I trust you

One factor that explains people's reluctance to get vaccinated is their low confidence in science and scientists. According to a recent article published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behavior, in addition to their own (s) trust in science (or in any case related to it), is the degree of consensus in one's own country about the reliability of scientists to play a key role in the reluctance of the individual to get vaccinated. According to the 3C model of the World Health Organization released in 2014, the propensity not to get vaccinated (“vaccine hesitancy”) is a function of three factors: complacency, convenience and trust.

Complacency derives, in an unfortunate paradox, precisely from the success of vaccination programs in defeating epidemics: in the face of such success, individuals give less weight to the risk of infection and the need to be vaccinated.

Convenience relates to the practical and logistical obstacles that make vaccines inaccessible, such as cost, location of the vaccine center, availability of efficient transport and quality of facilities.

The third component is that of trust, and in particular trust in vaccines, ie the extent to which people believe that vaccines are safe, effective and consistent with their political / cultural / religious beliefs. Such trust can come from the trust individuals have in institutions, health systems, the actors who produce and deliver immunization programs, as well as the science that supports the efficacy and safety of vaccines.
Trust in the technical competence and social responsibility of experts can be an effective aid in the presence of a complex decision-making problem for the individual. Not all citizens, in fact, have the skills to assess for themselves the risks and dangers deriving from mass vaccination programs. Trust in science thus becomes an efficient "heuristic shortcut" for forming an opinion on the safety, efficacy and importance of vaccination, which would otherwise require costly and error-prone cognitive processing for most individuals. This then explains how individual perception about the reliability of science can be related to trust in vaccines. But how is social trust in science - that is, the degree of consensus around how reliable science is - is related to individual trust in vaccination programs?

The authors of the paper propose the following hypothesis. Instead of laboriously processing often complex information, individuals form a quick idea of ​​the reliability of science through local social interactions, media representations and the cultural and political debate. This trend would be most pronounced when there is a strong social / moral consensus on the value, usefulness and safety of science and technology, encouraging people to conform to shared views on the benefits and risks of vaccination. In a country where there is a strong social consensus on trust in science, therefore, the authors expect trust in vaccination to be high.

The data on which the authors test this hypothesis are from 2018, therefore well before the pandemic. The statistical analysis is conducted on a representative sample of people residing in 126 countries for a total of more than 124 thousand observations. The results confirm the hypothesis of a positive relationship at the macro level between public confidence in science and people's confidence in vaccination: 1) people who trust science and scientists the most are also safer than vaccines; 2) people in countries with a high average level of confidence in science are even more confident about vaccination; 3) at higher levels of public consensus on the reliability of science, the strength of the association between confidence in science and confidence in vaccines is greater.

In a historical moment in which the citizen is often confused it is important to leverage the factors that increase the confidence in science of each individual and that contribute to the production of social consensus regarding the reliability of science, in order to to implement effective public communication strategies on vaccination programs.


Perluigi Conzo
NP January 2022