“I Have Some Serious Doubts About this Vaccine…” – Generic Conspiracy Beliefs Predict the Acceptance of the Covid-19 Vaccination

Abstract

The start of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout in early 2021 was accompanied by miscommunication from medical and political actors and decision-makers with regard to its availability. In central European countries, it was not clear when and to what extent vaccines would be available to the public. As our main hypothesis, we assumed that uncertainty about the availability of vaccines (vs certainty), as they were stated in media communication, might affect vaccination acceptance in conspiracy believers positively, who are otherwise assumed to have a low acceptance of vaccination. In a large preregistered online study (N = 659), we did not find evidence that media communication relates to vaccination acceptance, but conspiracy believers tended to accept the vaccine more if they were given the option to choose their preferred vaccine. This latter exploratory finding could be confirmed in a follow-up study (N = 199).

Keywords

• covid-19
• vaccination acceptance
• conspiracy beliefs
• media information