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Moral values do not affect prosocial vaccination

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 881–882 (2018)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Explaining and overcoming vaccine hesitancy is a burning issue in public health1,2. A recent publication by Amin et al.3 identifies moral values as relevant for vaccine hesitancy. Individual concerns with sanctity, chastity and avoiding contamination (moral foundation: purity) as well as the valuation of individual freedom and liberties (liberty) were positively related to vaccine hesitancy. In contrast, moral foundations related to caring for and protecting others (care) as well as opposition to cheating on others (fairness) were not associated with vaccine hesitancy. Yet, most vaccines protect also unvaccinated others due to the social benefit of herd immunity and thus touch issues that relate to caring for others and being fair. Knowing about the social benefit of herd immunity — for example, as a result of an intervention — has been shown to increase vaccination intentions by framing vaccination as a prosocial decision4,5. We therefore propose that moral values regarding care and fairness will guide vaccination intentions given that people know that vaccination also protects others6,7,8.

We combined two studies recently published in Nature Human Behaviour3,4 in a direct replication and extension to test whether the moral values of care and fairness differ in their impact on the intention to vaccinate given the social benefit of herd immunity is communicated versus not communicated. Two online experiments (via MTurk3,4) first assessed moral values6 followed by vaccine hesitancy3,9. In the subsequent decision task4, N = 1,072 (study 1) and N = 651 (study 2) US parents of children under 13 years of age stated how much they intended to vaccinate their child against a hypothetical disease (materials, data and analyses, see Supplementary Methods and ref. 10). Half of the participants received no information about herd immunity. The other half received information about herd immunity visualized by an interactive simulation4.

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Data availability

The preregistration form (study 2), data, experimental materials and methods, as well as detailed results are available at https://osf.io/4uyvm.

References

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  10. Betsch, C. & Böhm, R. Moral values do not affect prosocial vaccination — materials, data, and analyses. Center for Open Science https://osf.io/4uyvm (2018).

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Acknowledgements

Both authors contributed equally to this piece. The authors are grateful to A. B. Amin, S. B. Omer and their team who provided valuable feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript. Funding by the German Research Foundation for C.B. (BE 3970/8-1, BE3970/11-1) and R.B. (BO 4466/2-1) is gratefully acknowledged. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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  1. Center for Empirical Research in Economics and Behavioral Sciences, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany

    Cornelia Betsch

  2. School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Robert Böhm

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  1. Cornelia Betsch
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  2. Robert Böhm
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Correspondence to Cornelia Betsch or Robert Böhm.

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Betsch, C., Böhm, R. Moral values do not affect prosocial vaccination. Nat Hum Behav 2, 881–882 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0478-1

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