Anti-Vaccination Beliefs and Unrelated Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

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Chinese

Much recent literature has examined the correlates of anti-vaccination beliefs, without specifying the mechanism that creates adherence to these debunked ideas. We posit that anti-vaccination beliefs are an outcome of a general psychological propensity to believe in conspiracies based on new research on the interconnectedness of conspiracy beliefs. These ideas are tested with a confirmatory factor analysis and a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model of a nationally representative U.S. sample from the 2016 American National Election Studies. The confirmatory factor analysis shows that anti-vaccination beliefs highly correlate with belief in the unrelated conspiracies that Obama is a Muslim and 9/11 trutherism. Our SUR models also show that all three of these very different beliefs have similar predictors. All three have a negative correlation with political trust, political knowledge, education, and a positive correlation with authoritarianism. Thus, anti-vaccination beliefs are shown to be part of a psychological propensity to believe in conspiracies.

Keywords

Health Policy Public Opinion Vaccinations Anti-Vaccination Beliefs Anti-Vaxxers Conspiracies Conspiracy Theories Conspiracy Ideation 9/11 Trutherism Birtherism Obama Political Trust Political Psychology

Why do anti-vaccination beliefs persist after years of efforts to debunk them? Recent outbreaks of the measles and other childhood diseases show the acute danger of anti-vaccination beliefs. Although health providers have been aggressive in combating anti-vaccination beliefs, vaccination rates remain troublingly low (Fogel and Hicks 2017). We need to understand more clearly the persistence of these beliefs despite the best efforts of the medical establishment to educate the public on the extremely low risks and great benefits of vaccines.

Much recent literature has examined the correlates of anti-vaccination beliefs without specifying the mechanism that creates adherence to these debunked ideas. We posit that anti-vaccination beliefs are an outcome of a general psychological propensity to believe in conspiracies, based on new research on the interconnectedness of conspiracy beliefs. We further posit that, due to this general propensity toward conspiracy beliefs, separate conspiracy beliefs will correlate with many of the same predictors. Evidence from the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) national representative survey provides strong evidence that anti-vaccination supporters believe in other unrelated conspiracies, and that many similar predictors jointly correlate of all three conspiracy beliefs.

New research shows a correlation of belief patterns between conspiracy theories that are either not connected in any plausible way (Swami et al. 2011), are mutually contradictory (Wood, Douglas, and Sutton 2011), and/or fictitious (Imhoff and Lamberty 2016). Simply put, if you believe in one conspiracy theory, there is a high likelihood that you will believe in several others (Uscinski, Klofstad, and Atkinson 2016). This shows that there is a general propensity to believe in conspiracy theories that are not explainable by traditional ideas of partisan animus or in-group–out-group bias (Miller, Saunders, and Farhart 2016). We show in this article that anti-vaccination believers are more likely to believe in the ideologically antithetical conspiracies that Obama is a Muslim and also that the Bush Administration knew about the 9/11 attacks ahead of time. I also find that all three beliefs have a negative correlation with political trust, political knowledge, education, and a positive correlation with authoritarianism.

The data used (a nationally representative sample from the 2016 general election ANES, described in-depth below) show that nearly 6 percent of the sample believes in all three conspiracies. And 43.7 percent of those who endorse both Birtherism and Trutherism are also skeptical of the benefits of vaccines. Since these beliefs are ideologically oppositional, and neither have anything to do with vaccine safety, the high correlation between all three of these beliefs suggests that some underlying propensity to believe in conspiracies is the explanation.

Our ideas are tested with a confirmatory factor analysis and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models of a nationally representative sample from the 2016 general election ANES. The confirmatory factor analysis shows that anti-vaccination beliefs highly correlate with belief in the unrelated conspiracies that Obama is a Muslim and trutherism, all loading strongly on a single factor. The SUR models also show that these beliefs have similar predictors, especially a large negative correlation with political trust. Thus, anti-vaccination beliefs are best thought of as part of a psychological propensity to believe in conspiracies that correlate especially highly with low political trust.

