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Category: Project

Description: Despite the availability of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19, many people in the developed world have refused to accept them, continuing a long pattern of vaccine hesitancy (Machingaidze and Wiysonge, 2021, Betsch et al.,2018). Cross-national surveys document widespread concerns about safety (i.e.,side effects), doubts about efficacy, and skepticism about the speed of the vaccine rollout (Machingaidze and Wiysonge, 2021, Lazarus et al., 2021, Arce et al.,2021). Initially, governments relied on rhetorical appeals that cited individual and public health benefits in asking citizens to get vaccinated (Beaumont, 2021).Over time, however, the toll of the pandemic has prompted a shift toward policy interventions ranging from gentle nudges and financial incentives to harder restrictions like employer mandates and vaccine passports (Banerjee et al., 2021).While many of these measures have been shown to boost vaccine uptake (Dai et al., 2021, Campos-Mercade et al., 2021, Henley, 2021), they have been critiqued for neglecting citizen autonomy, which may exacerbate reactance to vaccines among a subset of the public (Chang et al., 2021). Our survey, which will be fielded in each G-7 country, contains three experiments that seeks to (a) better understand public opinion toward policy interventions designed to promote vaccination and (b) determine whether it is possible to deploy interventions that respect the autonomy of people while trying to persuade them to get vaccinated.