A visit from Mathew Marques

The Misinformation Lab was very happy to host Dr Mathew Marques (School of Psychology, La Trobe University) as a guest speaker today. Students and staff from the Misinformation Lab and other researchers from across the Deakin School of Psychology were in attendance and found Mat’s talk very engaging and relevant to their interests.

Details about Mat’s talk are below:

Marques M. D., Simsion, D. D., & Stukas, A. A. (October 2018). Attitudes towards the influenza vaccination: the impact of ideological worldview on sensitivity to vaccination risk message framing. Invited presentation to Misinformation Lab, Deakin University Melbourne

Abstract: Despite serious health impacts of seasonal influenza, coverage is below the level for required for herd immunity. Lower vaccine acceptance may be due to vaccine misinformation. We examined how attitudes towards the influenza vaccination differed for individuals depending on sensitivity to risk communicated in messages, as suggested by Cultural Cognition Theory (CCT). An online survey was administered to 356 US adults in March 2016 using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We measured ideological worldview, then randomly allocated participants to read information about the influenza vaccination in 2 (risk: decreased/increased) x 2 (focus: individual/community) factorial design (including control), and then report attitudes. Overall, participants were more negative to increased risk messages. Importantly and consistent with CCT, this was amplified for individual/hierarchical participants when focused on the individual, and conversely for egalitarian/communitarians when focused on the community. The importance of understanding the role psychological mechanisms such as worldview play in vaccine hesitancy are discussed.