Anti-Vaccination as Conspiracy Theory

Despite an overwhelming consensus within the broader scientific community of both the benefits and safety of childhood vaccination, skepticism, and outright denialism persists among pockets of the American public and developed-world (Attwell and Smith 2017). While some scholars have sought to link this sentiment to a wider conservative anti-intellectualism and distrust of government-funded science (Hamilton, Hartter, and Saito 2015; Rabinowitz et al. 2016), other research reports bi-partisan agreement over the benefits of vaccination (Kahan 2014; Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer 2013). Indeed, the data suggest that anti-vaccine attitudes are “confined to a small fraction of the population whose attitudes would make them outliers in all of the major cultural affinity groups in which citizens acquire information about decision-relevant science” (Kahan 2014, 41). Where political ideology has shown to be relevant, it largely rears itself in principled resistance to government vaccine-mandates and threats to individual autonomy—not a rejection of vaccine science per se (Kahan 2014, 41). Nevertheless, a small fringe does, in fact, doubt the science; and a vexing question is “why”?

While there are undoubtedly many factors that inform negative attitudes toward vaccination—including, inter alia, religious (e.g., it interferes with God’s plan; Dube, Vivion, and MacDonald 2015), New Age (e.g., belief in the “natural healing potential” of the body; Browne et al. 2015), and moral convictions (e.g., HPV vaccines risk encouraging female promiscuity; Kahan et al. 2010), or an unwillingness to subject one’s children to pain (Dube et al. 2013)—the notion that vaccines are unsafe, and the refusal to accept information to the contrary, has all the trappings of a conspiracy belief. To buy into the vaccine alarmism, one must believe that decades of scientists are either incompetent or are willfully conspiring to hoodwink the public for financial and ideological gain.

Accordingly, if conspiracy beliefs truly lie at the heart of anti-vaccination, we would expect those who hold such attitudes to distrust official accounts more broadly. And some existing research, while limited, appears to confirm this. Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013), for instance, find belief in other (unrelated) conspiracy theories (e.g., Princess Diana’s death was an organized assassination) to be the strongest predictor of belief in the dangers of vaccination (see also Wood 2016). Furthermore, while not examining it directly, Jolley and Douglas (2014) find notable bellwethers of conspiracy beliefs—namely, “powerlessness,” “disillusionment,” and “trust in authorities”—to be moderately to strongly correlated with espousing anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs. More recently, Hornsey, Harris, and Fielding’s (2018) cross-national survey of 24 countries found that those high in conspiratorial thinking also registered higher anti-vaccination attitudes. All of these studies are consistent with an earlier systematic review of qualitative research in which conspiracy beliefs figured among the most frequently cited reasons parents give for opposing vaccination (Mills et al. 2005).

Conspiracy beliefs would also explain why anti-vaxxers are often unresponsive to informational correction (Rossen, Hurlstone, and Lawrence 2016). Its mix of paranoia, suspicion, and overreliance on heuristic evaluation promotes a “monological” epistemology that transforms even the most thoroughly discredited ideas into further confirmations of conspiracy (Goertzel 1994). For instance, despite fraudulently linking autism to the MMR vaccine and losing his medical license, conspiracists adduce the outing of British surgeon Andrew Wakefield as evidence of big pharma’s interest in suppressing “the truth” (Goldstein 2016). In a similar vein, one study reported that parents who denied their kids’ vaccination cited suspicion over the increase in the number of school-required vaccines (Poland and Jacobson 2000).

Ironically, by way of the availability bias, the success of vaccines in preventing outbreaks of historically pestilent diseases fuels perceptions that the risks of nonvaccination are overblown (Browne et al. 2015). Accordingly, that vaccination is foisted on the public in the absence of any pronounced morbidity “can only mean” that government vaccination programs—and their corporate benefactors—are motivated more by avarice than concerns for public health. To make matters worse, the effective control of disease also means that mildly discomforting but transient vaccine side effects are likely over-weighted in virtue of their relative frequency (Browne et al. 2015).

