This research asked a deceptively simple question: what actually drives vaccine hesitancy, and does social media shape it? Working from a nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study tested whether familiarity with a vaccine or something more emotional governed people's willingness to take it. The headline result was counterintuitive. Respondents were more willing to accept unfamiliar or outright fictitious vaccines — putatively from the US health program Medicare and the defunct fraud Theranos — than they were to take the real Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines developed by the Russian and Chinese governments. The critical factor was not familiarity at all. It was anxiety. Threat perception, not information, predicted who balked. Social media use mattered selectively: Instagram and Twitter measurably influenced both willingness to vaccinate and self-reported knowledge, while Reddit and Facebook showed no significant effect either way. The work was published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (2022), funded by Kingston University, and conducted with 📝F. LeRon Shults. Related modeling I did with 📝Igor Mikloušić extends the same logic, tying nationalism and threat perception to how hesitancy propagates.
What I keep coming back to is that we were trying to persuade with facts when the real lever was fear. You can hand someone a flawless dossier on a vaccine and lose them anyway if their nervous system has already decided it is a threat. That reframing — hesitancy as an anxiety problem wearing an information costume — is why I build computational models of belief at 📝CulturePulse rather than chasing the next fact-check.