https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/07/imposing-vaccine-mandates-may-be-counterproductive-our-research-suggests/

https://archive.is/nfoEM

Imposing vaccine mandates may be counterproductive, our research suggests

Karin Schmelz (Universität Konstanz and Thurgau Institute of Economics)

Opposition to coronavirus vaccination stubbornly persists across the globe. Even in Israel — the world leader in vaccinating its population — the fraction vaccinated appears to have hit a plateau with one-third of the population unvaccinated. In the United States, some states are facing gluts of vaccine doses.

One common response to this is mandatory vaccination. The California university systems, and 1 in 10 U.S. universities and colleges, almost all in blue states, have announced that vaccination would be required for anyone attending in the fall. Even where demand for vaccination exceeds supply, vaccinations are being made mandatory. In March, the government of Galicia in Spain required vaccinations for adults, subjecting violators to substantial fines. Italy has mandated vaccinations for care workers.

Mandating vaccination may be unavoidable in some cases. But our new evidence from Germany suggests that it could hurt voluntary compliance, prolonging the pandemic and raising its social costs.

Survey evidence from Germany shows growing resistance to enforced vaccination

We looked at the attitudes of a representative sample of 2,653 Germans surveyed during the first and second German lockdowns, in April-May and in October-November of 2020. Respondents were asked: “If there is an approved vaccine against the coronavirus: To what extent would you agree to be inoculated yourself if: … vaccination is strongly recommended by the government but remains voluntary? … vaccination is made mandatory and checked by the government?”

More than two-thirds of respondents supported (either fully or somewhat) voluntary vaccination in both waves. But the fraction fully supporting vaccinations if they were enforced dropped from 44 percent to 28 percent over the same period, even though the infection rate had increased 15-fold between the two waves of our survey.

Trust in government and in science is critical for vaccination acceptance

The most important factor predicting vaccine willingness (and how it changed between the two waves) was whether the respondent trusted public institutions. We measure this by averaging respondents’ expressed trust in the federal government and specifically in its information about coronavirus, as well as trust in state governments, science and the media.

We found that the fall in support for enforced vaccination was disproportionately high among those whose public trust had also declined. The effect is substantial, accounting for a large fraction of the observed reduction in support for enforced vaccinations.

But the growing opposition to enforced vaccination was not a result of increased skepticism about the vaccine itself, or a general reduction in trust, neither of which changed on average between the two waves. About as many people became more trusting as lost trust. Our survey evidence, instead, points to increased opposition to enforcement itself because it “restricts your freedom.”

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Mandated vaccinations may provoke distrust

There are three reasons that we think may explain why a government mandate may make people more resistant to vaccinations. First, people resist being manipulated. Behavioral experiments have shown that positive incentives (carrots) and controlling or negative incentives (sticks) often backfire — producing the opposite of their intended result — because they provoke what economists term “control aversion.”

Second, people may be affected by what psychologists call “moral disengagement.” This happens when people think that the decision is predetermined by explicit rules or incentives, so that their own ethical convictions are not relevant. This is one of the reasons traffic engineers now consider traffic lights to be more hazardous than roundabouts. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom described how good citizenship can get crowded out when the government takes responsibility for doing the right thing.

Something like this may be happening with vaccination, with enforced vaccination crowding out altruistic motivations. In the second wave of our survey, those who were more altruistic (they said they were “willing to help others”) were also more likely to support voluntary but not enforced vaccinations.

Finally, enforcement may crowd out intrinsic motivation by diminishing trust. Citizens may take enforced vaccination as evidence that the government thinks people would not get the vaccine if they have a free choice. This may suggest either that there is something wrong with the vaccine, or that the state does not trust its citizens to respect a social norm of protecting others by getting vaccinated. The citizen’s tit-for-tat response to being distrusted may be to oppose the government’s vaccination program.

Effective vaccination policies can exploit herd behavior to achieve herd immunity

Resistance to mandated vaccinations could lead to a downward spiral. Initial public distrust could limit the numbers willing to be vaccinated, prompting mandatory vaccination, kindling further distrust of government and science. Alternatively, if the government were to start off by mandating vaccinations, our results suggest that this might squander a substantial initial willingness to be vaccinated if it were voluntary, forcing a more expansive vaccine mandate and further heightening public distrust.

In other words, implementing a policy may change citizens’ beliefs and preferences in ways that undermine the policy. The officials in charge of vaccines face a specific version of this problem: Mandates may reduce vaccine willingness.

And voluntary policies may be sufficient even if initial vaccine willingness is limited. In our recent PNAS article, we model how herd behavior can propel a population from vaccination hesitancy to a herd immunity target.

The reason is that those initially volunteering to be vaccinated send a positive signal about their willingness to cooperate and their belief in the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, which may influence others. By contrast, complying with enforced vaccination sends a much weaker signal, dampening the positive herd effects of others having been vaccinated.

To be clear: Our research does not show that policymakers should avoid vaccine mandates. Legally required vaccination against measles and other diseases play an essential role in public health policies around the world. Instead, our findings concern the design of policies — showing how mandated policies may provoke pushback, how enhancing public trust might mitigate this, and how, under a voluntary policy, herd behavior may be sufficient to reach herd immunity.

Katrin Schmelz is a behavioral economist and psychologist at the University of Konstanz and the Thurgau Institute of Economics.

Samuel Bowles directs the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute and is the author of “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens” (2016).

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It's good to know what the enemy wants to exploit.