All told, existing evidence points to the primary role of conspiracy beliefs in the adoption and maintenance of anti-vaccine beliefs. Nevertheless, only a handful of studies have tested this link directly. The present study thus hopes to add to this emergent body of work. Conspiracy beliefs are common enough to explain the relativity large amount of anti-vaccination sentiment in the public. Many people may engage in low levels of conspiratorial thinking (see, for example, Douglas and Sutton 2011), and recent research suggests that conspiracism is elevated among the general population during periods of social uncertainty (van Prooijen and Acker 2015) and cultural change (Federico, Williams, and Vitriol 2018).

But research also suggests that some are more predisposed to conspiratorial ideation than others (Swami, Chamorro-Premuzic, and Furnham 2010). By far the most consistent predictor of specific conspiracy beliefs has shown to be other conspiracy beliefs (Goertzel 1994; Swami 2012; Swami, Chamorro-Premuzic, and Furnham 2010; Swami et al. 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2016; Swami and Furnham 2012; Wood, Douglas, and Sutton 2011). Consistent with this, several studies show that those scoring high on such measures of general conspiracy beliefs are also more vulnerable to intentionality (Brotherton and French 2015; Gebauer, Raab, and Carbon 2016), major-event-major-cause (Leman and Cinnirella 2007) and “jump to conclusion” biases (Moulding et al. 2016), ontological confusions (i.e., anthropomorphizing inanimate entities; Lobato et al. 2014), and conjunction fallacies (i.e., overestimating the probability of causal relations between co-occurring events; Dagnall et al. 2017). Moreover, as these heuristics are similarly at work in the holding of other anomalous beliefs, research has unsurprisingly uncovered a link between conspiracy beliefs and paranormal, superstitious, and pseudoscientific beliefs (Bruder et al. 2013; Douglas et al. 2015; Drinkwater, Dagnall, and Parker 2012; Swami et al. 2013b).

Studies have also consistently shown that distrust of health care providers, medical professionals, and the pharmaceutical industry to be among the strongest predictors of the hesitancy and reluctance to vaccinate (Dube et al. 2013; Krishna 2017; Lee et al. 2016; Salmon et al. 2005). Distrust, in turn, has been significantly linked to exposure to negative information about vaccination (e.g., vaccines can cause autism, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and can overwhelm a child’s immune system), while negative information consumption, for its part, is found to predict resistance to vaccination. Jolley and Douglas (2014) found that the impact of anti-vaccine ideas was mediated by greater distrust in public authorities (and feelings of powerlessness).

If exposure to negative information about vaccines encourages a reluctance to vaccinate, one might assume that the antidote to resistance lies in greater exposure to expert sources of information. And yet, Salmon and others (2005) found that parents who refuse their children vaccinations were actually more likely to report receiving vaccine-related information from a diverse range of sources, including medical and health care authorities than parents of vaccinated children. Likewise, Lee and others (2016, 3976) report “no disparity in exposure to vaccine information from the government and healthcare providers between parents who trust and distrust the government.” The issue, then, is not that vaccine-skeptics do not have access to quality information; rather, they simply distrust the sources. Based on this prior research, this study posits that anti-vaccination beliefs are an outcome of a general propensity to believe in conspiracy theories.

Predictions

Taking the previous literature into account, the current study tests two hypotheses. Anti-vaccination beliefs are expected to be correlated with unrelated conspiracies if it is a part of an underlying psychological predisposition for believing in conspiracy theories. Two ideologically antithetical conspiracy theory beliefs were picked to determine if these beliefs jointly correlate with anti-vaccination beliefs The three selected are (1) that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Trutherism), (2) that former President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and (3) that government and public health authorities are deliberately lying to the public regarding the safety of vaccinations (Anti-vaxxism). Thus, the expected findings are that

Hypothesis 1 (H1): Beliefs that Obama is a Muslim, Trutherism, and Anti-vaxxism will load strongly on one factor in a principal component analysis (PCA).

