Social Interactions and Vaccine Hesitancy: Evidence from a Full Population Study in Sweden

Abstract We investigate individuals’ information milieu and their decision to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely personal and involves the processing of information about phenomena likely to be unfamiliar to most individuals. We thus expect an interplay between an individual’s education and skills level and the information processing of others with whom she can interact and whose decision she can probe and observe. Using individual-level data for adults in Sweden, we can identify the proportion of an individual’s neighborhood and workplace who are unvaccinated as indicators of possible peer effects. We find that individuals with low levels of educational attainment and occupational skills are more likely to be unvaccinated when exposed to other unvaccinated individuals. The peer effects in each of these information milieus further increase the likelihood of not getting vaccinated—with the two acting as information channels that amplify each other.