The influence of political ideology and trust on willingness to vaccinate.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Baumgaertner B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5784985 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments to impose major restrictions on individual freedom in order to stop the spread of the virus. With the successful development of a vaccine, these restrictions are likely to become obsolete-on the condition that people get vaccinated. However, parts of the population have reservations against vaccination. While this is not a recent phenomenon, it might prove a critical one in the context of current attempts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the task of designing policies suitable for attaining high levels of vaccination deserves enhanced attention. In this study, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey fielded in March 2019. They show that 39% of Europeans consider vaccines to cause the diseases which they should protect against, that 50% believe vaccines have serious side effects, that 32% think that vaccines weaken the immune system, and that 10% do not believe vaccines are tested rigorously before authorization. We find that-even when controlling for important individual-level factors-ideological extremism on both ends of the spectrum explains skepticism of vaccination. We conclude that policymakers must either politicize the issue or form broad alliances among parties and societal groups in order to increase trust in and public support for the vaccines in general and for vaccines against COVID-19 in particular, since the latter were developed in a very short time period and resulted-in particular in case of the AstraZeneca vaccine-in reservations because of the effectiveness and side effects of the new vaccines.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11077-021-09428-0.
| S-EPMC8206899 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveContact tracing (CT) can limit the spread of infectious diseases, however its effectiveness hinges on public participation. We evaluated perceptions of the financial and health risk posed by COVID-19 and trust in information about COVID-19 provided by the state health department that manages CT as predictors of comfort and willingness to comply with CT. We further examined the moderating effect of political ideology on these relationships.MethodsWe used structural equation modeling to test hypotheses in data from a cross-sectional survey completed by a representative sample of Michigan residents (N = 805) in 2020.ResultsPerceptions of the risk of COVID-19 to one's health (but not finances) was negatively related to comfort and willingness to participate in CT. Trust in information about COVID-19 and liberalism were positively related to comfort and willingness. There was also a moderating effect of political ideology, such that conservatives were less comfortable and willing at greater perceptions of health risk.ConclusionsConservatives and those who perceive a greater health risk may require targeted messaging and more deliberate engagement strategies to increase CT participation.
| S-EPMC9233989 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Ecological and cross-sectional studies have indicated that conservative political ideology is associated with better health. Longitudinal analyses of mortality are needed because subjective assessments of ideology may confound subjective assessments of health, particularly in cross-sectional analyses.Data were derived from the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index data set. Cox proportional analysis models were used to determine whether political party affiliation or political ideology was associated with time to death. Also, we attempted to identify whether self-reported happiness and self-rated health acted as mediators between political beliefs and time to death.In this analysis of 32,830 participants and a total follow-up time of 498,845 person-years, we find that political party affiliation and political ideology are associated with mortality. However, with the exception of independents (adjusted HR (AHR)=0.93, 95% CI 0.90 to 0.97), political party differences are explained by the participants' underlying sociodemographic characteristics. With respect to ideology, conservatives (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.12) and moderates (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.11) are at greater risk for mortality during follow-up than liberals.Political party affiliation and political ideology appear to be different predictors of mortality.
| S-EPMC5893220 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This article explores the relationships between electoral trust, operational ideology, and nonvoting political participation (NVP) during the 2020 US presidential election cycle. We hypothesize that: (1) more liberal operational ideology is associated with more NVP, (2) less electoral trust is associated with more NVP, and (3) operational ideology moderates the negative relationship between electoral trust and NVP. Using data from the 2020 American National Election Study (N = 8,280), our contribution is threefold: We first add to previous research that indicated liberals engage in more NVP than conservatives. We then provide some of the first evidence to suggest that electoral trust-in this case, trust prior to the 2020 election-is negatively associated with NVP. Results further indicate that the negative relationship between electoral trust and NVP is strongest among those with conservative operational ideology, such that the more trust those with conservative operational ideology have in the election, the less they engage in NVP. Given that electoral trust is crucial for a well-functioning democracy, the implication is that elites with a strategic incentive to express contempt for the election process can have direct and downstream consequences on political participation.
| S-EPMC11300041 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Does college change students' political preferences? While existing research has documented associations between college education and political views, it remains unclear whether these associations reflect a causal relationship. We address this gap in previous research by analyzing a quasi-experiment in which university students are assigned to live together as roommates. While we find little evidence that college students as a whole become more liberal over time, we do find strong evidence of peer effects, in which students' political views become more in line with the views of their roommates over time. This effect is strongest for conservative students. These findings shed light on the role of higher education in an era of political polarization.
| S-EPMC7812804 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveThe impact of cognitive function and decline on political ideology is unknown. We studied the relationship between cognition and both political orientation and political policy choices in a population of older persons.DesignLongitudinal investigation.SettingA retirement community and its surroundings in Southern California.Participants151 members of a longitudinal investigation of aging and dementia in the oldest-old (the 90+ Study), mean age 95 years.MeasurementsParticipants self-reported their political ideology (7-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative) and policy preferences for federal spending on public schooling, aid to the poor, and protecting the environment, as well as on preferences on immigration rates, death penalty, and university admission. The same political survey was mailed to participants twice: at time one and 6-months later. Cognitive function based on neurological examination and cognitive testing was classified as normal (55%), cognitive impairment/not dementia (CIND) (33%), or dementia (12%). We calculated rank correlations between ideology and policy choices, stratified by cognitive status, and agreement between Surveys 1 and 2.ResultsPolitical ideology/orientation was highly consistent over a six-month period (84% agreement) among the 122 who returned the second survey, with no significant relationship to cognitive status. Among cognitively impaired (CIND and dementia), however, there was significant loss of consistency between an individual's political orientation and their policy choices. Level of political engagement was high for participants, with more than 90% voting in the 2016 presidential election.ConclusionIn this population of older persons, political identification on the liberal-conservative spectrum was resilient despite cognitive decline, but its meaning and function were changed. For the cognitively impaired it remained a self-defining label, but no longer operated as a higher order framework for orienting specific policy preferences. There appeared to be loss of coherence between the political orientation and political policy choices of cognitively impaired individuals. Given the high level of political engagement of these individuals, these results have substantial public policy implications.
| S-EPMC8057885 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.
| S-EPMC9291242 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In a real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond.
| S-EPMC3677426 | biostudies-other
Project description:Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and private behavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found to be deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms that may serve to defend against environmental challenges like contamination and physical threat. These results invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion). We applied a machine-learning method to fMRI data to test the hypotheses that brain responses to emotionally evocative images predict individual scores on a standard political ideology assay. Disgusting images, especially those related to animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants' conscious rating of the stimuli. Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject's political ideology. These results provide strong support for the idea that fundamental neural processing differences that emerge under the challenge of emotionally evocative stimuli may serve to structure political beliefs in ways formerly unappreciated.
| S-EPMC4245707 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Studies have largely examined the association between political ideology and health at the aggregate/ecological level. Using individual-level data from 29 European countries, we investigated whether self-reports of political ideology and health are associated. In adjusted models, we found an inverse association between political ideology and self-rated poor health; for a unit increase in the political ideology scale (towards right) the odds ratio (OR) for reporting poor health decreased (OR 0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.94-0.96). Although political ideology per se is unlikely to have a causal link to health, it could be a marker for health-promoting latent attitudes, values and beliefs.
| S-EPMC2764955 | biostudies-literature