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/25/e2104912118

https://archive.is/Z1hZR

Overcoming COVID-19 vaccination resistance when alternative policies affect the dynamics of conformism, social norms, and crowding out

Karin Schmelz (Universität Konstanz and Thurgau Institute of Economics) and Samuel Bowles

Significance

We provide a model of policy effectiveness to explore the dynamics of vaccine resistance, drawing on our panel data set. The key ideas motivating the model are that voluntary citizen compliance is essential to policy success even under enforcement and that compliance preferences are endogenous, possibly crowded out by enforcement or enhanced due to conformism as more other citizens comply. Our panel data tracks intraindividual changes in trust in public institutions and vaccine acceptance, allowing inferences about causal effects. Our contribution is the integration of three features: 1) a model of interaction of public policy and citizen preferences, 2) using appropriate data, and 3) allowing insights on how to address the COVID-19 pandemic and other important societal challenges.

Abstract

What is an effective vaccination policy to end the COVID-19 pandemic? We address this question in a model of the dynamics of policy effectiveness drawing upon the results of a large panel survey implemented in Germany during the first and second waves of the pandemic. We observe increased opposition to vaccinations were they to be legally required. In contrast, for voluntary vaccinations, there was higher and undiminished support. We find that public distrust undermines vaccine acceptance, and is associated with a belief that the vaccine is ineffective and, if enforced, compromises individual freedom. We model how the willingness to be vaccinated may vary over time in response to the fraction of the population already vaccinated and whether vaccination has occurred voluntarily or not. A negative effect of enforcement on vaccine acceptance (of the magnitude observed in our panel or even considerably smaller) could result in a large increase in the numbers that would have to be vaccinated unwillingly in order to reach a herd-immunity target. Costly errors may be avoided if policy makers understand that citizens’ preferences are not fixed but will be affected both by the crowding-out effect of enforcement and by conformism. Our findings have broad policy applicability beyond COVID-19 to cases in which voluntary citizen compliance is essential because state capacities are limited and because effectiveness may depend on the ways that the policies themselves alter citizens’ beliefs and preferences.

Legally required vaccination against measles and other diseases is an essential part of public health policies around the world. But opposition to even voluntary COVID-19 vaccination has emerged in many countries. During the initial rollout of vaccinations in the United States, for example, an antivaccine demonstration temporarily closed down one of the country’s largest vaccination sites (1).

In early March 2021, among Americans not already vaccinated, 38% said that they would not willingly do so (2). In late March, among rural Americans who were not yet vaccinated, only a quarter were willing to be “as soon as possible” (3). In mid-February, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece authored by two former heads of the US Food and Drug Administration warned of a “vaccine glut.” By April, “[t]he challenge won’t be how to ration a scarce resource, but how to reach patients reluctant to get vaccinated” (4).

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Perhaps in response to concerns that voluntary vaccine take-up would be insufficient to end the pandemic, in all but 3 of the 14 countries surveyed, majorities of those expressing an opinion supported mandatory vaccination policies (this was in late January, prior to the discovery of rare adverse effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine) (5). In March, the government of Galicia in Spain announced that vaccinations would be mandatory with violations subject to substantial fines (6). In April, Italy made vaccinations mandatory for health care workers (7). At the same time, the Chinese government ordered local authorities to cease mandatory vaccines, fearing adverse public reaction (8). In the United States, 41% of those surveyed in March said they were “very concerned” that they “might be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine even if [they] don’t want to,” and another 21% were “somewhat concerned” (9).

An important fact motivating our evaluation of policies to overcome resistance to vaccination is that those hesitating appear to be taking their cues from others. In late February, 27% of Americans not already vaccinated said they would “wait […] to see how it is working for other people.” A total of 69% of those in households in which someone had already been vaccinated also wanted to be vaccinated “as soon as possible,” while this was true of only 37% of those who do not know anyone vaccinated (10).

Our panel data set from Germany allows us to ask how vaccine resistance is changing and to identify some of the determinants of these changes, including changes in public trust and whether vaccination is voluntary or legally mandated. To apply our findings to anti–COVID-19 policy making, we develop a model of the dynamics of vaccine resistance. This model illustrates how the willingness to be vaccinated may vary over time in response to the fraction of the population already vaccinated and whether this has occurred voluntarily or not.

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>>13884748

belongs to this

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>>13884730

My own post is 1 line, the rest is the article, shill

>we

You are not speaking for us, shill.

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Karin Schmelz (Universität Konstanz and Thurgau Institute of Economics)

https://www.wiwi.uni-konstanz.de/fischbacher/members/research-group/post-docs/katrin-schmelz/

https://archive.is/Ffmbh

Research Interests

Experimental & behavioral economics; motivation and incentives; culture, institutions and behavior

Publications

Schmelz, K. & Bowles, S. (2021). Overcoming COVID-19 vaccination resistance when alternative policies affect the dynamics of conformism, social norms and crowding-out. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 118(25).

Schmelz, K. (2021). Enforcement may crowd out voluntary support for Covid-19 policies, especially where trust in government is weak and in a liberal society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 118(1).

Schmelz, K. & Ziegelmeyer, A. (2020). Reactions to (the absence of) control and workplace arrangements: Experimental evidence from the Internet and the laboratory. Experimental Economics, 23(4), 933–960. (SM)

Rudorf, S., Schmelz, K., Baumgartner, T., Wiest, R., Fischbacher, U., & Knoch, D. (2018). Neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in control-averse behavior. The Journal of Neuroscience, 38(22), 5196-5208.

Rudorf, S., Baumgartner, T., Markett, S., Schmelz, K., Wiest, R., Fischbacher, U., & Knoch, D. (2018). Intrinsic connectivity networks underlying individual differences in control-averse behavior. Human Brain Mapping, 39(12), 4857-4869.

Ziegelmeyer, A., Schmelz, K., & Ploner, M. (2012). Hidden costs of control: Four repetitions and an extension. Experimental Economics, 15(2), 323-340.

You can find all chair´s publications here.

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What a COINincidence.