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Different paths to COVID-19’s conspiratorial beliefs for the religious and spiritual: The roles of analytic and open-minded thinking
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Abstract
With the threat of COVID-19, conspiratorial beliefs have proliferated, and people’s religiosity has risen. However, religiosity may only capture a narrow range of people’s meta-physical beliefs, spirituality may capture other aspects, and both of which may be associated with conspiratorial beliefs differently. To better understand the distinction between these traits, in a community sample of 662 Poles, we examined the correlations between them and misperceptions about COVID-19 (i.e., conspiracy and false factual beliefs) and the mediating role of analytic thinking and a tendency to be open-minded about evidence. Religiosity and spirituality were associated with misperceptions—directly and indirectly—but the associations were positive in the former and negative in the latter. The research points to the importance of studying both religiosity and spirituality in the context of cognition and misperceptions.
The present study aimed to investigate the effect of activating religiosity and spirituality on beliefs that comprise contaminated mindware (i.e., paranormal, pseudoscience, and conspiracy beliefs). In order to test this assumption, we conducted three experimental studies (combined sample N = 499) in which religiosity and spirituality were activated (by answering three kinds of questions). Dependent variables were measured by short scales of paranormal, pseudoscientific, and conspiracy beliefs. Obtained results show that activating religiosity and spirituality does not contribute to an increase in beliefs that comprise contaminated mindware. Additional Bayesian analyses show that our data provide at least moderate evidence for the null hypotheses to be true. In the light of conducted experiments, the positive relationship between spirituality, religiosity, and contaminated mindware observed in previous works seems to not have a causal nature. Instead, it may result from indirect factors such as cognitive abilities, cognitive styles, or worldviews.
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