Vaccine hesitancy is top of mind for global public health officials, and the reasons for this resistance are manifold. A group of American researchers recently focused on social identity as a motivating factor. Their study, published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities, found that group identification was an important factor for just over one-fifth of citizens.
Anti-vaxx social identification (AVSID) includes 22 percent of Americans — 14 percent of whom identify as "sometimes" resistant, while eight percent claim to "always" refuse vaccines. While on its face this appears to be a medical decision, the research team, led by Oklahoma State University political scientist Matt Motta, sought to discover the relevance of group acceptance.
Social psychology really matters
Previous research has found that anti-vaxxers conform to in-group norms by expressing skepticism against anyone that questions their autonomy and rejecting broader public health recommendations by out-group experts. Such resistance, they write, may result from identity protective cognition, that is, the avoidance of anything that challenges deeply held beliefs.
For this study, the team relied on the following two psychological theories:
- Social identity theory (SIT). Coined by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner, this theory predicts in-group behavior is due to perceived status differences as well as the legitimacy and stability of such differences. SIT predominantly focuses on the psychological motivations for group membership and attachment.
- Self-categorization theory (SCT). This social psychology theory is focused on the cognitive motivations for defining group membership. Also developed by John Turner, SCT investigates the consequences of perceiving people in group terms.
SIT argues that categorization can lead to identification depending on how personally each individual takes the content matter. In this case, when vaccine resistance provides self-esteem and personal meaning, then heightened group identification will merge with their identity. SCT steps in to cement the individual relationship to the content (vaccine resistance) and provides context for the group to flourish.
"Upon socially identifying with a group, people come to understand group membership in comparison to those not in the group, or to those in opposing groups. People then tend to favor members of the in-group and imbue positive characteristics onto them, whereas members of the out-group are viewed with suspicion and oftentimes are seen negatively."
Rally goers protest vaccines and the current administration during the "World Wide Rally for Freedom", an anti-mask and anti-vaccine rally, at the State House in Concord, New Hampshire, May 15, 2021.
Rally goers protest vaccines and the current administration during the "World Wide Rally for Freedom", an anti-mask and anti-vaccine rally, at the State House in Concord, New Hampshire, May 15, 2021. Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty Images
Following the herd, but not the immune kind
This mindset has profound social implications. While the U.S. has a goal to vaccinate 70 percent of American adults by July 4, public health officials are still concerned that another wave of COVID-19 will hit this summer due to millions of Americans refusing the jab.
While social psychology theories cannot explain all 22 percent of vaccine-hesitant individuals, the researchers are confident that they provide meaning for at least part of that population. People in this group often refuse to have their children vaccinated and also are more likely to express interest in "intuitive" thinking around health and medicine rather than accept empirical data offered by professionals.
Surveying over 5,000 Americans, the team discovered that full-blown anti-vaxxers (8 percent) were more likely to identify as a group than vaccine-hesitant respondents (14 percent). They also found that such respondents were more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking. They write:
"People who embrace folk theories about medicine — i.e., inter-generationally transmitted beliefs about medicine that are widely held, but factually inaccurate — have been shown to be more likely to think about the world in conspiratorial ways, and less knowledgeable about basic scientific facts."
The power of tribalism
The team notes that this is more than a barrier to herd immunity. Individuals that score high on the AVSID scale are more likely to share misinformation about vaccines and disrupt important public health communications. The challenge of combating such trends, they note, is especially difficult when anti-vaxx identity is bound to the group.
Reaching the 14 percent of vaccine-hesitant individuals will prove easier than trying to convince the 8 percent of anti-vaxxers. As long as their identity is tied with the group, changing their minds will be nearly impossible.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
What's one way to get a quick boost of confidence? If you watched the widely shared 2012 TED Talk "Your body language may shape who you are," you might think the answer is to strike a power pose.