This study also predicts that common predictors of conspiracy theories will simultaneously jointly have a similar correlation with all three conspiracies, because they stem from the same latent variable. We are interested in exploring the underpinnings of different combinations of conspiracy endorsement, and so expect to find that many predictors are simultaneously and similarly related to Obama a Muslim, Trutherism, and Anti-vaxxism. Prior research shows that political trust, political knowledge, and education have been commonly associated with less conspiracy beliefs (see Miller, Saunders and Farhart 2016; Abalakina-Paap et al. 1999; Hodson and Busseri 2012) and authoritarianism has been shown to correlate with greater conspiracy thinking (see Grzesiak-Feldman and Irzycka 2009; Richey 2017). Thus, given that our outcome variable is the collective endorsement of all three of the above conspiracies, we expect to find that

Hypothesis 2a (H2a): Political trust will correlate with simultaneously less endorsement of all three of following conspiracy theories: Obama a Muslim, Trutherism, and Anti-vaxxism.

Hypothesis 2b (H2b): Political knowledge will correlate with simultaneously less endorsement of all three of following conspiracy theories: Obama a Muslim, Trutherism, and Anti-vaxxism.

Hypothesis 2c (H2c): Education will correlate with less endorsement simultaneously of all three of following conspiracy theories: Obama a Muslim, Trutherism, and Anti-vaxxism.

Hypothesis 2d (H2d): Authoritarianism will correlate with more endorsement simultaneously of all three of following conspiracy theories: Obama a Muslim, Trutherism, and Anti-vaxxism.

Data and Methods

To test the preceding hypotheses, data from the ANES 2016 pre/post-election survey of 4,230 randomly sampled voting-age Americans are used.¹ This two-wave study was conducted via face-to-face interviews and a web-based survey platform. Wave 1, the pre-election survey, commenced in early September 2016 and continued right up to election day. Wave 2, the follow-up or post-election survey, began on November 9 and concluded in January 2017. Demographically, 52.7 percent of respondents were female and 71.68 percent were white with a mean age of 49.5 (SD = 17.58). The response rate was 50 percent for the face-to-face version and 44 percent for the Internet version of the questionnaire. Full information about the sampling procedure, question wordings, and survey methodology is available at the ANES website.

Dependent Variables

Trutherism is measured with the following question: “Did senior federal government officials definitely know about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 before they happened (4), probably knew about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 before they happened (3), probably did not know about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 before they happened (2), or definitely did not know about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 before they happened (1)?”

Obama a Muslim is measured through a summary variable that combines and sorts responses to two questions. The first is a dichotomous item that asks: Is Barack Obama a Muslim (1) or is he not a Muslim (0)? Using a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = Not at all sure; 5 = Extremely sure), a follow-up question asks respondents to indicate “how sure” they are “that Barack Obama is or is not a Muslim?” Together, these items form a 10-point ordinal scale, ranging from “Extremely sure Obama is not a Muslim (1)” to “Extremely sure Obama is a Muslim (10).” A potential objection here is that these questions make no explicit suggestion that Obama “conspired” to conceal his Muslim identity. Nor do they point to the many wider conspiracies surrounding Obama’s alleged status as a closet Muslim—for example, that he is an agent of Islamic supremacists (Reott and Reott 2012). While not ideal, these items nonetheless capture the essential ingredient of most, if not all, Obama-Muslim conspiracy theories (i.e., that Obama is hiding his Muslim identity). Moreover, even if respondents do not subscribe to the larger and more intricate Obama-Muslim conspiracies, the belief that Obama is a Muslim is conspiratorial in and of itself. Similar to beliefs in the danger of vaccines, it implies not only that Obama deliberately lied to the American public about his religious identity, but that he also co-opted or connived with other government officials to keep it under wraps throughout his eight-year term in his office.

Similar to measuring the Obama a Muslim conspiracy, Anti-vaxxism is measured with a summary variable comprising two interrelated questions. The first asks, “Do the health benefits of vaccinations outweigh the risks, do the risks outweigh the benefits, or is there no difference?” A proceeding question then asks, “Are the risks/benefits much greater, moderately greater, or slightly greater?” Sorting and combining these items produces a 7-point Likert-type scale, ranging from “Benefits are much greater than the risks (1)” to “Risks are much greater than the benefits (7).”

Independent Variables

To test Hypothesis 2, several measures are included that may correlate with a general propensity to believe conspiracies. Political Trust is measured with a 5-point ordinal item that asks, “How often can you trust the federal government in Washington to do what is right?” Responses range from “Never” (1) to “Always” (5). This measure is often used in research on political trust (see, for example, Hetherington 2005).

