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Ability to detect fake news predicts sub-national variation in COVID-19 vaccine uptake across the UK

Loomba, S.; Maertens, R.; Roozenbeek, J.; Götz, F. M.; van der Linden, S.; de Figueiredo, A.

2023-05-14 public and global health
10.1101/2023.05.10.23289764 medRxiv
Show abstract

Susceptibility to believing false or misleading information is associated with a range of adverse outcomes. However, it is notoriously difficult to study the link between susceptibility to misinformation and consequential real-world behaviors such as vaccine uptake. In this preregistered study, we devise a large-scale socio-spatial model that combines the rigor of a psychometrically validated test of misinformation susceptibility administered to a nationally representative sample of 16,477 individuals with COVID-19 vaccine uptake data of 129 sub-national regions published by the United Kingdom (UK) government, to show that the general ability to detect misinformation strongly and positively predicts regional vaccine uptake in the UK. We put this practically significant correlational effect size into perspective by noting how psychological interventions that reduce individuals misinformation susceptibility could be associated with additional vaccine uptake.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.