Cultural Cognition Theory: un'applicazione al processo decisionale riguardante il vaccino anti-Covid-19

Cultural cognition theory of risk is an interdisciplinary approach which studies individuals’ risk perceptions as derived by cultural worldviews, which are different ways of life derived by the interaction between grid and group dimensions of individuals' social life. Different cultural values allow to form dissimilar risk perceptions through psychological mechanisms which bias subjects' decisions in two ways: first, individuals' prior beliefs are formed according to values shared within the worldview; second, the search and updating information process is biased by the scientific consensus mechanism, which leads individuals to credit information able to reinforce their cultural values. This study is the application of cultural cognition theory to the Covid-19 risk perception. Vaccination decision is subjected to an extremely uncertain context where people knowledge is limited: citizens do not know exactly the Covid-19 vaccine risks and benefits; therefore, to form their expectations, they have to rely on information provided by experts. With a between-subjects four-scenario experiment the main hypothesis of cultural cognition theory, concerning the Covid-19 vaccine risk perception, are tested. Focusing only on the cultural group dimension which characterizes individuals into Individualists or Communitarians, it is studied if cultural affiliation is a prior in the perception of vaccine risk, hence, if adherence with group cultural values influence the risk perception, and if people credit information provided by advocates belonging to the same cultural background by adapting to that argumentation their beliefs. Although some limitations in the implementation of the research due to the strong beliefs already formed by individuals with respect to Covid-19 and vaccines, and due to the use of US culturally based values, it is shown that the cultural affiliation score, indicating how much a person is Individualistic, is positively correlated with the vaccine risk perception: the more people have individualistic values the higher is their perception of Covid-19 vaccine risks. Moreover, the assimilation of information, when it is provided by culturally identifiable experts, is biased by the credibility heuristic which allows individuals to give a higher weight to the credibility of argumentation exposed by the same cultural affiliated scientist.