Conspiratorial ideation, reactance, trust and stress around vaccine and booster acceptance for COVID-19.
Authors
Rountree, Claire
Issue Date
2022
Degree
Higher Diploma in Psychology
Publisher
Dublin Business School
Rights holder
Rights
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Abstract
Vaccines represent the main pathway out of the CoVID-19 pandemic however a minority express consistently hesitant attitudes. The research explored relationships between acceptance or rejection of CoVID-19 vaccinations and components of psychological reactance, conspiratorial ideation, dimensions of trust, and pandemic related stress among participants (N = 1,030) online who completed a self-report questionnaire.
Results from regression analyses indicated moderate explanatory power in predicting vaccine intentions. Affect and institutional trust were the most significant influences. T-tests identified that those fully vaccinated displayed higher trust & positive affect with lower anger and uncertainty, and lower conspiracy beliefs, and freedom threat perceptions while the opposite applied amongst those not fully vaccinated.
While conspiratorial ideation is not typically amenable to facts-based challenges findings indicate potential for interventions such as cognitive boosts to harness and leverage trust and/or affect. Peripheral cues should be optimised in communications to promote or encourage vaccine acceptance. In just over two years, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has decimated social and economic systems across the globe. Described in ‘game-changing’ by the World Health Organisation ("COVID-19 vaccines", 2022), vaccines represent the main pathway out of the CoVID-19 pandemic (W.H.O.com). Vaccination commenced in Ireland at end-September 2020, and booster shots began to be offered to older adults and healthcare workers in October 2021 (Towey, 2021).
All Irish adults have now been offered a vaccine and a booster dose, with over 4 million primary vaccination doses, and 2.8 million booster doses administered at end February 2022 ("Ireland's COVID-19 Data Hub", 2022). However, despite one of the highest vaccination rates in the European Union ("COVID-19 vaccine doses administered per 100 people", 2022), approximately 5% of the adult population (rising to 13% amongst those aged 18-34), have expressed consistently hesitant attitudes towards accepting a vaccine for CoVID-19 (Nunn & Laher, 2022).
Mass vaccination campaigns are more likely to succeed where a disease is well known and feared, cases are well publicised, community leaders (political and social) are actively involved in the campaign, access to vaccines is made easy as possible, and social norms of acceptance are well promulgated (Dubé, Gagnon & MacDonald, 2015).
A joint statement by WHO, UN, UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNAIDS, ITU, UN Global Pulse, and IFRC, expressed concern that management of health behaviours during CoVID-19, not least vaccine acceptance, has been beset by a concurrent ‘infodemic’, largely situated online ("Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: Promoting healthy behaviours and mitigating the harm from misinformation and disinformation"; 2020).
Thus, while the internet has facilitated social functioning through unprecedented stay-at-home orders, CoVID-19 itself, its origins, and motivations behind recommended health behaviours have all been the subject of prolific online misinformation campaigns (Agley & Xiao, 2021). Such misinformation flourishes online, where membership of geographically dispersed but ideologically aligned communities online can contribute to a warped sense of consensus for what might in local physical or community “place” (Giddens, 2015), be considered ‘marginal’ or ‘outlandish views’ (Kozyreva, Lewandowsky & Hertwig, 2020).
Research has also shown anti-vaccination beliefs tend to correlate with unrelated conspiracy theories (Goldberg & Richey, 2020; Hornsey, Finlayson, Chatwood & Begeny, 2020) as one of several ideology systems which impact on vaccine refusal ("Covid-19 Vaccines: Safety Surveillance Manual", 2020).
Mistrustful attitudes towards so called ‘mainstream’ narratives serve a heuristic role in evaluating health behaviours such as vaccination (Jolley & Douglas, 2014; Nancy Chen, 2015). Both conspiratorial ideation (Agley & Xiao, 2021) and networks of trust (Schweers Cook, 2005) are known to emerge under conditions of uncertainty or risk such as, for example, the pandemic context within which this research takes place.
This research will therefore seek to examine the relationships between measures of psychological reactance, conspiratorial ideation, trust and CoVID-19 vaccination intentions. To assess individual differences in responding to environmental uncertainty or risk, the research will also measure levels of CoVID-19 related stress.