The roles of national and global identities and leaders in the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines developed by different countries (Los roles de las identidades y los lideres nacionales y globales en la aceptacion de las vacunas contra la COVID-19 desarrolladas por diferentes paises)

Abstract

The current paper aims to study the social-psychological factors that would play roles in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. Specifically, we examined whether national and global identifications and the leaders whom people think being in charge of managing the COVID-19 pandemic on a national scale could explain people's acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccines developed by different countries. We proposed a model in which people's assessment of the leader in terms of identity-leadership mediates the relationship between different identification types (i.e., global and national) and acceptance of Western, Asian or national vaccines. The model was tested on self-reported data collected in Turkey (N = 694) utilizing Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) in R software. The results revealed that national identification positively predicted acceptance of national vaccines and negatively predicted acceptance of Western vaccines; both of the relationships were also mediated by people's assessments of the leader in terms of identity-leadership dimensions. On the other side, global identification positively predicted acceptance of Western vaccines. The implications of the findings were discussed in terms of their practical contributions along with their theoretical relevance.