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Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy
Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. Therefore, public health authorities need to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a spatially structured mathematical model of opinion dynamics with reinforcement. The...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9554521/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36312563 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220367 |
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author | Müller, Johannes Tellier, Aurélien Kurschilgen, Michael |
author_facet | Müller, Johannes Tellier, Aurélien Kurschilgen, Michael |
author_sort | Müller, Johannes |
collection | PubMed |
description | Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. Therefore, public health authorities need to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a spatially structured mathematical model of opinion dynamics with reinforcement. The model allows as an emergent property for the occurrence of echo chambers, i.e. opinion bubbles in which information that is incompatible with one’s entrenched worldview, is probably disregarded. We scale the model both to a deterministic limit and to a weak-effects limit, and obtain bifurcations, phase transitions and the invariant measure. Fitting the model to measles and meningococci vaccination coverage across Germany, reveals that the emergence of echo chambers dynamics explains the occurrence and persistence of the anti-vaccination opinion in allowing anti-vaxxers to isolate and to ignore pro-vaccination facts. We predict and compare the effectiveness of different policies aimed at influencing opinion dynamics in order to increase vaccination uptake. According to our model, measures aiming at reducing the salience of partisan anti-vaccine information sources would have the largest effect on enhancing vaccination uptake. By contrast, measures aiming at reducing the reinforcement of vaccination deniers are predicted to have the smallest impact. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9554521 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-95545212022-10-27 Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy Müller, Johannes Tellier, Aurélien Kurschilgen, Michael R Soc Open Sci Mathematics Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. Therefore, public health authorities need to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a spatially structured mathematical model of opinion dynamics with reinforcement. The model allows as an emergent property for the occurrence of echo chambers, i.e. opinion bubbles in which information that is incompatible with one’s entrenched worldview, is probably disregarded. We scale the model both to a deterministic limit and to a weak-effects limit, and obtain bifurcations, phase transitions and the invariant measure. Fitting the model to measles and meningococci vaccination coverage across Germany, reveals that the emergence of echo chambers dynamics explains the occurrence and persistence of the anti-vaccination opinion in allowing anti-vaxxers to isolate and to ignore pro-vaccination facts. We predict and compare the effectiveness of different policies aimed at influencing opinion dynamics in order to increase vaccination uptake. According to our model, measures aiming at reducing the salience of partisan anti-vaccine information sources would have the largest effect on enhancing vaccination uptake. By contrast, measures aiming at reducing the reinforcement of vaccination deniers are predicted to have the smallest impact. The Royal Society 2022-10-12 /pmc/articles/PMC9554521/ /pubmed/36312563 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220367 Text en © 2022 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Mathematics Müller, Johannes Tellier, Aurélien Kurschilgen, Michael Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
title | Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
title_full | Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
title_fullStr | Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
title_full_unstemmed | Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
title_short | Echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
title_sort | echo chambers and opinion dynamics explain the occurrence of vaccination hesitancy |
topic | Mathematics |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9554521/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36312563 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220367 |
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