The idea, detailed in a 2010 paper published in Psychological Science, is that striking a triumphant posture for a couple minutes causes neuroendocrine and behavioral changes in people, helping them to feel more powerful and perform better at various tasks.
U.K. political candidatesCredit: Kieron Bryan (@kieronjbryan) / Twitter
In addition to looking ridiculous, the benefits of the "power pose" probably aren't real. Since 2015, more than a dozen studies have tried and failed to replicate the effects reported in that 2010 paper. It's far from the first failed replication.
The replication crisis
Over the past two decades, the repeated failure to reproduce findings in the research literature, especially in the social and biomedical sciences, has been dubbed the replication crisis. Why is it a "crisis"?
Replication is a key principle of the scientific method. Successful replication increases the probability, and therefore confidence, that a given claim or effect is true: After all, if one study finds X, other studies should also find X, assuming they follow or build upon the original study design.
Despite widespread controversies and concern about the replication crisis over the past two decades, there's little evidence that things are getting better. The problem isn't just that many studies are nonreplicable but also that findings from nonreplicable studies continue to be cited by subsequent studies. "Failed papers," as a 2020 analysis dubbed them, "circulate through the literature as quickly as replicating papers."
Bad science travels fast
A new study published in Science Advances suggests the problem may be even worse than we thought, finding that nonreplicable papers receive 16 more citations per year than replicable ones, on average. Over time, that translates to 153 more citations.
This imbalance generally held true even after replication attempts revealed "failed" papers to be nonreplicable. It also persisted after controlling for factors like number of authors, percentage of male authors, language, and location.
Why do journals publish nonreplicable studies? It may come down to hype. "When the results are more 'interesting,' they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility," the new study suggests.
Stuart Richie made a similar argument in his 2020 book titled Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. He suggested that because researchers face institutional pressures to publish papers and earn grants, they're less likely to conduct dry yet valuable "workhouse studies" and more likely to pursue "showy and ostentatious findings" that generate media attention.
In short, incentives may be pushing some researchers away from the pursuit of truth.
Comparing citations
The new research included data from studies featured in three major replication projects conducted between 2015 and 2018. According to the paper, each of the three projects:
"tried to systematically replicate the findings in top psychology, economics, and general science journals. In psychology, only 39% of the experiments yielded significant findings in the replication study, compared to 97% of the original experiments. In economics, 61% of 18 studies replicated, and among Nature/Science publications, 62% of 21 studies did."
The researchers then compared this replicability data with the number of citations those studies received, collected from Google Scholar from the date of publication until the end of 2019. The results showed that when replication projects published data revealing studies to be nonreplicable, there was no significant effect on how often those studies were cited in the future. In other words, the studies continued to be cited, even though they were shown to be incorrect.
The average yearly citation count per year for studies that were not replicated (according to P value of the replication) in each replication study [(A) for Nature/Science, (B) for Economics, and (C) for Psychology papers in replication markets] and for those that were replicated. Serra-Garcia et al.
But couldn't some citations of nonreplicable studies have come from studies that were critical of the past findings? The researchers acknowledged this possibility but noted that only twelve percent of subsequent papers acknowledged that the findings they cited had failed to replicate.
Predicting replicability isn't difficult
Ignorance or a lack of intuition likely doesn't explain why the reviewers of top academic journals accept nonreplicable papers or publish subsequent papers that cite those findings. After all, academics and laypeople alike are quite good at predicting which studies will replicate. A 2020 study found, for example, that laypeople were able to guess the replicability of social science studies with above-chance accuracy (59 percent).
Similarly, a 2018 analysis found that psychologists correctly predicted the replicability of psychology studies with an accuracy of 70 percent, while a 2021 paper found that experts could predict the replicability of behavioral and social science papers 73 percent of the time.
These findings seem to bolster the argument that hype-related incentives are contributing to the replication crisis. Still, in the spirit of replication, it's probably worth waiting until these findings themselves are replicated by future research.
