The Impact of Socio-Institutional Context and Cultural Worldviews on Acceptance Rates for the COVID-19 Vaccine: A Representative Study of Italian Residents

Key issue in the Covid-19 pandemic resolution is vaccination. Therefore, the current global situation urges for understanding of mechanisms underlying vaccine hesitancy. The current study aims at explaining to what extent, the experience of the whole context of the pandemic frames the meanings people attribute to vaccination. For this purpose, an Italian sample of 3020 respondents completed a questionnaire battery, measuring the demand for COVID-19 vaccination, the domain meanings framing the interpretation of the socio-institutional scenario – mainly, political values and trust in institutions – and the cultural worldviews (symbolic universes) grounding the way people represent significant and affective-laden aspects of their contexts of life. Consistently with hypotheses, analyses revealed that: a) vaccine adhesion can be predicted by the trust in institutions, but not by the political values or sociodemographic variables; b) symbolic universes moderated the relation between trust in institutions; c) the moderation effect of symbolic universes was more evident in the low-income than in the high-income participants group. Results are interpreted in the framework of Semiotic Cultural Psychology Theory, giving importance to high contextual uncertainty, generated by pandemic crisis.