ArticlePLOS global public health2022
Are socio-demographic and economic characteristics good predictors of misinformation during an epidemic?
Article in PLOS global public health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Online Health Misinformation Susceptibility Increases Health Risk Behaviors and Vaccine Hesitancy: Evidence from Greece.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Scoping review of artificial intelligence via mobile technology and social media for health in Africa.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Misinformation and COVID-19 vaccine uptake hesitancy among frontline workers in Tanzania: Do demographic variables matter?Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2024Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We combine data on beliefs about the origin of the 2014 Ebola outbreak with two supervised machine learning methods to predict who is more likely to be misinformed. Contrary to popular beliefs, we uncover that, socio-demographic and economic indicators play a minor role in predicting those who are misinformed: misinformed individuals are not any poorer, older, less educated, more economically distressed, more rural, or ethnically different than individuals who are informed. However, they are more likely to report high levels of distrust, especially towards governmental institutions. By distinguishing between types of beliefs, distrust in the central government is the primary predictor of individuals assigning a political origin to the epidemic, while Muslim religion is the most important predictor of whether the individual assigns a supernatural origin. Instead, educational level has a markedly higher importance for ethnic beliefs. Taken together, the results highlight that government trust might play the most important role in reducing misinformation during epidemics.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.