Relationship of people's sources of health information and political ideology with acceptance of conspiratorial beliefs about vaccines

Abstract

Background: Conspiracies about vaccination are prevalent. We assessed how the health information sources people rely upon and their political ideologies are associated with acceptance of vaccine conspiracies.

Methods: Online survey (N = 599) on Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsource platform. Hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling.

Results: Acceptance of vaccine conspiracy beliefs was associated positively with greater reliance on social media for health information (coef. = 0.42, p < .001), inversely related to use of medical websites (coef. = -0.21, p < .001), and not significantly related to use of providers for health information (coef. = -0.13, p = .061). In addition, liberal political orientation was negatively associated with acceptance of vaccine conspiracies (coef. = -0.29, p < .001).

Conclusions: An understanding of vaccine conspiracy acceptance requires a consideration of people's health information sources. The greater susceptibility of political conservatives to conspiracy beliefs extends to the topic of vaccination.

Keywords: Conspiracy beliefs; Political ideology; Social media; Vaccines.