Behavioral Barriers in the Covid-19 Vaccination Process

• Applicant: Ivo Steimanis, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 466132531

The willingness to be vaccinated against Covid-19 when a vaccine is available threatens to decrease further in Germany. This decrease in the willingness to be vaccinated poses a high risk to the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. The goal of our research project is to identify changes in the willingness to vaccinate and, in particular, behavioral barriers. We strive to propose behavioral-economic solutions for the coming winter and future pandemics.We plan to conduct an online survey with 1,500 participants in Germany. Participants will be surveyed over three waves. The first wave will be conducted by March before the general population can be vaccinated against Covid-19, the second wave will be conducted in the summer when it becomes possible to be vaccinated voluntarily, and the third wave will take place at the end of summer to check how many have been vaccinated before the winter season starts.In addition to socioeconomic characteristics, the online survey asks about risk perception, political attitudes, social values, and attitudes toward Corona vaccination and general vaccination readiness. To examine what causes the change in vaccination willingness and how people are persuaded to get vaccinated, participants are randomly assigned to one of four groups: (1) Social Norms, (2) Brief Information, (3) Media Mirror, (4) Control Group. Depending on the group, we show different information to participants at the start of the survey. This randomization allows us to test whether the change in vaccination willingness is due to ignorance or whether participants justify their attitude with the expectation that the majority of the population also rejects it. Expectations of conformity to the attitudes of others are essential to maintain collective behavior in the long run. Furthermore, we want to investigate whether vaccination skeptics engage in motivated reasoning, focusing only on information that confirms their opinion.We will contact our participants via the Respondi AG survey platform. The goal is to reach a representative sample of German society. Incentivization of study participants is controversial in the social sciences and humanities. In economics, however, incentivization has become a standard quality feature.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants