Perceived social norms and vaccine hesitancy

Vaccines are an important tool for preventing serious illness and avoiding deaths. Vaccine hesitancy, the delay or refusal of vaccines when available or offered, is one of the top 10 threats to global public health. The acceptance and uptake, delay, or refusal of vaccines has direct health implications for individuals, their close contacts, and indirectly for others in their environment and wider social networks. Vaccination uptake/hesitancy is the product of human decision-making and is influenced by various psychological and social factors, including perceived social norms. Individuals will often consider others’ vaccine-related attitudes and/or behaviors to guide their own decision-making. One potential way of reducing vaccine hesitancy is by changing people’s (mis)perceptions of these vaccine-related social norms through feedback interventions that highlight the actual vaccination norms (e.g., that most others would take a vaccine if offered). This article takes a social norms perspective toward understanding vaccine hesitancy, discusses how and why perceived social norms may be influential in hesitancy, and outlines ways psychological science can better understand the perceived social norms implicated in vaccine hesitancy.