How the Instinct for Self-Preservation Fuels Vaccine Refusal

As more and more unvaccinated Americans die of Covid-19 and with their final breaths regret their choice, saying they “thought it was a hoax,” “don’t trust the government,” or “didn’t want anybody telling me what to do,” frustration mounts with what seems like stunningly self-destructive irrationality. How can anyone be so blind to the facts that they would put their lives in such obvious danger? Wouldn’t you think that the instinct of self-preservation would kick in at some point?

Counterintuitively, it may well be that very instinct that explains their behavior and costs them their lives. Rather than throw our hands up in dismissive disdain for what many see as ignorance, we need to understand the psychology of vaccine resistance if we’re going to reduce it and save some of those lives

We are social animals. We evolved to depend on one other, and not just to have friends to hang out with. From our pre-human hominid ancestors on, we needed our group, our family, our tribe, to survive. To provide food. To prevail against adversaries. To protect ourselves from predators. To go it alone was to run the real risk of winning a Darwin Award, doing something so overtly stupid that your resulting death helps clean that behavior out of the gene pool. Our genes responded to the reality that survival of the fittest meant survival of the most united.

So we evolved to be social, deeply – instinctively – reliant on others for our own safety. This instinct is woven into our basic biochemistry, which is equipped with exquisitely sensitive antennae to help us judge who is on our side...who we can trust.

Some of the signs of who we can trust are subtle, things like body posture, tone of voice, the slightest change in the muscles around the eye. Some are more obvious, like a genuine hug, keeping a promise, or demonstrating through your actions that you are loyal to the beliefs of your tribe, which enhances your tribe’s solidarity and power (and thus its members’ safety), and proves that you are a trustworthy member worthy of the tribe’s protection. Demonstrating loyalty to your tribe makes you feel safer. Which is why vaccination, what should be a no-brainer health choice in the face of a deadly pandemic, has become politically polarized.

The New York Times reported on July 23 that 17 states have now provided at least one dose to more than 60 percent of their population. They all voted for Joe Biden. In 16 states, fewer than half the population has gotten at least one dose. They all voted for Donald Trump.

• A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that as of early July, 47 percent of the population in counties that voted for Biden was fully vaccinated, yet only 35 percent in counties that voted for Trump.
• Kaiser asked people about their intentions to get vaccinated as soon as possible and found a 30 point gap; 88 percent of Democrats planned on it, but only 54 percent of Republicans did.
• In April the New York Times reported that the “partisan gap holds even after accounting for income, race and age demographics, population density and a county’s infection and death rate.”

Even with people around them sick and dying, as clear a signal as one can imagine for “you are in danger,” people who identify as members of the Republican party still place tribal loyalty above getting vaccinated as a way to stay safe. The need to demonstrate that we are loyal trustworthy members of our tribe and therefore worthy of the tribe’s protection is so instinctively important to our sense of safety that it supersedes even the most glaringly clear evidence that we are physically at serious risk.

Fortunately, a few (too few) of the thought leaders on the right wing, who politicized the pandemic in the first place, have recognized what this instinct is doing to their tribe (and its political prospects). Ads on Fox News urge vaccination, as are influential Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy, (while arch Tribe Trump voices like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham still are not.) Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis – whose state has a huge elderly/at-greater-risk population and is home to roughly one in four new Covid-19 infections nationally – late last week urged Floridians to get vaccinated citing “unequivocal evidence that vaccines save lives” (even as he was still maintaining some of his tribal loyalty by denying the solid evidence that masks do too)

A conservative talk show host in Tennessee – vaccination rate 39 percent – who bragged about refusing vaccination, is now urging his listeners to get the protection he proudly declined. Or rather, his family is, on his behalf, since at the time he was intubated, in critical care, and close to death. Over the July 4th weekend Republican Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia (45 percent of the eligible population had received at least one dose as of July 23) urged his residents to get vaccinated, and was blunt about those who haven’t, saying “The red states probably have a lot of people that are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that.’ But they’re not thinking right.”

Governor Justice is observing what this problem really boils down to, the seemingly irrational way we often respond to risk. He is right regarding people’s thinking about vaccination and the threat of the pandemic, but wrong to suggest that people aren’t thinking right in general. In a broad sense, people refusing vaccination out of loyalty to tribal views are thinking right. Or rather, they are not just consciously thinking and rationally reasoning, but instinctively responding to all the threats in their lives with all the biological and psychological systems evolution has given us to help us keep ourselves safe and alive. Conscious critical thinking is only one of those tools, and often not the most influential.

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As Covid-19 vaccine refusal makes clear, for social animals like us, the instinct to demonstrate loyalty to our tribe in return for the sense of safety that provides, is far more powerful than reasoning itself. That deeper respect for the emotional roots of risk perception is vital if we are to overcome at least some of the vaccine refusal keeping the pandemic alive, and killing thousands of our friends and neighbors and family members.