Emotional Sensitivity to Probability as a Predictor of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Prevention Behaviors

Any path out of the COVID-19 crisis will depend heavily on widespread vaccination, but substantial vaccine hesitancy and refusal stand in the way of reaching that goal. The pre-COVID literature on vaccine hesitancy points to several important factors, but important features of this pandemic may be uniquely contributing to hesitancy specifically for this vaccine. This pandemic has been characterized by unprecedented access to real-time risk statistics, such as positivity rates and case counts, and interpretations of those numbers may help account for individual differences in how people respond to the virus. In a survey of college students, we measured participants’ intention to pursue the vaccine, their adherence to guidelines like masking and social distancing, and their worry about both the virus and the vaccine. We modeled these responses using a measure of emotional sensitivity to probability (ESP; the extent to which individuals calibrate their emotional responses to changes in risk probability) as well as 3 other individual difference measures for emotional reactivity to possibility (ERP), aversion to ambiguity in medicine (AAMed), and medical maximizing-minimizing (MMM). We found that ESP significantly predicted greater vaccine intention, β = .29, p = .003, and AAMed predicted less, β = –.25, p = .008. MMM predicted more frequent masking, β = .21, p = .02, social distancing, β = .22, p = .01, and avoidance of public places, β = .25, p = .006. ERP predicted worry about long-tern illness, β = .29, p < .001, hospitalization, β = .25, p = .001, and death, β = .27, p < .001, from COVID-19 but also predicted worry about side effects from the vaccine, β = .22, p = .006.