Elite party cues increase vaccination intentions among Republicans.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Pink SL
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8364165 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States requires mobilizing a large majority of the mass public to vaccinate, but many Americans are hesitant or opposed to vaccination. A significant predictor of vaccine attitudes in the United States is religiosity, with more-religious individuals expressing more distrust in science and being less likely to get vaccinated. Here, we test whether explicit cues of common religious identity can help medical experts build trust and increase vaccination intentions. In a preregistered survey experiment conducted with a sample of unvaccinated American Christians (n = 1,765), we presented participants with a vaccine endorsement from a prominent medical expert (NIH Director Francis Collins) and a short essay about doctors' and scientists' endorsement of the vaccines. In the common religious identity condition, these materials also highlighted the religious identity of Collins and many medical experts. Unvaccinated Christians in the common identity condition expressed higher trust in medical experts, greater intentions to vaccinate, and greater intentions to promote vaccination to friends and family than those who did not see the common identity cue. These effects were moderated by religiosity, with the strongest effects observed among the most religious participants, and statistically mediated by heightened perceptions of shared values with the medical expert endorsing the vaccine. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of common identity cues for promoting vaccination in a vaccine-hesitant subpopulation. More generally, the results illustrate how trust in science can be built through the invocation of common group identities, even identities often assumed to be in tension with science.
| S-EPMC8670469 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Social liberals tend to be less pathogen-avoidant than social conservatives, a pattern consistent with a model wherein ideological differences stem from differences in threat reactivity. Here we investigate if and how individual responses to a shared threat reflect those patterns of ideological difference. In seeming contradiction to the general association between social conservatism and pathogen avoidance, the more socially conservative political party in the United States has more consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic. This puzzle offers an opportunity to examine the contributions of multiple factors to disease avoidance. We investigated the relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautionary behavior in light of the partisan landscape of the United States. We explored whether consumption of, and attitudes toward, different sources of information, as well as differential evaluation of various threats caused by the pandemic-such as direct health costs versus indirect harms to the economy and individual liberties-shape partisan differences in responses to the pandemic in ways that overwhelm the contributions of social conservatism. In two pre-registered studies, socially conservative attitudes correlate with self-reported COVID-19 prophylactic behaviors, but only among Democrats. Reflecting larger societal divisions, among Republicans and Independents, the absence of a positive relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautions appears driven by lower trust in scientists, lower trust in liberal and moderate sources, lesser consumption of liberal news media, and greater economic conservatism.
| S-EPMC8241032 | biostudies-literature
Project description:What effects do international crises have on the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs)? Deviating from previous research, we argue that such crises make those international organizations more salient that are mandated to solve the respective crisis. This results in two main effects. First, the public legitimacy of those IOs becomes more dependent on citizens' crisis-induced worries, leading to a more positive view of those IOs. Second, as the higher salience also leads to higher levels of elite communication regarding IOs, elite blaming of the IOs during crises results in direct negative effects on public legitimacy beliefs on IOs. Finally, both the valence and content of the elite discourse additionally moderate the positive effects of crisis-induced worries. Implementing survey experiments on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis with about 4400 respondents in Austria, Germany and Turkey, we find preliminary evidence for the expectations derived from our salience argument. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on IO legitimacy and IO legitimation.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-021-09452-y.
| S-EPMC8831685 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Numeric political appeals represent a prevalent but overlooked domain of public opinion research. When can quantitative information change political attitudes, and is this change trumped by partisan effects? We analyze how numeracy-or individual differences in citizens' ability to process and apply numeric policy information-moderates the effectiveness of numeric political appeals on a moderately salient policy issue. Results show that those low in numeracy exhibit a strong party-cue effect, treating numeric information in a superficial and heuristic fashion. Conversely, those high in numeracy are persuaded by numeric information, even when it is sponsored by the opposing party, overcoming the party-cue effect. Our results make clear that overlooking numeric ability when analyzing quantitative political appeals can mask significant persuasion effects, and we build on recent work advancing the understanding of individual differences in public opinion.
