It just doesn’t feel right – the relevance of emotions and intuition for parental vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccination uptake

Abstract

Objective: Vaccine hesitancy has been identified as one of the major contributors to child under-vaccination. Research indicates that some hesitant parents’ mistrust extends to specific conspiracy ideation, but research on vaccine conspiracy beliefs is still scarce. Our objective was to explore factors contributing to parental vaccine conspiracy beliefs and actual vaccine uptake in children.

Design: A cross-sectional correlational design with a non-probabilistic sample of 823 volunteer participants surveyed online.

Main outcome measures: We focussed on the contributions of the analytically rational and experientially intuitive thinking styles, as well as measures of emotional functioning, namely optimism and emotions towards vaccination, to vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccine uptake as outcomes.

Results: The obtained results showed that greater vaccine conspiracy beliefs were associated with stronger unpleasant emotions towards vaccination and greater experientially intuitive thinking, as well as lower levels of education. Furthermore, unpleasant emotions towards vaccination and intuitive thinking were associated with vaccine refusal.

Conclusion: These findings confirm the primary importance of emotions, along with the propensity towards intuitive thinking, in the context of vaccine conspiracy beliefs and refusal, supporting the notion that parents’ avoidance is guided by their affect. These results have direct implications for addressing vaccine hesitancy within public campaigns and policies.

Keywords:

• Vaccine hesitancy
• conspiracy beliefs
• emotions
• affect-heuristic
• optimism
• need for cognition
• faith in intuition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.