It also follows that both educational attainment and cognitive ability will be inversely related to belief in the conspiracies. In the first case, research has consistently documented negative relationships between Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and the former two variables (see, for example, Hodson and Busseri 2012). Second, and as previously cited, numerous studies have linked general conspiracism to both lower educational attainment as well as poorer performance on measures of intelligence and analytical reasoning.

Specifically, conspiracies are said to offer cognitively “easy” explanations to otherwise complicated socio-political phenomena. Thus, they are especially likely to appeal to those who lack both the ability and the epistemic resources to accurately digest political and scientific issues.

Political Knowledge is measured by summing the number of correct responses (1 = Correct; 0 = Incorrect) to a ten-question open-ended quiz featured in the 2016 ANES. For example, one question asked respondents to input the number of years “in one full term of office for a U.S. Senator,” while another asks them to provide the first name of former “Vice President Biden.” Education, as discussed, is expected to negatively affect endorsement of the three conspiracy theories included in the current study.

Authoritarianism is measured using Stenner’s (2005) and Feldman’s (2003) Social Conformity Autonomy (SCA) scale. While the ANES survey featured questions tapping the three dimensions (conventionalism, submission, aggression) of Altemeyer’s (1996) standard RWA inventory, their similarity to conservatism poses challenges for discriminant validity. The SCA scale, by contrast, is composed of items that are apolitical. Specifically, it asks, “Although there are a number of qualities that people feel that children should have, every person thinks that some are more important than others. I am going to read you pairs of desirable qualities. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders; curiosity or good manners; obedience or self-reliance; being considerate or well behaved.” The respondents choose one of the traits as desirable for children; those choosing more conformity traits are deemed more authoritarian. To construct the scale, a PCA was generated, which saw all four traits loading almost equally on one component with an eigenvalue of 1.94.² Although the SCA scale measures authoritarianism differently than the original RWA, both instruments are highly correlated, with a typical coefficient of roughly .7 (see Feldman 2003, 57).

Other predictors includes 7-point measures of ideology (1 = Extremely Liberal; 7 = Extremely Conservative) and partisan identification (1 = Strong Democrat; 7 = Strong Conservative) as well as demographic items spanning age, gender (1 = Male; 0 = Female), race and ethnicity (black, Hispanic), income, and educational attainment. Of the latter, income was previously found to negatively influence conspiracism³ (Radnitz and Underwood 2017), while race only emerged as a significant predictor in the case of anti-black conspiracy theories (Goertzel 1994).

Results

Testing Hypothesis 1

The analysis begins by tabulating a correlation matrix in Table 1 of all three conspiracy beliefs. As expected, Anti-vaxxism, Trutherism, and Obama a Muslim are all significantly positively related to one another. For example, anti-vaxxism strongly correlates (r = .241; p < .001) with Trutherism and only slightly less so with Obama a Muslim (r = .217; p < .001). Additional support for this is reflected in the weaker (r = .158)—but still significantly positive (p < .001)—relationship between Trutherism and Obama a Muslim, which would seem to be oppositional to partisan motivated reasoning. While beyond the scope of the current study, these findings point to the uniformity of motivations underlying the endorsement of different conspiracy beliefs. That all were significantly inter-correlated suggests the presence of a propensity to believe in conspiracism. This proposition is tested more formally with a confirmatory factor analysis in Tables 2 and 3.

Table 1.

Correlation Matrix of Conspiracy Beliefs.

Variable	Anti-vaxxism	Obama a Muslim
Obama a Muslim	.254***
Trutherism	.249***	.165***
N	3,320

Note. Cells represent unstandardized pairwise correlations.

†

p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Table 2.

Results of Principal Component Analysis for Anti-vaxxism, Obama a Muslim, and Trutherism.

	Component 1	Component 2	Component 3
Eigenvalue	1.41	0.844	0.739
Proportion cumulative	0.4723	0.4723	0.7536

Table 3.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis Loadings.

