Abstract
Vaccines are a powerful and relatively safe tool to protect against a range of serious diseases. Nonetheless, a sizeable minority of people express ‘vaccination hesitancy’. Accordingly, understanding the bases of this hesitancy represents a significant public health opportunity. In the present study we sought to examine the role of Big Five personality traits and general intelligence as predictors of vaccination hesitancy across two vaccination types in a large (N = 9667) sample of UK adults drawn from the Understanding Society longitudinal household study. We found that lower levels of general intelligence were associated with COVID-19 and seasonal flu vaccination hesitancy, and lower levels of neuroticism was associated with COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy. Although the self-reported reasons for being vaccine hesitant indicated a range of factors were important to people, lower general intelligence was associated with virtually all of these reasons. In contrast, Big Five personality traits showed more nuanced patterns of association.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 4488-4495 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Vaccine |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 32 |
| Early online date | 27 May 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Jul 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:RTM acknowledges financial support from the NOMIS Foundation and from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust (grant no: SRG1819\190996).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier Ltd
Keywords
- Vaccination hesitancy
- Intelligence
- Personality
- Individual differences
Access to Document
- Full-text PDF (author accepted manuscript) )
This is the accepted author manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via Elsevier at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.05.062. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher.