COVID-19 and Cause-Seeking. An Exploratory Study in Italy.

In 2020, over 2 million Italian people contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A pandemic of this magnitude and the very stringent countermeasures that have been adopted have had a disruptive effect on people's lives on psychological, social, and economic levels. The exploratory study illustrated in this article focuses on people’s search for causes, which is prompted by the climate of great uncertainty that has characterized the situation thus far. In particular, the causal attributions for a possible contagion, which play a key role in improving the effectiveness of the prevention and the management of the contagion, are examined. The study involved 575 participants, who were selected through a snowball sampling technique. Given the exploratory nature of this study, descriptive and chi-square analyses were conducted to ascertain whether respondents' characteristics, such as their sociodemographics, were related to the causal attributions that they made. The main results highlight a strong overall preference for external causes and significant correlations between the controllability and stability of the causes and the respondents' age and educational level. The results suggest the importance of encouraging cooperation between community agencies and social media and exploiting the latter's ability to spread information, better manage communication, and improve the quality of information. This intervention may be helpful in that allowing people to better handle information can enhance their regular course of information processing and the subsequent attribution of causes to the events, thus reducing fear and anxiety.