Political power plays, contradictory messaging, recalled scientific studies, insidious misinformation campaigns, and everyone from POTUS to Madonna chiming in with their suspicions that someone isn’t telling us the full story: the coronavirus pandemic has all the ingredients for stirring doubt.
But according to an academic paper published last week, one group is particularly susceptible to believing sinister explanations. Researchers set out to learn whether that would be Democrats or Republicans. Instead, they found, it’s men.
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In an April survey of 3,000 Americans, co-authors Joanne Miller and Erin Cassese at University of Delaware and Christina Farhart at Carleton College polled participants about 11 popular conspiracy theories. These included claims that China or the U.S. accidentally created and spread the virus; that 5G cellular towers are causing the virus; that Bill Gates is planning to leverage COVID-19 vaccines as a way of injecting people with tracking devices; and that scientists and the media are exaggerating the seriousness of the pandemic in order to damage Donald Trump’s reputation.
Staggeringly high numbers of respondents expressed willingness to believe one if not multiple conflicting theories. Just over half agreed the virus may have been accidentally released by China, 49 percent believe it is a Chinese biological weapon, and 46 percent believe it is either probable or definite that Bill Gates is creating a tracking device to be injected along with a COVID-19 vaccine. The results, published in Politics & Gender, indicated that the group that was most inclined to believe and endorse these theories wasn’t a political issue. Across the board, the coronavirus truthers were more likely to be men.
The researchers found “statistically significant” gender gaps for all 11 theories among Democrats and for nine out of 11 theories among Republicans. In each case, there was just over a 10 percent difference between men and women.
Past research hasn’t revealed any particular gender inclination toward conspiratorial thinking. So why now? And why men?
“We're finding that one of the reasons that men are more likely to believe COVID conspiracy theories, at least right now, is that they're more likely to be feeling helplessness,” Cassese told The Daily Beast.
“In our research, men are scoring higher than women in this specific sample. But if you look back across all the research that’s been done, that’s not the case. There is something gendered in how people are experiencing this.”
The team adds that men’s and women’s responses to the virus are bound to be different, as their experiences of it differ. For example, male coronavirus patients have higher COVID-19 morbidity rates than women, while women are more likely than men to be caregivers or frontline workers and thus face a greater risk of contracting COVID-19.
“In this case,” Cassese said, “it might be more about the economic downturn caused by the pandemic than the pandemic itself, because men are more likely to be the breadwinner, and this difference could be driven by this group of men for whom that role is more central to their identities.”
Miller, citing research that women are more likely than men to follow the safety protocols and recommendations laid out by government officials and health experts, offered another hypothesis: “We might speculate that women are gaining back some of that control by engaging in these self-protective behaviors, and men are gaining back some of that control by explaining the event as a conspiracy.”
Indeed, it’s an ouroboros. Concurrent studies have suggested that people who endorse conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are less likely to accept public health experts’ warnings about the severity of the crisis.
Alina Salganicoff, head of the Women’s Health Policy team at Kaiser Family Foundation said that in her experience, gender differences across political lines are often washed away by partisan differences. But she added that polling by Kaiser has found consistent gender disparities in experience with and response to the pandemic — like that women were more likely to say that they know someone affected by coronavirus, they reported being less hopeful about the future than men, and they were more likely than men to report the pandemic was having an adverse effect on their mental health.
“As someone who’s spent a better part of my career looking at gender differences in particular as it affects politics, it’s not surprising that there are these consistent gender differences,” Salganicoff told The Daily Beast.
“In the past, we haven’t done a very good job of looking at gender,” she said of studies at large. “Often, research controls for gender, but it doesn’t offer that much insight into the nature of the different responses.” With coronavirus, she said, researchers are getting an opportunity to dive deeper into questions of gender than they have before.
And while there is no question that men and women are responding differently to the pandemic, like any unprecedented finding, a gender gap in coronavirus conspiracy theory belief is one that calls for more research. Other studies have pointed in different directions.
For example, according to June 2020 data from the Pew Research Center, women were somewhat more likely than men to see some truth to the conspiracy theory that powerful people planned the COVID-19 pandemic.
But across the board, one thing is clear: A strikingly high percentage of people are inclined to buy not only bogus but conflicting theories about the coronavirus. In fact, this bridges not only political parties but national borders.
An early May survey of 2,501 adults in England by researchers at the University of Oxford and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust found that 50 percent showed some degree of endorsement of coronavirus conspiracy theories, with one in 10 showing “very high levels” of endorsement.
“The results are illuminating but dispiriting: a substantial minority of the population endorses unequivocally false ideas about the pandemic,” the Oxford team wrote. “A public health information crisis may be observable. Misinformation and misguided – often malign – views look to be highly prevalent. Fringe beliefs may now be mainstream.”
According to the researchers, there were “no significant differences” reported in gender response.
Cassese doesn’t feel any certainty that the gender gap noted in her team’s research will persist. “These things have a progression. If you look at something that’s not about conspiracy theories at all, like foreign military intervention, there are stages where the gender gap in support is larger, gets smaller, gets larger again. And if you look at the anti-vaxx movement, you do see women playing a really significant role in that,” she said.
“Maybe as we move into a vaccine stage, we’ll see this shift,” she said. “We’re coming at it from a political psychology standpoint: these beliefs are functional. They’re doing something for people. In some ways, these beliefs, like preventative health behaviors, are a coping mechanism. We need to do the work to understand the coping mechanism aspect of it—what people are thinking, and who’s thinking it.”
