Emotional susceptibility to public scrutiny and vaccine hesitancy: an exploratory experimental analysis

This paper explores the understudied link between self-consciousness and vaccine scepticism, combining an experimental approach with causal forests to estimate individual treatment effects. Leveraging data from a lab experiment with Italian university students, we find that individuals who are more easily induced to self-conscious responses (e.g., feeling shame or embarrassment) tend to hold stronger vaccine misbeliefs. Rather than a causal effect of self-consciousness elicitation on vaccine attitudes, our results highlight a correlation between pre-treatment attitudes and susceptibility to self-conscious emotions. This underlines the importance of policy interventions aimed at effective public health communication, since more sceptical individuals may avoid discussing with health professionals or develop self-conscious emotions as the result of these discussions, further exacerbating their vaccine hesitancy.