Abstract
BackgroundConspiracies about vaccination are prevalent. We assessed how the health information sources people rely upon and their political ideologies are associated with acceptance of vaccine conspiracies. MethodsOnline survey (N = 599) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsource platform. Hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling. ResultsAcceptance of vaccine conspiracy beliefs was associated positively with greater reliance on social media for health information (coef. = 0.42, p < .001), inversely related to use of medical websites (coef. = −0.21, p < .001), and not significantly related to use of providers for health information (coef. = −0.13, p = .061). In addition, liberal political orientation was negatively associated with acceptance of vaccine conspiracies (coef. = −0.29, p < .001). ConclusionsAn understanding of vaccine conspiracy acceptance requires a consideration of people’s health information sources. The greater susceptibility of political conservatives to conspiracy beliefs extends to the topic of vaccination.
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