| S-EPMC4888569 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesThis Registered Report attempted to conceptually replicate the finding that communicating herd immunity increases vaccination intentions (Betsch, et al., 2017, Nat. Hum. Behav., 0056). An additional objective was to explore the roles of descriptive social norms (vaccination behaviour of others) and the herd-immunity threshold (coverage needed to stop disease transmission).DesignAn online experiment with a 2 (herd-immunity explanation: present vs. absent) × 3 (descriptive norm: high vs. low vs. absent) × 2 (herd-immunity threshold: present vs. absent) between-subjects fractional design.MethodsSample consisted of 543 people (aged 18-64) residing in the United Kingdom. Participants first received an explanation of herd immunity emphasising social benefits (protecting others) in both textual and animated-infographic form. Next, they were faced with fictitious information about the disease, the vaccine, their country's vaccination coverage (80% or 20%), and the herd-immunity threshold (90%). Vaccination intention was self-rated.ResultsCompared to the control, communicating social benefits of herd immunity was effective in increasing vaccination intentions (F(1,541) = 6.97, p = .009, Partial Eta-Squared = 0.013). Communicating the descriptive norm or the herd-immunity threshold alongside the herd-immunity explanation demonstrated no observable effect.ConclusionCommunicating social benefits of herd immunity increased self-reported vaccination intentions against a fictitious disease, replicating previous findings. Although this result is positive, the practical relevance may be limited. Further research into the effect of social nudges to motivate vaccination is required, particularly with respect to the recent pandemic context and varying levels of vaccine hesitancy.
| S-EPMC8646271 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In a series of three studies, we examined whether third-party observers can detect attraction in others based on subtle nonverbal cues. We employed video segments of dates collected from a speed-dating experiment, in which daters went on a brief (approx. 4 min) blind-date and indicated whether they would like to go on another date with their brief interaction partner or not. We asked participants to view these stimuli and indicate whether or not each couple member is attracted to their partner. Our results show that participants could not reliably detect attraction, and this ability was not influenced by the age of the observer, video segment location (beginning or middle of the date), video duration, or general emotion recognition capacity. Contrary to previous research findings, our findings suggest that third-party observers cannot reliably detect attraction in others. However, there was one exception: Recognition rose above chance level when the daters were both interested in their partners compared to when they were not interested.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-02927-0.
| S-EPMC8990491 | biostudies-literature
Project description:PurposeThere is good evidence that for many behaviours, increasing risk appraisal can lead to a change in behaviour, heightened when efficacy appraisals are also increased. The present systematic review addressed whether interventions presenting a risk message increase risk appraisal and an increase in vaccination intentions and uptake.MethodA systematic search identified randomized controlled trials of interventions presenting a risk message and measuring risk appraisal and intentions and uptake post-intervention. Random-effects meta-analyses investigated the size of the effect that interventions had on vaccination risk appraisal and on vaccination behaviour or intention to vaccinate, and the size of the relationship between vaccination risk appraisal and vaccination intentions and uptake.ResultsEighteen studies were included and 16 meta-analysed. Interventions overall had small significant effects on risk appraisal (d = 0.161, p = .047) and perceptions of susceptibility (d = 0.195, p = .025), but no effect on perceptions of severity (d = -0.036, p = .828). Interventions showed no effect on intention to vaccinate (d = 0.138, p = .195) and no effect on vaccination behaviour (d = 0.043, p = .826). Interventions typically did not include many behaviour change techniques (BCTs), with the most common BCT unique to intervention conditions being 'Information about Health Consequences'. Few of the included studies attempted to, or successfully increased, efficacy appraisals.ConclusionsOverall, there is a lack of good-quality primary studies, and existing interventions are suboptimal. The inclusion of additional BCTs, including those to target efficacy appraisals, could increase intervention effectiveness. The protocol (CRD42015029365) is available from http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Previous research indicates that an increase in risk appraisal is associated with increased uptake in health-related behaviours. Research suggests that interventions increasing risk appraisal have a greater effect on intention when elements of efficacy appraisals are simultaneously increased. What does this study add? This is the first systematic review to examine the effect of interventions on risk appraisal and vaccination uptake using only experimental studies. Limitations of the interventions themselves, and those caused by study methods and reporting, mean that the potential value of this type of review is lost. Instead, its value is in shining a light on the paucity of experimental studies in this area, and the quality of methods and reporting used. Future experimental studies should examine interventions that focus exclusively on increasing risk and efficacy appraisal compared to controls, use conditional measures of risk, and improve reporting to enable both more accurate coding of intervention content and more accurate assessments of study bias.
