Does discourse breed an appetite for Covid-19 vaccination? An online experiment on group dynamics, arguments, and narratives

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Lydia Mechtenberg
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 466310941

We investigate how peer-to-peer communication with vaccination supporters affects the willingness to get vaccinated against Sars-Cov-2 among vaccine skeptics. Opinions on newly developed vaccines against Sars-Cov-2 are split across different socio-demographic groups in many countries, such as Germany and the U.S. Without increasing the willingness to get vaccinated in these countries, governments will find it politically costly – if not impossible - to reach herd immunity by vaccination. We conduct a large-scale survey-chat experiment that will randomly match subjects into small peer groups that chat among each other on the pros and cons of getting vaccinated against Sars-Cov-2. We hypothesize that communication with random peers will affect the willingness to get vaccinated along two dimensions: (1) via the distribution of opinions in random peer groups, and (2) via the types of messages and sentiments used. Furthermore, we hypothesize that opinion malleability depends on three factors: (1) the degree of receptiveness of a subject, given their communication style; (2) the degree of difference between own opinion versus the majority of peers in the group; and (3) the persuasiveness of peer arguments used to back up their claims. The pandemic significantly restricts contacts in society, thus heavily limiting the opportunity to exchange opinions with peers on whether or not to get vaccinated. Instead, people are locked into their homogenous social settings and/or in homophilious online echo chambers, which decreases malleability of beliefs. Our experiment provides the opportunity of meeting and discussing with random peers online. Treatments randomly assign chat-group composition with respect to ex-ante attitude towards Covid-19 vaccination and an intervention priming participants towards either fact-based or narrative-based types of arguments relative to a neutral control. By analyzing the sentiments and discourse dynamics from the text generated during their discussions, we will shed light on the types of arguments and persuasion tactics that are most effective in increasing or decreasing the willingness to get vaccinated. Online chats in the field yield rich text data that directly relate to the discussion topic; and those with pre-formed opinions use arguments as well as narratives to persuade others. Therefore, in this project, we will compare how narrative-based arguments (i.e. anecdotes, stories) and fact-based arguments play a role in shifting opinions across social groups.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Grischa Perino