Eigenvectors	Component 1
Anti-vaxxism	0.6191
Obama a Muslim	0.5403
Trutherism	0.5698

Note. Cells in Table 4 represent confirmatory factor analysis loadings on the main factor, Component 1 in Table 3.

A PCA shown in Table 2 lends credence to this interpretation, as there is only one component with an eigenvalue above 1.0, and all three conspiracy theories load strongly on this factor at above .54 or greater.

As shown in Table 3, all three conspiracy beliefs load strongly (.6191, .5698, .5403) on a single component with a cumulative contribution of 0.47. Such is consistent with Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013), which fingered general conspiracy mentality as a strong predictor of anti-vaxxism.

Testing Hypotheses 2a, 2b, 2c, and 2d

While the findings above show evidence of a propensity toward conspiracism, we have yet to test whether there are similar underlying factors that predict all three. Such is the task of the SUR model in Table 4, which investigates the joint correlation of many predictors and these beliefs.

Table 4.

SUR Model of Three Conspiracy Beliefs.

	Anti-vax		Obama a Muslim		Truther
	b	SE	b	SE	b	SE
Anti-vax
Political trust	−0.129***	0.036	−0.197***	0.058	−0.138***	0.021
SCA	0.146***	0.025	0.391***	0.040	0.031*	0.014
Political knowledge	−0.109***	0.015	−0.157***	0.023	−0.049***	0.008
Ideology	0.039	0.028	0.335***	0.045	−0.046**	0.016
Party identification	−0.003	0.020	0.346***	0.032	−0.021	0.011
Age	−0.012***	0.002	0.006*	0.003	−0.004***	0.001
Male	0.191**	0.062	−0.154	0.098	0.028	0.035
Education	−0.181***	0.030	−0.188***	0.048	−0.078***	0.017
Income	−0.007	0.004	−0.021**	0.007	−0.011***	0.002
Black	0.543***	0.117	−1.126***	0.187	0.114	0.067
Hispanic	0.160	0.188	−0.145	0.300	0.143	0.108
Intercept	4.187***	0.184	3.533***	0.293	3.684***	0.105
N	2,447		2,447		2,447
χ²	468.798***		1,351.21***		296.28***

Note. Cells represent unstandardized coefficients and standard errors of a seemingly unrelated regression model, which simultaneously models the three dependent variables—Anti-vaccination, Obama is a Muslim, and Trutherism—on the independent variables. SUR = seemingly unrelated regression; SCA = Social Conformity Autonomy.

†

p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Hypothesis 2a predicted a negative relationship between political trust and the endorsement of all three conspiracies. As shown in Table 3, this is exactly what we find. Beginning with the anti-vaccination equation, a 1-point increase in political trust corresponds to a significant (p < .001; z = −3.71) 0.132-point decrease in the belief that the risks of vaccines outweigh their benefits. These effects are even stronger in the case of Birtherism where each point rise in political trust amounts to a significant 0.277-point drop (p < .001; z = −4.71) in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Stronger still (z = −5.74) is the influence of political trust on Trutherism: each point increase in the former equates to a significant (p < .001) 0.118-point reduction in the belief that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

The results also show negative relationships between all three conspiracy beliefs jointly from educational attainment and political knowledge, supporting Hypotheses 2b and 2c. Across all three equations, we find more scholastic achievement yields a significant drop in the likelihood of endorsing Anti-vaxxism (B = −0.14; p < .001; z = −4.48), Obama a Muslim (B = 0.209; p < .001; z = −4.02), and Trutherism (B = −0.072; p < .001; z = −3.96). Importantly, these effects are similar for political knowledge. In the latter case, each additional correct response to the ANES knowledge quiz results in 0.101 (p < .001), −0.177 (p < .001), and −0.048-point reductions in anti-vaxxer, Birther, and Truther responses, respectively. Together, these findings are consistent with the notion that, by increasing cognitive complexity and analytical thinking, greater education and political knowledge render conspiracies less plausible (Swami et al. 2014; van Prooijen 2017). This is likely due to the nature of the conspiracism in question.

