Anti‐Vaccination Beliefs and Unrelated Conspiracy Theories

Much recent literature has examined the correlates of anti‐vaccination beliefs, without specifying the mechanism that creates adherence to these debunked ideas. We posit that anti‐vaccination beliefs are an outcome of a general psychological propensity to believe in conspiracies based on new research on the interconnectedness of conspiracy beliefs. These ideas are tested with a confirmatory factor analysis and a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model of a nationally representative U.S. sample from the 2016 American National Election Studies. The confirmatory factor analysis shows that anti‐vaccination beliefs highly correlate with belief in the unrelated conspiracies that Obama is a Muslim and 9/11 trutherism. Our SUR models also show that all three of these very different beliefs have similar predictors. All three have a negative correlation with political trust, political knowledge, education, and a positive correlation with authoritarianism. Thus, anti‐vaccination beliefs are shown to be part of a psychological propensity to believe in conspiracies.