“Because their tribe said so” is a good point, but in most cases I don’t think that the decision to not get the vaccine was made by people who wanted to “signal” beliefs contrary to their own real beliefs about the vaccine. This seems unnecessarily convoluted compared to the explanation below regarding trust and belief.
Their tribe was telling them things like:
>The official Covid numbers are deliberately manipulated (e.g. the definition of a “Covid case” deliberately includes false positives). >The vaccinecarries a high risk of death or serious illness (the real numbers are being covered up and all anecdotes are being scrubbed from social media in a grand conspiracy).
Being a member of the tribe, they would default to trusting their allies, or, even if they had some uncertainty, at least they’d trust their allies sooner than the ones their allies were calling liars, if forced to choose (which they were). And they could recite some of the reasons explained by their allies, even if the real biggest reason for their belief in the claims was the fact that the claims were their allies’. But they wouldn’t just say they believe to fit in—they would really believe that the claims are the truth. Although leaping to these tribe-conforming conclusions about the vaccine was not done in a rational way, given those beliefs (taking them as assumptions), the conclusion “I should not get the vaccine” is a perfectly logical one.
I think there were far more people who doubted the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine but got it anyway (than people who believed in the safety and effectiveness but refused the vaccine), due to social/economic pressures like free donuts and “I will fire/expel/reject you unless you get it.”
“Because their tribe said so” is a good point, but in most cases I don’t think that the decision to not get the vaccine was made by people who wanted to “signal” beliefs contrary to their own real beliefs about the vaccine. This seems unnecessarily convoluted compared to the explanation below regarding trust and belief.
Their tribe was telling them things like:
>The official Covid numbers are deliberately manipulated (e.g. the definition of a “Covid case” deliberately includes false positives).
>The vaccine carries a high risk of death or serious illness (the real numbers are being covered up and all anecdotes are being scrubbed from social media in a grand conspiracy).
Being a member of the tribe, they would default to trusting their allies, or, even if they had some uncertainty, at least they’d trust their allies sooner than the ones their allies were calling liars, if forced to choose (which they were). And they could recite some of the reasons explained by their allies, even if the real biggest reason for their belief in the claims was the fact that the claims were their allies’. But they wouldn’t just say they believe to fit in—they would really believe that the claims are the truth. Although leaping to these tribe-conforming conclusions about the vaccine was not done in a rational way, given those beliefs (taking them as assumptions), the conclusion “I should not get the vaccine” is a perfectly logical one.
I think there were far more people who doubted the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine but got it anyway (than people who believed in the safety and effectiveness but refused the vaccine), due to social/economic pressures like free donuts and “I will fire/expel/reject you unless you get it.”