2. Your Uncle Wants to Avoid Cognitive Dissonance

If you put yourself in the shoes of one of these vaccine rejectors, you can understand why—even in the face of the more virulent Delta variant—they are not going to change their minds now. At the beginning, there was a moment when things might have gone the other way. It might have been different if the nation’s political leaders had come out united in favor of vaccines—perhaps President Trump, President-Elect Joe Biden, and their wives could have been vaccinated together in a live televised event. Perhaps Mike Pence and Kamala Harris could have done public service announcements together. But nothing like that happened. Instead, President Trump was almost never seen wearing a mask, and Republican politicians and conservative media figures cast doubt on the severity of the pandemic and the safety of vaccines (Lerer 2021).

By now, that moment of opportunity is long past. We can only imagine that, in the months since vaccines became widely available, the adults like your uncle who have not yet been vaccinated have had hundreds of conversations with their friends and families and have heard themselves justify their decisions over and over. Once vaccine rejection became a fixed idea, going against that decision would produce cognitive dissonance—an unpleasant motivational state created when our actions conflict with our stated beliefs or values. When the stakes are low, the conflict is sometimes resolved by changing one’s beliefs or attitudes, but when the beliefs are more central, the solution is often to remain loyal to your beliefs and avoid those actions that would create dissonance. To suddenly get vaccinated now, without other provocation, would be difficult for vaccine rejectors to justify.

In an earlier column, I considered how QAnon believers would handle the resulting cognitive dissonance when their widely held belief that Donald Trump would be reelected did not come true (Vyse 2021). This was an example similar to the famous book When Prophecy Fails, which described the experiences of a religious group that predicted the end of the world on a specific date (Festinger et al. 1956). In that case, when the date of destruction came and went, many people rationalized the prophecy’s failure and became even more faithful members of the religious group. But in the case of vaccine rejection, the action that would cause dissonance—getting vaccinated—is under the individual’s control. Your uncle can avoid the conflict that would result from changing course so late in the pandemic by remaining true to his risky decision.