Why do conspiratorial interpretations of public-health crises endure even in educated, information-rich societies?
Beyond the abstract: the argument, study design, evidence, and limits of inference.
Two waves of original surveys cover Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States during a shared public-health emergency. The settings differ in political institutions and media conditions. The design therefore asks whether associations observed in one country also appear across distinct information environments.
The core models relate right-wing authoritarian predispositions to endorsement of public-health conspiracy claims. Education and exposure to different information sources are examined separately and in combination. This distinguishes acquiring information from the dispositions through which information may be evaluated.
The unpublished manuscript reports a positive association between authoritarian orientation and conspiratorial endorsement. More education alone or exposure alone does not consistently weaken the relationship; it is attenuated when higher education coincides with more varied information sources. Supplemental cohort and instrumental-variable exercises speak to possible temporal ordering but do not establish causation.
Research basis: Why Citizens Endorse Public-Health Conspiracy Theories, unpublished comparative manuscript.
The evidence is observational. Supplementary analyses are not a substitute for randomized assignment and do not establish unambiguous causal priority. The manuscript is unpublished and its findings are described as reported in the draft.
Unpublished coauthored manuscript using original cross-national surveys.