Distrustful Complacency and the COVID-19 Vaccine: How Concern and Political Trust Interact to Affect Vaccine Hesitancy

We test the hypothesis that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is attributable to distrustful complacency—an interactive combination of low concern and low trust. Across two studies, 9,695 respondents from different parts of Britain reported their level of concern about COVID-19, trust in the UK government, and intention to accept or refuse the vaccine. Multilevel regression analysis, controlling for geographic area and relevant demographics, confirmed the predicted interactive effect of concern and trust. Across studies, respondents with both low trust and low concern were 10%–22% more vaccine hesitant than respondents with either high trust or high concern, and 26%–29% more hesitant than respondents with both high trust and high concern. Results hold equally among White, Black, and Muslim respondents, consistent with the view that regardless of mean-level differences, a common process underlies vaccine hesitancy, underlining the importance of tackling distrustful complacency both generally and specifically among unvaccinated individuals and populations.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

A pattern recognition account of decision making

In the domain of pattern recognition, experiments have shown that perceivers integrate multiple sources of information in an optimal manner. In contrast, other research has been interpreted to mean that decision making is nonoptimal. As an example, Tversky and Kahneman (1983) have shown that subjects commit a conjunction fallacy because they judge it more likely that a fictitious person named Linda is a bank teller and a feminist than just a bank teller. This judgment supposedly violates probability theory, because the probability of two events can never be greater than the probability of either event alone. The present research tests the hypothesis that subjects interpret this judgment task as a pattern recognition task. If this hypothesis is correct, subjects’ judgments should be described accurately by the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP)—a successful model of pattern recognition. In the first experiment, the Linda task was extended to an expanded factorial design with five vocations and five avocations. The probability ratings were described well by the FLMP and described poorly by a simple probability model. The second experiment included (1) two fictitious people, Linda and Joan, as response alternatives and (2) both ratings and categorization judgments. Although the ratings were accurately described by both the FLMP and an averaging of the sources of information, the categorization judgments were described better by the FLMP. These results reveal important similarities in recognizing patterns and in decision making. Given that the FLMP is an optimal method for combining multiple sources of information, the probability judgments appear to be optimal in the same manner as pattern-recognition judgments.