Author:
Thürmer J. Lukas,McCrea Sean M.
Abstract
AbstractCOVID vaccination protects individuals and helps end the pandemic, but a sizable minority in Western countries rejects the vaccine. Vaccination status should serve as a group membership, critical communication between groups undermines trust, and we accordingly suggest that calls to get vaccinated by vaccinated sources lead to defensive rejection instead of desired behavior change. We term this the vaccination rift effect. A unique collaboration with national print, online and TV news media yielded a large (N = 1170), age-representative sample of Austrian citizens for our fully randomized experiment. Participants exhibited the vaccination rift: They ascribed less constructive motives, d = 0.28, 95% CI [0.17; 0.40], experienced more threat, d = − 0.30, 95% CI [− 0.42; − 0.19], and ascribed worse personality characteristics to vaccinated (vs. unvaccinated) commenters, d = 0.17, 95% CI [0.06; 0.29]. Constructiveness consistently predicted behavioral measures of counterarguing and vaccination planning (indirect effects B = 0.033, SE = 0.013 and B = − 0.056, SE = 0.014). The vaccination rift was substantially stronger among the critical group of unvaccinated participants, ds = |0.39–0.52|, than among those fully vaccinated, ds = |0.08–0.17|. We discuss how to apply these psychological mechanics of the vaccination rift to public campaigns.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference36 articles.
1. Collins, D. F. Dr. Collins reflects on career at NIH, COVID response effort, work on genome sequencing. In PBS Newshour (ed Woodruff J) (2021).
2. World Health Organization. Report of the meeting of the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS), 8–9 June 2021–July 2021. Wkly. Epidemiol. Rec. 96, 321–327 (2021).
3. Finney Rutten, L. J. et al. Evidence-based strategies for clinical organizations to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Mayo Clin. Proc. 96, 699–707 (2021).
4. Bedford, H. et al. Vaccine hesitancy, refusal and access barriers: The need for clarity in terminology. Vaccine 36, 6556–6558 (2018).
5. El-Mohandes, A. et al. COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among adults in four major US metropolitan areas and nationwide. Sci. Rep. 11, 21844 (2021).
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献