The rapid spread of the highly contagious and deadly COVID-19 virus, since its emergence in December 2019, has led to a global pandemic—a state of affairs not seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu (see Ashton, 2020 for a comparison).¹ Governments around the world communicated with the public about the virus with varying degrees of swiftness: the data from Hale et al. (2021), which we delve into in Study 1, show that there is substantial heterogeneity in how quickly governments began communicating with the public about COVID-19. In this paper, we ask whether the swiftness of government risk communication can explain the spread of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories, which typically seek to assign blame for the pandemic to powerful actors with secret agendas.

Our main hypothesis is that, where government risk communication is slow, there are opportunities for people to ‘fill in the blanks’ with conspiratorial ideas which attempt to rationalize the situation at hand, namely, the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic is an ideal breeding ground for the spread of false narratives: a sudden environment of extreme angst, frustration, and fear materialized, which in the minds of many people could not have been foreseen, and thus requires an extraordinary explanation. As a matter of fact, apart from the virus itself, a hallmark feature of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the proliferation of conspiracy theories on social media, a pattern which began early on during the pandemic (Van Bavel et al., 2020a). More generally, as shown by the folklorist Jon D. Lee (2014) in his book An Epidemic of Rumors, pandemics and epidemics, from AIDS to H1N1 and SARS, commonly give rise to rumours and conspiratorial narratives. Thus, we hypothesize that false narratives spread where governments do not communicate swiftly with the public about the virus.

We test our hypothesis using Google search data as a proxy for interest in the QAnon conspiracy theory in Study 1 and find strong support for our hypothesis. Our motivation for studying QAnon is that it is an integral part of what Rosenblum and Muirhead (2020, p. 35) define as the ‘new conspiracism’, which is an ‘active assault on democracy’. QAnon is an extreme conspiratorial movement which blames a supposed secret cabal of left-leaning politicians for many real or perceived ills, including the pandemic. QAnon’s spread is of current policy concern, as the group has been designated a terror threat by the FBI as early as 2019.² Central to QAnon lore is the dangerous belief that the pandemic is a hoax,³ which makes QAnon a phenomenon deserving of empirical investigation. Importantly, the human cost of becoming embroiled in QAnon is also staggering, as evidenced by the stories of individuals ‘losing’ loved ones to the cult-like nature of QAnon,⁴ which motivates us to study QAnon in Study 1. We also test our hypothesis using self-reported conspiratorial beliefs in a sample of approximately 40,000 respondents from 51 countries from the International Collaboration on Moral and Social Psychology (Van Bavel et al., 2020b), in the pre-registered Study 2. Our hypothesis finds limited support in Study 2, which suggests that not all conspiratorial ideas respond equally largely to government (in)action. Our results provide ample caution about the responsiveness of interest in extreme ideas, such as QAnon, to government risk communication.

Our work contributes to a well-established area of investigation in psychology and across the social sciences, which is the study of conspiracy theories (for overviews, see Lewandowsky and Cook, 2020; van der Linden et al., 2021) and of false beliefs more generally (O’Connor and Weatherall, 2019). The phenomena of scapegoating and conspiracy theories ensuing from pandemics have a long history, dating back at least to the plague of Cyprian in Roman times (Retief and Cilliers, 2000). Conspiracy theories and false narratives, more generally, tend to circulate more in times of uncertainty or complexity as a way of trying to make sense of what is going on in the world around us. These usually relate to clandestine government plans, elaborate murder plots, or paranoia about powerful groups, thinking they are sinister or have ‘hidden agendas’, and persist even when there is no decisive evidence for them (Lewandowsky and Cook, 2020). People ‘fill in the gaps’ with their own explanations as a way of relieving feeling of anxiety and stress (Douglas et al., 2017)—even going as far as assigning blame or responsibility to certain individuals or groups to fulfil their epistemic need for an explanation, with the scapegoating of Jews during the Black Death being a salient example. We thus contribute to a nascent literature analysing interest and beliefs in conspiracy theories in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic (see, for example, Cassese et al., 2020; Enders et al., 2020; Imhoff and Lamberty, 2020; Miller, 2020; Sternisko et al., 2020; Stoica and Umbreș, 2020; Uscinski et al., 2020; Chan et al., 2021; Šrol et al., 2021).

Our work also contributes to a strand of research in the crisis and risk communication literature, which emphasizes the benefits of communicating early (see, e.g., Heath and O’Hair, 2009; Coombs and Holladay, 2011). In mock criminal trials, Dolnik et al. (2003) show that revealing damaging information about oneself (a strategy known as ‘stealing thunder’) without waiting for others to reveal it first is beneficial to the party revealing the information. In an organizational context, Arpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen (2005) show that stealing thunder results in higher credibility ratings for the disclosing organization. Williams and Treadaway (1992) argue that the Exxon corporation’s slow communication response to the grounding of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in Alaska played a driving role in the failure of Exxon’s communication strategy. In the context of health communication, Covello (2003, p. 5) specifically defines as best practice to ‘demonstrate respect for persons affected by risk management decisions by involving them early, before important decisions are made’. Thus, in the case of the COVID-19 virus outbreak, our findings complement the extant risk communication literature by showing that early communication about the virus has a chilling effect on the diffusion of conspiratorial narratives people turn towards, to ease their feelings from the uncertainty of the virus’ nature and spread. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to quantitatively explore crisis communication during COVID-19 (see Malecki et al., 2021 for a discussion).

