Antecedents of vaccine scepticism

Abstract

The recent focus of public discourse on better understanding the factors that might explain people’s willingness or reluctance to Covid-19 vaccination has brought attention onto vaccine scepticism, more broadly, and its potential social and psychological predictors. Recent studies have confirmed the positive association between trust in authorities - e.g., trust in government and/or in science - and compliance with COVID-19 lockdown, including attitudes towards and intention to vaccinate against Covid-18 (Han et al., 2021). Additionally, trust in authorities and vaccine attitudes are linked to political ideology (Baumgaertner, et al., 2018). For example, recent evidence suggests that more conservative US citizens are less concerned about coronavirus and report less compliance with the COVID-19 measures (YouGov, 2020). As such, we are interested in examining the role that levels of trust in authorities and science as well as political orientation might play into explaining people defining themselves as vaccine sceptics. Over the last two years, the information landscape, including news, novel government guidelines and conspiracy theories, has rapidly changed and consumption of information had dramatically increased as a result of the social media development (Comscore, March 2020). Since repeated information is more likely to be perceived as true (Fazio et al., 2020), thus, making it difficult for individuals to critically evaluate information as true or as fake news, we are interested in better understanding the link between the spread of fake news, e.g., receptivity to bullshit, and vaccine scepticism.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/eknvj

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https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/publications/c9e6469a-baa0-4ce1-8135-d705ca6243cf