Highlights The politicization of a COVID-19 vaccine approval in the United States could undermine people’s beliefs in the safety and efficacy of a vaccine and their willingness to receive it. An announcement of vaccine approval one week before the presidential election, a politically salient event, reduces confidence in the vaccine’s safety and efficacy and uptake intentions relative to an announcement one week after the election. Endorsement of vaccine by political figures, President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has a polarizing effect even among those who express high levels of confidence in vaccines generally. However, endorsement by Dr. Anthony Fauci increases willingness to receive a vaccine and beliefs about its safety and efficacy for all partisan subgroups. Results highlight the importance of understanding the politicization of vaccination and medicine more generally.

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Individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources to promote equality in groups. These costly choices promote equality and are associated with behavior that supports cooperation in humans, but little is known about the brain processes involved. We use functional MRI to study egalitarian preferences based on behavior observed in the "random income game." In this game, subjects decide whether to pay a cost to alter group members' randomly allocated incomes. We specifically examine whether egalitarian behavior is associated with neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex, two regions that have been shown to be related to social preferences. Consistent with previous studies, we find significant activation in both regions; however, only the insular cortex activations are significantly associated with measures of revealed and expressed egalitarian preferences elicited outside the scanner. These results are consistent with the notion that brain mechanisms involved in experiencing the emotional states of others underlie egalitarian behavior in humans.behavioral economics | egalitarianism