“The instinct from the medical community was, ‘If only we could educate them,'” said Saad Omer, PhD, director of New Haven, Conn.-based Yale Institute for Global Health, who studies vaccine skepticism. “It was patronizing and, as it turns out, not true.”
Dr. Omer and a team of both epidemiologists and social psychologists studied vaccine hesitancy and discovered a clear set of psychological traits tied with skepticism.
They found skeptics were much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty and less deference to those in positions of power. Skeptics were also twice as likely to care a lot about the “purity” of their bodies and minds.
In 2018, scientists found similar patterns in a broad sample of vaccine-hesitant people in 24 countries.
“At the root are these moral intuitions — these gut feelings — and they are very strong,” said Jeff Huntsinger, PhD, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago who collaborated with Dr. Omer’s team. “It’s very hard to override them with facts and information. You can’t reason with them in that way.”
