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Large-scale empirical study examining how societal trust in science influences vaccine confidence across 126 countries, relevant to understanding information cascades, social consensus effects, and public trust in expert institutions—critical factors in AI safety communication and governance.
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This study analyzes data from over 120,000 respondents across 126 countries to examine how societal-level factors influence vaccine confidence. The research demonstrates that macro-level trust in science significantly predicts individual vaccine confidence, independent of personal scientific trust. Importantly, the strength of social consensus around trust in science moderates this relationship—in countries with strong consensus about science's trustworthiness, the link between individual trust in science and vaccine confidence is substantially stronger than in countries with weaker consensus.
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Trust in science, social consensus and vaccine confidence | Nature Human Behaviour
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Subjects
Human behaviour
Science, technology and society
Abstract
While scholarly attention to date has focused almost entirely on individual-level drivers of vaccine confidence, we show that macro-level factors play an important role in understanding individual propensity to be confident about vaccination. We analyse data from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor survey covering over 120,000 respondents in 126 countries to assess how societal-level trust in science is related to vaccine confidence. In countries with a high aggregate level of trust in science, people are more likely to be confident about vaccination, over and above their individual-level scientific trust. Additionally, we show that societal consensus around trust in science moderates these individual-level and country-level relationships. In countries with a high level of consensus regarding the trustworthiness of science and scientists, the positive correlation between trust in science and vaccine confidence is stronger than it is in comparable countries where the level of social consensus is weaker.
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Fig. 1: Strength of consensus around trust in science across countries. Fig. 2: The strength of consen
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