Belief in Vaccination Claims: The Role of Sources, Epistemic Beliefs, and Political Ideology

• In Event: Grappling With Socioscientific Topics During Knowledge Revision and Belief Change in Varied Social Contexts

Abstract

Purpose: Misinformation about vaccines and vaccination safety are among the greatest threats to the current global pandemic. While factors such as the source of information, partisanship, and epistemic beliefs have been shown to impact readers’ belief in information, there is a need to more deeply understand how these factors independently and interactively exert their influence on belief in vaccine-related claims.

Perspectives: Individuals encounter information from both scientific sources as well as mainstream media sources, which vary in how they cover scientific issues such as COVID-19 (Mitchell et al., 2020). Political ideology also influences information coverage, as partisan sources vary in how accurately they expose their target audiences to scientific information (Guess et al., 2021). As epistemic factors can help explain individuals’ misconceptions about different scientific and political issues (Sinatra, 2022), we also focus on epistemic beliefs (OSoC, Garrett & Weeks, 2017). Dimensions examined include faith in intuition (the extent to which people rely on their own intuition to judge truth), need for evidence ( a person’s need for evidence to judge truth), and truth is political (the extent to which people believe that “facts'' are politically constructed).

Methods: We examined the extent to which different information sources interacted with individuals’ epistemic beliefs and political ideologies to influence their belief in vaccine information through mixed-effects ANOVAs including source (conservative media vs. liberal media vs. scientific institution) as a within-subjects factor, political ideology (liberal vs. conservative political ideology) as a between-subjects factor, epistemic beliefs (each dimension of OSoC) as continuous independent variables, and belief ratings as the dependent measure.

Evidence:The online experiment was conducted with US adults in November of 2020, including 133 liberals and 354 conservatives. Eighteen statements about vaccines varying in accuracy were presented as allegedly being from liberal sources (Huffington Post or MSNBC), conservative sources (American Conservative or Fox News), or scientific institutions (The World Health Organization or the National Institutes of Health). The source manipulation was fully crossed and counterbalanced, creating 3 sets of items to which participants were randomly assigned. After reading each statement, participants rated their belief in the statement on a 1-7 rating scale. Participants also completed the OSoC measure of epistemic beliefs (Garret & Weeks, 2017).

Results: Overall, belief in vaccine claims was determined primarily by the source of the vaccine claims and epistemic beliefs, but not by political ideology. In general, belief in claims from scientific sources was higher than belief in claims from liberal or conservative sources. There was no effect of political ideology; rather, interactions between source type and all three epistemic belief dimensions were significant predictors.

Significance: These findings suggest that the source of vaccination information matters when considering people’s belief in the information they encounter. In addition, epistemic beliefs determined, in part, deference towards beliefs from scientific sources, suggesting a need to more closely examine the role of beliefs about knowledge when considering belief in claims. Understanding how these factors interact could lead to more effective science communication and therefore reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake.

Authors

• Victoria Johnson, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Panayiota Kendeou, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author