Thread by @EricMerkley

🚨New pre-print 🚨by the @MediaEcosystem team on anti-intellectualism and information preferences during the #COVID19 pandemic. Check it out! 👀👇#SocSciResearch #scicomm 1/

osf.io/agm57/

Building on work by @AlbertsonB2 and @sgadarian, we expect that individuals will have preference for both expert information related to #COVID19 and #COVID19 news in general. But, that these effects will be weaker among those with higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment 2/

We use two survey experiments on a pair of large, nationally representative samples of Canadians (N~2,500) to show that 1) citizens prefer expert information, and this effect weakens among those with high levels of anti-intellectualism; 3/

and 2) citizens prefer COVID-19 news, and this effect is also much weaker among those with high levels of anti-intellectualism. We find no such consistent heterogeneous effects for ideology, sophistication, or conspiratorial beliefs 4/

There is a strong relationship between anti-intellectualism and COVID-19 risk perceptions and social distancing compliance. It's possible some of this could be due to differences in information seeking. More research is needed 5/

This paper builds off my dissertation research on anti-intellectualism that has been recently published in Public Opinion Quarterly, which was partly inspired by @matt_motta's great work. We need more research on anti-intellectualism! 6/

https://twitter.com/EricMerkley/status/1232706071074164736

Shout out to the awesome @MediaEcosystem team: @PeejLoewen @taylor_owen @derekruths @AengusBridgman @ozhilin1.

Looking forward to comments! This work is under peer-review, so treat with caution. Apologies to scholars grumpy about COVID-19 pre-prints. More to come from us! END/