Planet Erland

To test how expert opinion affects this debate, we constructed arguments for and against mandatory vaccination and matched them with fictional male experts, whose appearance (besuited and grey-haired, for example, or denim-shirted and bearded) and publication titles were designed to make them look as if they had distinct cultural perspectives. When the expert who was perceived as hierarchical and individualistic criticized the CDC recommendation, people who shared those values and who were already predisposed to see the vaccine as risky became even more intensely opposed to it. Likewise, when the expert perceived as egalitarian and communitarian defended the vaccine as safe, people with egalitarian values became even more supportive of it. Yet when we inverted the expert-argument pairings, attributing support for mandatory vaccination to the hierarchical expert and opposition to the egalitarian one, people shifted their positions and polarization disappeared.