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A new paper from Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center analyzes data from three COVID-19 pandemic years and finds that those with conspiracy mindsets discount messages from sources they don’t trust; challenges to misinformation are most effective from their own trusted community.
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Scholars have found that acceptance of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories is associated with hesitance to take a COVID-19 vaccine. But data gathered during the pandemic about belief in COVID-specific conspiracy theories cannot determine whether what is at play are conspiracy beliefs that the …
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Antisemitism has been called the oldest hatred, spanning nearly 2,000 years, and as recent events have made clear, it is alive and well in the 21st century. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2021, the highest number ever recorded …
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This semester, Robert Gerard Pietrusko joined the standing faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture as an associate professor, following a decade on the landscape architecture faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His design work, which is produced under the name of his …
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How do people come to believe in conspiracy theories? It’s a question Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Dolores Albarracín has been thinking about for decades. “I grew up in Argentina in the ’70s, during the Dirty War that eventually led to the disappearance of 30,000 Argentines. The …
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In the fourth survey conducted with a nationally representative sample of more than 1,600 U.S. adults, in November 2021 the Annenberg Public Policy Center continued its tracking of misbeliefs and conspiracy theories that have persisted and, in rare cases, grown since the inception of the pandemic. …
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The report uses the term unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, rather than unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. Why is there a distinction? Much in the same way that we moved away from saying ‘flying saucers’ and started saying ‘UFOs,’ I think UAP acknowledges that not everything everyone sees is …
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Belief in conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic increased through the early months of the U.S. outbreak among people who reported being heavy users of conservative and social media, a study by Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) researchers has found. Prior APPC research found that people who …
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Belief in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic is not only persistent but also is associated with reluctance to accept a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available and to engage in behaviors such as mask-wearing that can prevent its spread, according to researchers at the Annenberg …
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