| S-EPMC6767484 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Observing others' gaze is most informative during social encounters between humans: We can learn about potentially salient objects in the shared environment, infer others' mental states and detect their communicative intentions. We almost automatically follow the gaze of others in order to check the relevance of the target of the other's attention. This phenomenon called gaze cueing can be conceptualized as a triadic interaction involving a gaze initiator, a gaze follower and a gaze target, i.e., an object or person of interest in the environment. Gaze cueing can occur as "gaze pointing" with a communicative or "social" intention by the initiator, telling the observer that she/he is meant to follow, or as an incidental event, in which the observer follows spontaneously without any intention of the observed person. Here, we investigate which gaze cues let an observer ascribe a social intention to the observed person's gaze and whether and to which degree previous eye contact in combination with an object fixation contributes to this ascription. We varied the orientation of the starting position of gaze toward the observer and the orientation of the end position of a lateral gaze shift. In two experiments participants had to infer from the gaze behavior either mere approach ("the person looked at me") vs. a social ("the person wanted to show me something") or a social vs. a private motivation ("the person was interested in something"). Participants differentially attributed either approach behavior, a social, or a private intention to the agent solely based on the passive observation of the two specific gaze cues of start and end position. While for the attribution of privately motivated behavior, participants relied solely on the end position of the gaze shift, the social interpretation of the observed behavior depended additionally upon initial eye contact. Implications of these results for future social gaze and social cognition research in general are discussed.
| S-EPMC6928136 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Widespread vaccination remains the best option for controlling the spread of COVID-19 and ending the pandemic. Despite the considerable disruption the virus has caused to people's lives, many people are still hesitant to receive a vaccine. Without high rates of uptake, however, the pandemic is likely to be prolonged. Here we use two survey experiments to study how persuasive messaging affects COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions. In the first experiment, we test a large number of treatment messages. One subgroup of messages draws on the idea that mass vaccination is a collective action problem and highlighting the prosocial benefit of vaccination or the reputational costs that one might incur if one chooses not to vaccinate. Another subgroup of messages built on contemporary concerns about the pandemic, like issues of restricting personal freedom or economic security. We find that persuasive messaging that invokes prosocial vaccination and social image concerns is effective at increasing intended uptake and also the willingness to persuade others and judgments of non-vaccinators. We replicate this result on a nationally representative sample of Americans and observe that prosocial messaging is robust across subgroups, including those who are most hesitant about vaccines generally. The experiments demonstrate how persuasive messaging can induce individuals to be more likely to vaccinate and also create spillover effects to persuade others to do so as well. The first experiment in this study was registered at clinicaltrials.gov and can be found under the ID number NCT04460703. This study was registered at Open Science Framework (OSF) at: https://osf.io/qu8nb/?view_only=82f06ecad77f4e54b02e8581a65047d7.
| S-EPMC8531257 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesIncreasing vaccination hesitancy threatens societies' capacity to contain pandemics and other diseases. One factor that is positively associated with vaccination intentions is a supportive subjective norm (i.e., the perception that close others approve of vaccination). On the downside, there is evidence that negative attitudes toward vaccinations are partly rooted in conspiracy mentality (i.e., the tendency to believe in conspiracies). The objective of this study is to examine the role of subjective norms in moderating the association between conspiracy mentality and vaccine hesitancy. We examined two competing predictions: Are those high in conspiracy mentality immune to subjective norms, or do subjective norms moderate the relationship between conspiracy mentality and vaccination intentions?MethodsWe conducted five studies (total N = 1,280) to test these hypotheses across several vaccination contexts (some real, some fictitious). We measured conspiracy mentality, vaccination intentions, subjective norms, attitudes toward vaccination, and perceived behavioural control.ResultsA merged analysis across the studies revealed an interaction effect of conspiracy mentality and subjective norm on vaccination intentions. When subjective norm was high (i.e., when participants perceived that close others approved of vaccines) conspiracy mentality no longer predicted vaccination intentions. This was consistent with the moderating hypothesis of subjective norms and inconsistent with the immunity hypothesis.ConclusionsThe typical negative relationship between conspiracy mentality and vaccination intentions is eliminated among those who perceive pro-vaccination subjective norms. Although correlational, these data raise the possibility that pro-vaccination views of friends and family can be leveraged to reduce vaccine hesitancy.
| S-EPMC8420227 | biostudies-literature