For Hypothesis 2d, Table 4 shows that each point increase in SCA equates to a statistically significant 0.126 (p < .001; z = 5.05) and 0.396-point (p < .001; z = 9.58) rise in Anti-vaxxism and Obama a Muslim, respectively. The one small exception is the Truther equation, where the positive effects of SCA (B = 0.027) achieve only marginal significance (p = .054; z = 1.92). The negative relationship (i.e., in the liberal direction) between political ideology and Trutherism might account for this.⁴

Interestingly, both party ID and political ideology prove insignificant in the anti-vaxxer equation, which suggests that vaccine-skepticism is not a partisan-motivated phenomenon. Taken as a whole, the specified variables explain 15.7, 34.26, and 11.19 percent of the variance in Anti-vaxxism, Obama a Muslim, and Trutherism, respectively. The comparatively greater R2 for Obama a Muslim is at least partly driven by the latter’s stronger relationship (r = .375) with authoritarianism (i.e., SCA). Given that Obama a Muslim has greater currency among the political right (Cassino and Jenkins 2013), which, itself, is significantly positively correlated (r = .364) with SCA, this disparity is unsurprising. That said, whereas the effect size of SCA varies considerably, that of political trust is relatively more stable. This, again, attests to the central role the predisposition to believe in conspiracies in explaining anti-vaccination beliefs.

Conclusion

We have shown that anti-vaccination beliefs are best explained as an extension of a common psychological predisposition for conspiracy beliefs. The anti-vaccination beliefs studied here correlate strongly with the unconnected and ideologically oppositional conspiracy beliefs that Obama is a Muslim and the 9/11 Truther movement. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that these three beliefs all load strongly on the same factor and they correlate strongly with each other. This shows that these conspiracy beliefs are bound by the same psychological predisposition and that anti-vaccination beliefs are a part of this predisposition.

In addition, we show that many of the same predictors simultaneously predict all three conspiracy beliefs, which are not in any way related. The primary predictor in terms of statistical strength is the strong negative correlation with political trust with all three beliefs. The SUR models show that political distrust explains a large portion of all three conspiracy beliefs. This adds to the long list of benefits from political trust for liberal democratic societies that have been showed by other researchers (see Hetherington 2005). An important feature of political trust is that it functions as a counterweight to predisposition to believe in conspiracy beliefs. This provides a clue as a potential way to inhibit the growth of conspiracy theories, by conceptualizing them as a function of both psychological propensity.

These results help explain why information on vaccine safety that emphasizes credibility and legitimacy derived from establishment sources has a backfire effect on those highly committed to anti-vaccination beliefs. If anti-vaccination beliefs are a form of conspiracy beliefs, any information to debunk those beliefs which derives its validity from the establishment and the government will seem suspicious to a conspiracy theorist. This points to future efforts to encourage vaccine uptake, which counter-intuitively do not mention their sources of legitimacy because these will be antagonistic to someone with a predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories. Indeed, if general conspiracism is, for some people, the product of individual differences in core psychological traits (Barron et al. 2018), this research portends that convincing these segments of the public of the safety of vaccines will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, under conventional intervention strategies. Future experimental work can test whether stimuli that do not emphasize any connection to government organizations are more effective in promoting vaccine uptake.

Finally, it is hoped that the current study motivates further research into the nature of political trust’s relationship with conspiratorial ideation. For instance, does distrust in government increase peoples susceptibility to anti-vaccine conspiracies? Does distrust in government merely flow from (or is epiphenomenal to) conspiratorial ideation? Or is the process best construed as a kind of feedback loop? Answering these questions is crucial for the design of effective intervention strategies. While recent studies have undoubtedly broadened our understanding of the correlates of conspiracism, these basic but vital questions deserve far greater empirical attention.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank beneficial comments from participants at the MPSA Annual Conference and the GSU Graduate Students Association Annual Conference. This article has names that are alphabetically listed and has equal authorship.

Notes

About the Authors

Zachary J. Goldberg is a PhD candidate in political science at Georgia State University. He researches American politics, with a focus on political polarization and public attitudes on race and immigration.

Sean Richey is associate professor of political science at Georgia State University. He is also the director of Georgia State University’s Political Survey Research Lab, which he founded. He researches American politics, with a specialization in voting behavior, public opinion, and quantitative methodology.

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