People Being More Social are Less Likely to Accept Vaccines

A new study highlights the influence of personal characteristics on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal and the need for future research on these behaviors.

People with an extrovert type of personality were more hesitant about COVID-19 vaccination during the pandemic’s peak time. This is according to a new study that survey more than 40,000 Canadians and published the findings in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

These findings can help with future public health messaging and vaccination campaigns. It also offers a unique perspective in vaccine hesitancy research, a field that has largely focused on political affiliation.

Finding the Role of Personality in COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal

What types of people are vaccine-hesitant? Research on the personal characteristics related to vaccine hesitancy has largely focused on traits such as political ideology and political knowledge. In a new and constantly changing environment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic ().

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‘People who are lower in openness, agreeableness, and negative emotionality are more hesitant to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.#COVID-19Vaccine #Personality #VaccineRefusal’

It is important to understand the role of more foundational personal traits, as the partisan and political implications of COVID-19 are fluid and context-dependent. The focus on personality traits, specifically the Big-5, helps to explain why some people are more hesitant about vaccines than others.

Using a unique survey of Canadians from November 2020 to July 2021, researchers found that the personality aspects model known as the “big five,” which gauges an individual’s openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability could explain the difference between vaccine acceptors and refusers.

Additional questions probed how respondents felt about vaccination. One question, for example, asked, “When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, will you be vaccinated?” As the vaccine rollout began, questions were altered to reflect their availability.

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Identifying who refuses COVID-19 vaccination is important for not only understanding the COVID-19 pandemic but also for guiding future vaccination efforts related to novel viruses or persistent health threats like influenza.

They found that people who are lower in openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and negative emotionality are more likely to indicate they are not willing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them ().

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These traits, however, do not consistently distinguish the hesitant from the accepters. The effects we observe here are modest, but still meaningful in comparison to other fundamental traits.

The increase in our personality traits is associated with anywhere from an 11%−28% change in the relative risk of being a vaccine refuser. A similar increase in age, education, and income is associated with reductions of 49%, 25%, and 13% in this same risk, respectively.

Personality Predicting Health-Behavior Endorsement in COVID-19 Pandemic

Unexpectedly, people who are higher in extraversion are more likely to indicate they are not willing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them, a finding that persists regardless of the trajectory of COVID-19 cases or vaccination rates at the time.

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This is a peculiar finding deserving of further research. We might have expected extroverts to be more amenable to vaccination as a means of reducing the risk of social activity.

Openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness matter less as a predictor of vaccine refusal as COVID-19 vaccination rates increase, and the same goes for the latter two traits as COVID-19 cases rise.

Negative emotionality, on the other hand, matters more as pandemic circumstances changed; people scoring high on this dimension are more likely to indicate a willingness to be vaccinated as vaccine rates increase. On balance, personality mattered less as vaccines rolled out and when risk escalated, but the story is not entirely consistent across personality traits.

Researchers, public health experts, and those responsible for policy implementation can use this information to inform future vaccination campaigns. These findings show that personality-based differences in vaccine refusal are not immutable, so it may be advantageous to work into these strategies ().

Future research on vaccine hesitancy may wish to address ways in which personality interacts with other types of traits and circumstances to inform vaccine-related attitudes.

References:

Psychological and behavioural responses to Coronavirus disease 2019: The role of personality - (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1002/per.2281)
Dynamic role of personality in explaining COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal - (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1163570/full)
Adaptive and Dark Personality in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Predicting Health-Behavior Endorsement and the Appeal of Public-Health Messages - (https://www.medindia.net/news/people-being-more-social-are-less-likely-to-accept-vaccines-212950-1.htm)

Source-Eurekalert