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 laboratory experiment with Italian university students, we find that individuals who are more easily induced to self-conscious responses (e.g., feeling shame or embarrassment) in response to public scrutiny tend to hold stronger vaccine misbeliefs. Rather than identifying 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 suggests that studying targeted public health communication may be crucial, as more sceptical individuals could avoid discussing with health professionals or develop self-conscious emotions as a result of these interactions, further exacerbating their vaccine hesitancy.