COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs and Vaccination Intentions among Social Media Users
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Kostas Gemenis
Abstract
More than a year after the introduction of vaccines against COVID-19, inoculation remains inconsistent and variable across countries. In this paper, we introduce a multi-item scale of COVID-19 related misinformation, skepticism, and conspiracy theories and investigate the effects of these beliefs on vaccine hesitancy. We report findings from a survey in Greece where participants were recruited via paid advertising on Facebook and the study sample was adjusted for demographic variables using a nationally representative reference sample. We show that the endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs is the primary factor driving vaccine hesitancy, far exceeding the effect of all other demographic and attitudinal variables, including health status. Furthermore, a pre-registered randomized survey experiment showed that the effect cannot be attributed to respondents’ exposure to the COVID-19 conspiracy theory questions of the survey. The paper concludes by discussing potential public policy implications for combating misinformation and promoting health literacy among social media users.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 3rd Annual UK Political Psychology Conference (January 11–15, 2021). The author would like to thank the conference participants as well as the anonymous reviewers of Statistics, Politics and Policy for their comments, while he remains solely responsible for any errors. The author acknowledges the support of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies for the data collection. The study materials and experiment pre-registration are available at the Center for Open Science (OSF): https://www.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SG97N Data and replication code are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://www.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FGMNNF.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2022-0005).
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Special on Social Media and Machine Learning Research
- Political Polarisation on Gender Equality: The Case of the Swiss Women’s Strike on Twitter
- COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs and Vaccination Intentions among Social Media Users
- Data Mining in Social Sciences: A Decision Tree Application Using Social and Political Concepts
- Inequality and International Communication
- Lower Inequality and Lower Development: A Contradiction Sensitivity Analysis of Jammu and Kashmir
- The Aspects of International Communication: Strategic Partnership of Ukraine and Turkey
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Special on Social Media and Machine Learning Research
- Political Polarisation on Gender Equality: The Case of the Swiss Women’s Strike on Twitter
- COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs and Vaccination Intentions among Social Media Users
- Data Mining in Social Sciences: A Decision Tree Application Using Social and Political Concepts
- Inequality and International Communication
- Lower Inequality and Lower Development: A Contradiction Sensitivity Analysis of Jammu and Kashmir
- The Aspects of International Communication: Strategic Partnership of Ukraine and Turkey
