This model is to explore how individuals’ cultural backgrounds may play a role in their Covid vaccination decision-making. Two cultural dimensions of collectivism/individualism and power distance are considered. Through the experimental scenarios, we find that Covid-vaccination opinions in collectivist societies can also be considerably polarised, if the power distance is less and authorities less centralised. This result complements the popular idea that cultural collectivism is usually associated with a high degree of social consensus. Hopefully, this study will help explain countries’ difference in the response of Covid vaccination programs.

This model simulates the opinion dynamics of COVID-19 vaccination to examine especially how fears and cognitive bias contribute to the opinion polarisation and vaccination rate. In studying the opinion dynamics of COVID-19 vaccination, this model refers to the HUMAT framework (Antosz et al, 2019). Many psychological and social processes are included in the model, such as dynamical decision-making processes of information exchange and fear formation, satisfaction evaluation, preferred decision selection and dissonance reduction.