Vaccines face growing skepticism (Poland & Jacobson, 2001; Wilson & Marcuse, 2001). Intuitive reasoning, including teleological, essentialist, and anthropic thinking, can complicate students’ ability to learn core concepts in biology (Coley & Tanner, 2015). As previous studies found that unvaccinated children were more likely to have mothers with a college degree (Smith et al., 2004; Yang et al., 2016), we wanted to explore the relationship between vaccine misconceptions, intuitive reasoning, and vaccine refusal in college biology students.

Our study uses data previously collected at a diverse public comprehensive university. We asked non-biology majors, entering biology majors, and biology faculty whether they would vaccinate their children. We also asked whether and why they endorsed for intuitive-reasoning- based misconceptions about vaccines.

Approximately 10% of students would not vaccinate their children. We found intuitive reasoning was prevalent across all levels of expertise. Vaccine acceptors were more likely to use teleological reasoning overall, but vaccine refusers were more likely to use essentialist reasoning to answer 3 of the 4 prompts. Finally, we found that endorsement of the essentialist, anthropic, and autism misconceptions was significantly correlated with vaccine refusal. In our data set, we did not find any differences in the proportion of vaccine refusers by gender, white vs. non-white race, or first-generation college student status.

In the future, we hope to explore this relationship in more depth with examples of intuitive reasoning that are pro- and anti-vaccine. Eventually, we would like to design educational interventions to combat misconceptions and vaccine hesitancy.