It just doesn't feel right - the relevance of emotions and intuition for parental vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccination uptake

Objective: Vaccine hesitancy has been identified as one of the major contributors to child under-vaccination. Research indicates that some hesitant parents' mistrust extends to specific conspiracy ideation, but research on vaccine conspiracy beliefs is still scarce. Our objective was to explore factors contributing to parental vaccine conspiracy beliefs and actual vaccine uptake in children.Design: A cross-sectional correlational design with a non-probabilistic sample of 823 volunteer participants surveyed online.Main outcome measures: We focussed on the contributions of the analytically rational and experientially intuitive thinking styles, as well as measures of emotional functioning, namely optimism and emotions towards vaccination, to vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccine uptake as outcomes.Results: The obtained results showed that greater vaccine conspiracy beliefs were associated with stronger unpleasant emotions towards vaccination and greater experientially intuitive thinking, as well as lower levels of education. Furthermore, unpleasant emotions towards vaccination and intuitive thinking were associated with vaccine refusal.Conclusion: These findings confirm the primary importance of emotions, along with the propensity towards intuitive thinking, in the context of vaccine conspiracy beliefs and refusal, supporting the notion that parents' avoidance is guided by their affect. These results have direct implications for addressing vaccine hesitancy within public campaigns and policies.

Justice Judgments as Complex Psychocultural Constructions

A technique is developed for visually portraying the multidimensional-complex structure of perceptions of distributive justice within any society, based on theoretical assumptions of equity theory. This article outlines a spatial heuristic designed to facilitate cross-cultural exploration and comparison of the fairness maps people use in making contextual judgments about the relative contributions, rewards, and needs of perceived groups within their society. The technique is illustrated using plots of perceptual judgment data from a sample of 5,393 undergraduates, across 19 different cultural contexts. Variations in perceptions of fairness regarding different occupational groups, age categories, social classes, genders, and ethnic groups are explored. Judgments of fair and unfair and equitable and inequitable relationships are operationally defined, consistent with propositions of equity theory, and illustrative comparisons are made between the distributive equity patterns observed in several of the Cross-Cultural Variations in Distributive Justice Perception (CVDJP) cultural samples: Jamaica, Turkey, Estonia, and Taiwan

Cognitive Style as Environmentally Sensitive Individual Differences in Cognition

The key aims of this article are to relate the construct of cognitive style to current theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience and to outline a framework that integrates the findings on individual differences in cognition across different disciplines. First, we characterize cognitive style as patterns of adaptation to the external world that develop on the basis of innate predispositions, the interactions among which are shaped by changing environmental demands. Second, we show that research on cognitive style in psychology and cross-cultural neuroscience, on learning styles in education, and on decision-making styles in business and management all address the same phenomena. Third, we review cognitive-psychology and neuroscience research that supports the validity of the concept of cognitive style. Fourth, we show that various styles from disparate disciplines can be organized into a single taxonomy. This taxonomy allows us to integrate all the well-documented cognitive, learning, and decision-making styles; all of these style types correspond to adaptive systems that draw on different levels of information processing. Finally, we discuss how the proposed approach might promote greater coherence in research and application in education, in business and management, and in other disciplines.

Development and Validation of the Cognitive Style Indicator

The authors describe the development and validation of the Cognitive Style Indicator (CoSI) using 3 diverse samples (N = 5,924; N = 1,580; and N = 635). Reliability, item, and factor analyses demonstrated the internal consistency and homogeneity of 3 cognitive styles: knowing, planning, and creating. The authors also found substantial support for the instrument's convergent and discriminant validity by including other cognitive style instruments and personality and academic performance measures in the validation process. Criterion-related validity was confirmed by examination of the relation between these cognitive styles and work-related characteristics. The main contributions of this study are (a) the further refinement of the analytic-intuitive cognitive style dimension by splitting the analytic pole in a knowing and a planning style and (b) the development of a valid and reliable cognitive style instrument for use in organizations.

Response to Skinner, et al. on “National Personality Characteristics: II. Adaption-Innovation in Canadian, American, and British Samples”

Skinner, et al. interpreted as significant the difference between means for Canadian men and women on Kirton's inventory and those for British and American samples. The means were similar to prior values. Skinner, et al.'s groups were large and composed of very unequal numbers of men and women, which factors could account for their interpretation. As reported, their analysis is insufficient to interpret very small mean variations as differences in national character.