Securing the Goalposts on Vaccine Hesitancy

Abstract

In this project, we quantitatively assessed how vaccine hesitancy is influenced by (i) a lack of information on COVID-19 and its vaccines, and (ii) politically-motivated reasoning or exposure to misinformation. We tested scalable interventions to address both of these potential causes of vaccine hesitancy using a large-scale (n=8000) randomized control trial run on unvaccinated populations in both UK and US. The key outcomes of this trial were attitudes towards vaccination and willingness to seek further information. Our first intervention addressed information gaps through a series of comprehensive but accessible animated videos about COVID-19 and its vaccines. For both the UK and US, we found that these videos cause positive changes in attitudes towards vaccines and intentions to be vaccinated. Furthermore, we observed that a large share of participants (approximately 60%) engaged in further information seeking by watching additional (non-compulsory) videos on COVID-19 vaccination. Our second intervention addressed politically-motivated reasoning by adapting the communication tools of “Paradoxical Reasoning” which were developed to unfreeze entrenched beliefs in the context of the most intractable conflicts (e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian border conflict). In our US sample, we found that this communication method caused positive changes in vaccine intentions. In contrast, in the UK, it had no effect (and even a negative effect in some dimensions). In addition to effective interventions, we developed a metric of motivated reasoning that we hope will allow healthcare providers to identify which individuals are more likely to be resistant to standard information provision about the vaccine. We validate this metric by showing its predictive validity for individual attitudes towards the vaccine.