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

Abstract

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.