Can Learning about One Disease Breed Misconceptions about Other Diseases?

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Health, Growth, Injury

Abstract

When a new disease like COVID-19 captures widespread public attention, one wonders whether children’s processing of information about it skews their understanding of other diseases. It is clear that children formulate germ theory of disease in early childhood and only gradually differentiate among diseases (Bares & Gelman, 2008; Marco et al., 2017). During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, many children wrongly inferred that AIDS could be spread through the casual contact that spreads colds. Indeed, the misconception that cancer is contagious is quite common among children (Chin et al., 1998; Schonfeld et al., 2001; Sigelman et al., 1993). We explore here the possibility that teaching children about an infectious disease will make more salient their germ theories of disease and may therefore magnify misconceptions about other diseases. We first reviewed research on children’s beliefs about the contagiousness of cancer and then conducted a new analysis of data from an AIDS education study to determine whether AIDS education increased misconceptions that cancer is contagious. The analysis centered on 278 children (117 boys, 160 girls) in grades 3, 5, and 7; 64.7% were Mexican-American or other minorities. The AIDS program, guided by an intuitive theories perspective, briefly noted that some diseases are infectious and others are not and then focused on how HIV is and is not transmitted and its effects in the body. Control classrooms in the same schools did not receive the program. Six questions about true and false risk factors for AIDS were also asked about lung cancer at pretest and posttest. A correctness score for each disease was also computed, high scores reflecting endorsement of true risk factors for the disease and rejection of false risk factors. The literature review revealed that one in five elementary school children, sometimes more, believe that cancer was contagious. Preliminary analyses of the parallel AIDS and cancer items revealed that knowledge increased significantly with grade on all but the items about true AIDS risk factors, known well even by third graders. Because grade did not interact with treatment condition, disease, and pretest-posttest in MANOVAs, the three grades were pooled in further analyses. Table 1 shows mean item endorsement scores; Figure 1 shows mean correctness scores. Children’s knowledge of AIDS increased significantly from pretest to posttest in the experimental group. Importantly, rather than exacerbating misconceptions about cancer, education about AIDS reduced misconceptions about cancer, especially about the dangers of kissing. These findings reduce concerns that teaching children about one disease is likely to give rise to misconceptions about others and blur the line between infectious and noninfectious diseases. Research is now needed on the implications of COVID-19 education, however. Whereas AIDS is caused only by specific types of contact, COVID can be caused by mere proximity to an infected individual. Care must therefore be taken to convey that COVID is a unique disease associated with a unique virus that can be spread in many ways, many of which do not apply to all infectious diseases, much less to noninfectious ones.

Authors

• Carol K. Sigelman, George Washington University
  Presenting Author

• Imani Jami, George Washington University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eleanor D'Andria, George Washington University
  Non-Presenting Author