Social media has reshaped human behavior in ways we're only starting to understand. The proliferation of online communities has helped spawn novel strategies for promoting political causes, conducting business, finding sex and love, and transforming culture.
Could online communities also transform behavior in the financial world?
That's one of the key questions explored in a new study published on the preprint server arXiv. Titled "Reddit's self-organised bull runs: Social contagion and asset prices," the study used discussion data from the subreddit WallStreetBets to analyze relationships between the price of stocks and "hype" among online retail investors.
Hype is nothing new in the investing world. But the researchers noted that there seems to be something novel about the short squeeze of GameStop's stock in January, when the price of the stock rose tenfold, thanks largely to self-organized retail investors from WallStreetBets.
"As academics and regulators alike grapple with the implications, many wonder whether large-scale coordination among retail investors is the new 'modus operandi,' or a one-off fluke," the researchers wrote. "We argue that this is a new manifestation of a well-established global phenomenon."
To better understand how online hype is associated with stock prices, the researchers focused on two social components of hype: contagion and consensus. Contagion refers to investors spreading interest in an asset among each other, while consensus refers to their ability to agree on whether to buy or sell an asset.
The analysis found empirical evidence that both contagion and consensus emerge in online communities like WallStreetBets. In other words, investors spread sentiments about future stock performance to other investors, and then they cohere around investment strategies.
Popularity over fundamentals
The findings suggest that an asset's popularity, not its fundamentals, is paramount to many investors.
"Our results consistently show that investors become interested in discussing an asset, not because of fundamentals, but because other users discuss it," the researchers wrote. "Subsequently, this paper tests whether an individual's sentiment about future asset performance [is] affected by those of others. We find that this is the case: people look to their peers to form an opinion about an asset's potential."
To find evidence for social contagion among online investors, the researchers compiled a large dataset of posts and comments submitted to WallStreetBets. The goal was to analyze whether investors' past comments or posts about a given stock, such as Tesla, had a predictable effect on future discussions of that asset within WallStreetBets.
After conducting a regression analysis, the results suggest that hype is socially contagious and cyclical. The cycle usually plays out like this: A small group of investors hypes an asset. This attracts a larger group of investors who join the discussions.
But eventually, too many investors have joined the discussion, and fewer new investors are buying into the hype. As investors lose interest, they spend less time discussing (or "spreading") the asset on the forum, and they turn to new opportunities. The process is similar to a virus: As enough people become infected, they reach herd immunity, and the virus (hype) dies out.
So, does this process affect the stock price, and if so, how? The researchers said it was difficult to establish causality between hype and actual market activity. After all, they didn't have access to the trading records of subscribers to WallStreetBets.
But their model did show that activity on WallStreetBets was able to explain "significant variance" in trading volumes for the most-discussed assets on the forum. This suggests that when social contagion is strong for a given asset, consensus is strong too.
On the stock chart, consensus may start off bullish (or positively): As hype spreads, there's a slow, steady run-up in price. But the growth eventually becomes unstable and is followed by a crash and a period of volatility.
"The price crash stems from panic selling, as investors turn nervous in the face of volatility," the researchers wrote.
Bad news spreads faster than good news
Interestingly, the analysis found that bearish (or negative) sentiments were significantly more contagious on WallStreetBets.
"The data demonstrates that authors who previously commented on a bearish post are 47.7% more likely to express bearish over neutral sentiments, and 18.1% less likely to express bullish sentiments over neutral sentiments. Similarly, but less markedly, authors who previously commented on at least one bullish submission are 9.4% more likely to write a bullish submission, yet 11.3% less likely to write a bearish one."
The researchers said that the changing investing climate and widely available online data offers "promising opportunities for future research."
"As social media galvanizes a larger pool of retail investors with the potential for exciting stock market gambles, it is crucial to understand how social dynamics can impact asset prices," the researchers wrote. "With the first publicly acclaimed victory of Main Street over Wall Street, in the form of the GameStop short squeeze, it is unlikely that socially-driven asset volatility will simply disappear."
