Examining Conspiracy Theory Spillover in Health Communication Arena: Factors that Impact COVID-19 Conspiratorial Beliefs and Health-Related Behaviors
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Health Communication
Volume 10 – 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1548575
This article is part of the Research TopicHealth Misinformation: Examining Its Presence and Impact across Communication ContextsView all 10 articles
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Georgia, Athens, United States
- 2University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States
- 3Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, United States
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This study tested the strength of different groups of individual-level variables in predicting conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and related health behaviors, by conducting a survey on a national online sample of U.S. adults. The results indicated that, among a wide range of individual-level variables including psychopathological variables, cognitive variables, trust perceptions, trait emotions emotional, health-related variables, and demographics, general belief in conspiracy theories (CTs) best predicted belief in specific COVID-19 CTs. In addition, our results showed that higher people belief in COVID-19 CTs served as asis a significant negative predictor of engaging in less lower avoidance behavior. Furthermore, our results indicated that belief in general CTs itself doesn’t directly cause a change in avoidance behavior; it works through thethe relationship is instead mediated by belief in COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, CTs. as it mediated the relationship between belief in general CTs and avoidance behavior. Perceived severity of COVID-19 was the best predictor for proactive health behavior, whereas actual vaccination behavior was best predicted by confidence in COVID-19 vaccines. These results were interpreted using a framework that combines health communication theories with the concepts of path-dependency and spillover effects in conspiratorial thinking. The results are interpreted in light of health communication theoretical models, assumptions of path-dependency in conspiratorial thinking, and conspiracy theories spillover effect
Keywords: Conspiracy theories, COVID-19, health behaviors, Spillover effect, Public Health
Received: 19 Dec 2024; Accepted: 23 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pjesivac, Klein, Zhao, Lu and Jin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ivanka Pjesivac, University of Georgia, Athens, United States
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