is that, where governments communicate earlier about COVID-19, beliefs in COVID-related conspiracy theories are smaller. “Earlier” communication here is specifically defined as the number of days between the first communication campaign and either (i) the first COVID-19 case in the country or (ii) the first COVID-19 death in the country (both from OxCGRT). For example, a country which sees its first case of COVID-19 on 10 March 2020 and starts a national communication campaign on 20 March 2020 has an elapsed time of 10 days. The hypothesis is that countries with smaller elapsed times have less belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Our two dependent variables are from the ICSMP and measured on a 1 to 8 scale. For ease of interpretation, we will re-scale these variables between 0 and 1. These dependent variables are: 1) The coronavirus (COVID-19) is a conspiracy to take away citizen’s rights for good and establish an authoritarian government. 2) The coronavirus (COVID-19) is a hoax invented by interest groups for financial gains. Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main hypothesis Our model takes the form: Y_ij= α_0+β_1 Elapsed Time_i+ ϵ_ij where α_0 is a constant term, ϵ_it is an error term, and Elapsed Time is the number of days between the start of government communication campaigns and the first confirmed case of coronavirus in country i. Respondents are indexed by subscript j. Y is either of the two dependent variables discussed in item 4 above. The model will be estimated via ordinary least squares (OLS). One specification will be unconditional, i.e. without any control variables; other specifications will account for the control variables available in the ICSMP dataset (employment status, children [yes/no], marital status, age, sex). Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. The conspiracy theories block comprises of questions that are scored similarly (more belief =&gt; higher numbers), so we cannot identify flat-liners with this block. However, the moral identity block allows us to detect flat-liners (people who answer the same number to all questions in a block, even though it does not make sense to do so). Specifically, we will exclude: Any respondent who answers the same number to these two questions from the moral identity block: It would make me feel good to be a person who has these characteristics; and I would be ashamed to be a person who had these characteristics. Any respondent who answers the same number to these two questions from the moral identity block: Having these characteristics is not really important to me. I strongly desire to have these characteristics. Other: This pre-registration is for secondary analyses conducted with a large dataset from the COVID19 International Collaboration on Social &amp; Moral Psychology (ICSMP). Pre-registration was completed before we accessed the ICSMP dataset.