Boldyreva T.A., Prigoda A.V.
DISTRUST IN DETERMINATION COVID ANTI­VAXXERS SENTIMENT ^{[№ 1 ' 2022]}
The COVID­19 pandemic has become a phenomenon that has affected all spheres of modern life. Ensuring safety in the interaction of people in the social space, preventing the spread of infection through vaccination in this context acquires a subjective psychological meaning, namely the individual semantic content of existing social attitudes. Against the backdrop of an abundance of conflicting messages about the benefits and harms of vaccination, based on the findings of evidence­based medicine or worldly superstitions and prejudices, often archaic, the leading role in the choice that a person makes belongs to trust or distrust information sources, toneself in the ability to predict the development and people around.
A brief tour into history allows us to state the permanent nature of anti­vaxxer sentiments, probably having some connection with socio­political processes, and, therefore, of a psychological nature. Consideration of covid­antivaccination phenomena, therefore, allows us to explore some of the psychological mechanisms underlying them.
Due to this, the aim of the study is to survey the quality characteristics of distrust as an integral psychological category that determines the stable ideas of people of different ages about the greater danger of vaccination compared to the risks of complications as a result of a possible infection with COVID­19.
To achieve the goals of the study, the following psychodiagnostic methods are used: “The author’s method of trust / distrust of the individual in the world, other people, himself” A.B. Kupreychenko and semantic differential (classical version of Ch. Osgood). To realize the assessment by the semantic differential method the following concepts are proposed: “I”, “covid­19”, “health”, “illness”, “my past”, “my present” and “my future”. The study allows us to state that such factors as the age and the labor status of people in the compared groups are not decisive in the decision to vaccinate. Significant factors are the level and quality characteristics of distrust, primarily distrust in oneself and others, associated with an underestimation of the possible harm to health under the condition of uncontrolled infection with COVID­19.