engleski

Intention to vaccinate against COVID-19 among young adults: The role of conspiratorial thinking

The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a gain in the momentum of anti-scientific and anti-vaccine movements. Among factors contributing to the vaccine hesitancy, the ones related to the pseudoscientific beliefs and conspiratorial thinking provided a fruitful theoretical frame-work for exploring decision-making processes, including the vaccination-related ones. The aim of this study was to explore which variables best differentiated between groups of vaccinated (n=289), vaccine-hesitant (n=106) and vaccine-refusing (n=146) young adults. The study was con-ducted online and took place at the beginning of the mass vaccination campaign, when the vac-cine just became available for younger and non-vulnerable members of the general population. The demographic variables, COVID-19 anxiety, and conspiratorial thinking regarding COVID-19 were entered into the discriminant analysis. The function explaining 89.2% of the group differ-ences was mostly defined by conspiratorial thinking regarding COVID-19 (0.852), followed by variables with substantially less discriminative power, including the COVID-19 anxiety (0.423 ; lower in vaccine-refusing group), political orientation (0.486 ; vaccinated group leaning more to the left), financial and educational status (0.435 and 0.304 respectively ; both lower in the vac-cine-refusing group), religiosity (0.301 ; higher in the vaccine-refusing group). These results con-firm that among young adults, the decision to vaccinate against COVID-19 might be heavily in-fluenced by one’s proclivity to engage in conspiratorial thinking.

vaccine hesitancy ; COVID-19 vaccine ; conspiratorial thinking ; young adults

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