Emotional Susceptibility to Public Scrutiny and Vaccine Hesitancy: An Exploratory Experimental Analysis
Christine Alamaa & Alice Dominici
What the paper says
This paper explores the understudied link between self-consciousness and vaccine scepticism, combining an experimental approach with causal forests to estimate individual treatment effects. Leveraging data from a laboratory experiment with Italian university students, we find that individuals who are more easily induced to self-conscious responses (e.g., feeling shame or embarrassment) in response to public scrutiny tend to hold stronger vaccine misbeliefs. Rather than identifying a causal effect of self-consciousness elicitation on vaccine attitudes, our results highlight a correlation between pre-treatment attitudes and susceptibility to self-conscious emotions. This suggests that studying targeted public health communication may be crucial, as more sceptical individuals could avoid discussing with health professionals or develop self-conscious emotions as a result of these interactions, further exacerbating their vaccine hesitancy.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.