While Google searches (Study 1) present the clear advantages of being measured in near real-time, available across a wide range of geographies, and not subject to desirability biases, a noteworthy limitation of Google data is that they do not necessarily reflect being ‘taken in’ by the QAnon conspiracy theory. We do however have evidence from previous work (Madestam et al., 2013; Stephens-Davidowitz, 2014) and from Supplementary Figure S1 that Google searches correlate with actual political behaviour, such that our results are unlikely to reflect mere fleeting curiosity. Relatedly, it is also possible that the differences in the results across the two studies are driven by differences in measurement. A potential limitation is that the outcome variables used across studies are internet searches and self-reports, which present clear differences in measurement, and might thus hinder comparability across studies.

Another limitation of this paper is that we do not study other elements of government risk communication besides timeliness. One would expect that other facets of risk communication, including accuracy and consistency, also matter for the diffusion of false narratives: there are anecdotal reports, for example, of the public feeling misled by early calls for not using face masks (which were ostensibly directed at preventing mask hoarding) which were later reversed to recommended or even compulsory mask policies.¹³ We believe this is a fruitful area for future data collection efforts, as we know of no data set that takes stock of other facets of government risk communication beyond timeliness. Another potentially productive research agenda, going forward, would be to explore the dynamics of conspiratorial beliefs and government communication as contextual elements change. We leave these questions open for future research.

In general, the capacity for belief is a core and dominant force in humans. As Fuentes (2019) points out, ‘[b]eliefs permeate our neurobiologies, bodies, ecologies and societies. They mediate the whole of human existence’ (p. 65). But beliefs are not always a good thing. There are also dangers inherent in such a capacity. Misleading beliefs about the world can threaten societies’ fabrics. In the long term, societal functioning depends on beliefs that are consistent with available evidence. However, an overload of information can result in a failure to properly process available information. As Herbert Simon (1983, p. 22) points out, we all ‘have modest computational abilities in comparison with the complexity of the entire world that surrounds’ us. Thus, it is worth exploring which mechanisms help society better respond, either to available evidence or to the spread of false beliefs. Investigating such mechanisms is particularly important in times of crises (such as pandemics) which can trigger prolonged uncertainty, feelings of fear and a sense of needing reassurance to cope with the challenging situation, often through assigning blame to others for the occurrence of the crisis. Although interest in conspiracy theories is different from actual belief, showing higher levels of interest can be a warning sign against exercising a sensible approach when drawing inferences from available facts.

In this paper, we have investigated the link between timely risk communication and the assignment of blame for the pandemic, as reflected by interest or belief in conspiratorial narratives. Our results indicate that a key mechanism in reducing the spread of interest in the QAnon conspiracy theory is the timely provision of risk communication regarding the emergency faced. In Study 1a, we showed that the earlier governments communicate about the virus, relative to the first instance of the virus in a given country, the lower the public’s interest in the destructive QAnon conspiracy theory – as measured by Google searches for QAnon in a sample of 111 countries and territories. In Study 1b, we showed that the results of Study 1a cannot be explained away by either of two crucial factors: (i) rising interest in QAnon in the COVID-19 era and (ii) pre-pandemic cross-country differences in interest in QAnon. Instead, interest in QAnon appears to rise specifically in response to late government risk communication about the virus, with a degree of regional heterogeneity, as effects were overall larger in the Americas, Oceania and Europe. These results should serve as a caution for policymakers in future developments with the COVID-19 pandemic and, in other crises, as they may arise: the late communication of risk can foster the rise of extreme ideas. We believe this is an important result, especially in a world where misinformation is rife.

In the pre-registered Study 2, we found only limited evidence of a relationship between government communication timeliness and self-reported beliefs in other conspiracies around the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we did not find evidence that respondents in countries with later government communication think that COVID-19 is a conspiracy to establish an authoritarian government or a hoax perpetrated by interest groups for financial gains. Once we account for observable differences between countries and individual respondents, we do find evidence of higher conspiracy beliefs for the latter outcome, but not for the former. The overall picture emerging from Study 2 is thus mixed, with only limited indication that self-reported conspiracy beliefs respond to the timeliness of communication. Overall, we believe it is reassuring to observe that not all conspiratorial ideas respond equally to government (in)action.

The data analyzed in this study is subject to the following licenses/restrictions: Part of the data used for this article is proprietary (the International Country Risk Guide). We are happy to share our replication data with users who have access to the ICRG. Requests to access these datasets should be directed to PRS Group.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

HC: conceptualization, formal analysis, and writing – review and editing. SR: conceptualization, writing – original draft, and writing – review and editing. AS: conceptualization, validation, formal analysis, and writing – original draft. BT: conceptualization, methodology, and writing – review and editing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.