Information seeking about vaccines: institutional trust, perceived benefits, and individual vs. collective frames

ABSTRACT

Despite robust scientific and medical consensus on vaccine effectiveness, many people remain hesitant to get vaccinated against life-threatening diseases. Considering the importance of information seeking in a misinformation-filled landscape to make critical decisions such as vaccination behavior, we set out to understand information seeking intention about vaccines. Using COVID-19 vaccines as the context, we conducted an experiment to examine the impact of individual vs. collective messages on information seeking intention. Our findings show significant main effects of the messages, and we discover a complex picture of the moderating roles of institutional trust and perceived benefits with messages on information seeking intention. Specifically, our findings show that among people with lower perceived benefits of vaccination, and with a higher trust in authoritative organizations, exposure to individually framed messaging results in greater information-seeking intention. But when people have low perceived benefits and also low trust in authoritative organizations, collectively framed messages show a persuasive advantage.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccination
• framing
• information seeking
• institutional trust
• perceived benefits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2024.2302469

Notes

1. The loss vs. gain manipulations were for another study and were added as a co-variate in the current study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Porismita Borah

Porismita Borah (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a Professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University. Borah primarily studies discourses on digital platforms as well as message effects in the context of both politics and health. Twitter: @borah. Web: http://porismitaborah.com/

Xizhu Xiao

Xizhu Xiao (Ph.D. Washington State University) is an Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Qingdao University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of health communication, strategic communication, and new media.

Xiaohui Cao

Xiaohui Cao is an M.A. student at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University. Her research interests include health communication and psychology. She is currently studying health persuasion, message design, and communication technologies.

Anastasia Vishnevskaya

Anastasia Vishnevskaya is an Assistant Professor in the College of Media & Communication, Texas Tech University. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, she studies and writes on the effects that stereotypes and image politics have on public opinion as well as on effective interventions to mitigate the negative effects of bias.