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• Author response to the 27.01.23 response
  Eleonore Batteux, Samuel G B Johnson and David Tuckett
  Published on: 20 March 2023
• Data of the present study was not able to support the conclusion
  Sam Ng
  Published on: 30 January 2023

• Published on: 20 March 2023

  Author response to the 27.01.23 response

  • Eleonore Batteux, Research Fellow University College London
  • Other Contributors:
    • Samuel G B Johnson, Assistant Professor of Psychology
    • David Tuckett, Emeritus Professor of Decision-Making

  We would like to thank the previous respondent (27.01.23) for their careful reading of our paper and for sharing their thoughts. Having considered it, the response assumes that our study included a manipulation check which was based on the emotion variable. However, this was not the case. We are not trying to manipulate how uncertain the participants actually feel – we expect them to feel uncertain after receiving conflicting information regardless of whether or not uncertainty is expressed in the vaccine announcement. The point of the paper is that when governments fail to express the uncertainty that people end up encountering, this reduces trust in them. How uncertain participants feel is therefore not a manipulation check as it is not conceptually linked to our manipulation, i.e. uncertainty expressed by the government. If we had wanted to include a manipulation check, it would have been about the perception that the government official is certain about the effectiveness of the vaccine.

  Having said that, the question of experienced uncertainty is still an interesting research question. Although there was some evidence that the manipulation did affect the dynamics of uncertainty (i.e., there was a significantly larger increase in uncertainty in the “certain” than in the “uncertain” condition; F(1,326)=9.27, p=0.003)), this is not required for our conceptual model. Even if we were to use the uncertain emotion variable as a manipulation check, it would not be appr...

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  We would like to thank the previous respondent (27.01.23) for their careful reading of our paper and for sharing their thoughts. Having considered it, the response assumes that our study included a manipulation check which was based on the emotion variable. However, this was not the case. We are not trying to manipulate how uncertain the participants actually feel – we expect them to feel uncertain after receiving conflicting information regardless of whether or not uncertainty is expressed in the vaccine announcement. The point of the paper is that when governments fail to express the uncertainty that people end up encountering, this reduces trust in them. How uncertain participants feel is therefore not a manipulation check as it is not conceptually linked to our manipulation, i.e. uncertainty expressed by the government. If we had wanted to include a manipulation check, it would have been about the perception that the government official is certain about the effectiveness of the vaccine.

  Having said that, the question of experienced uncertainty is still an interesting research question. Although there was some evidence that the manipulation did affect the dynamics of uncertainty (i.e., there was a significantly larger increase in uncertainty in the “certain” than in the “uncertain” condition; F(1,326)=9.27, p=0.003)), this is not required for our conceptual model. Even if we were to use the uncertain emotion variable as a manipulation check, it would not be appropriate to use it as an independent variable in a mediator model in a setting where it is influenced by numerous exogenous factors. We do not expect that an experimental manipulation of this nature would have a large effect on a variable like vaccine uncertainty, that has so many social determinants outside of the experimental setting. It makes sense that those who feel more uncertain about getting the vaccine are going to have lower intentions to get it, which is precisely why some public health communicators avoid expressing uncertainty. Our point here is that when communicators express uncertainty, rather than exacerbating the public’s uncertainty, this helps to protect them against a loss of trust if problems surface later and maintains vaccine intentions in the longer term.

  Although we do not agree that the uncertainty emotion data are problematic for the interpretation of the paper, we thank the respondent for raising this interesting question about how the manipulation affects experienced uncertainty.

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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• Published on: 30 January 2023

  Data of the present study was not able to support the conclusion

  • Sam Ng, R&D NA

  While I agree with the conclusion of this research that it is necessary for the government to communicate uncertainties with the general public about public health and vaccination specifically in the COVID-19 era, I’m afraid that data of the present study was not able to support this conclusion.
  In the emotions part of the result section, the authors reported that no significant between group differences of uncertainty was found in any circumstances, neither after receiving the announcement (p = .091), nor after reading the conflicting information (p = .462), or overall (p = .628). This result indicated that the intervention of the present study failed to manipulate different level of certainty between two intervention groups. All analysis and the corresponding results based on condition as independent variable tended to be invalid because it didn’t pass the manipulation check.
  Under this circumstance, the level of uncertainty before intervention would be a more reasonable choice as the primary independent variable. The similar mediation model in the present study was tested with the level of uncertainty before intervention as independent variable and the vaccination intention after intervention as dependent variable. If trust in government representative and perceived vaccine effectiveness before intervention were tested as mediators in the model, indirect effects of both path were significant, with the trust path β = -0.0898, 95% CI = [-0.1401, -0.0426], and...

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  While I agree with the conclusion of this research that it is necessary for the government to communicate uncertainties with the general public about public health and vaccination specifically in the COVID-19 era, I’m afraid that data of the present study was not able to support this conclusion.
  In the emotions part of the result section, the authors reported that no significant between group differences of uncertainty was found in any circumstances, neither after receiving the announcement (p = .091), nor after reading the conflicting information (p = .462), or overall (p = .628). This result indicated that the intervention of the present study failed to manipulate different level of certainty between two intervention groups. All analysis and the corresponding results based on condition as independent variable tended to be invalid because it didn’t pass the manipulation check.
  Under this circumstance, the level of uncertainty before intervention would be a more reasonable choice as the primary independent variable. The similar mediation model in the present study was tested with the level of uncertainty before intervention as independent variable and the vaccination intention after intervention as dependent variable. If trust in government representative and perceived vaccine effectiveness before intervention were tested as mediators in the model, indirect effects of both path were significant, with the trust path β = -0.0898, 95% CI = [-0.1401, -0.0426], and the effectiveness path β = -0.1444, 95% CI = [-0.2059, -0.0926]. The total effect from uncertainty to vaccine intention was β = -0.5804, 95% CI = [-0.6686, -0.4921], and the direct effect was β = -0.3591, 95% CI = [-0.4593, -0.2484]. This new mediation model indicated that higher level of uncertainty would lead to less intention for vaccination, this effect was mediated by trust in government representative and perceived vaccine effectiveness.
  Changing the independent variable from condition to the level of uncertainty before intervention led to the opposite conclusion of the present study. This suggested that the conclusion of the present study was at least not robust.

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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