A message of the majority with scientific evidence encourages young people to show their prosocial nature in COVID-19 vaccination
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Abstract
The most promising way to prevent the explosive spread of COVID-19 infection is to achieve herd immunity through vaccination. It is therefore important to motivate those who are less willing to be vaccinated. To address this issue, we conducted an online survey of 6232 Japanese people to investigate age- and gender-dependent differences in attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination and the underlying psychological processes. We asked participants to read one of nine different messages about COVID-19 vaccination and rate their willingness to be vaccinated. We also collected their 17 social personality trait scores and demographic information. We found that males 10–20 years old were least willing to be vaccinated. We also found that prosocial traits are the driving force for young people, but the motivation in older people also depends on risk aversion and self-interest. Furthermore, an analysis of 9 different messages demonstrated that for young people (particularly males), the message emphasizing the majority’s intention to vaccinate and scientific evidence for the safety of the vaccination had the strongest positive effect on the willingness to be vaccinated, suggesting that the “majority + scientific evidence” message nudges young people to show their prosocial nature in action.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257954: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are limitations in the present study. First, we could not examine the actual vaccination behaviors of people who were nudged. It was reported that an increase in motivation does not always lead to an actual change in behaviors [37,38,39]. Whether motivation causes behavioral change is an important topic for future investigation. …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257954: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are limitations in the present study. First, we could not examine the actual vaccination behaviors of people who were nudged. It was reported that an increase in motivation does not always lead to an actual change in behaviors [37,38,39]. Whether motivation causes behavioral change is an important topic for future investigation. Second, although we identified an effective nudge message for young people with prosocial and empathetic orientation, we still do not have an effective way to nudge young people who have proself orientation. This too is worth future study. The third limitation is cultural differences regarding the majority. Because higher in-group conformity is known for Japanese people [40], it is necessary to examine whether messages emphasizing the majority is generally effective for young people in other cultures. Fourth, we did not include a direct question about the degree to which the participants perceived themselves to be at risk for COVID-19, although the perception of risk was reported as an important factor for determining vaccination attitudes [1,8,9]. We believe that the usual preventive attitudes against COVID-19 reflected risk perceptions and were strongly related to a willingness or refusal to be vaccinated (Tables 1 and 2). Fifth, we did not directly assess the trust of the information source about vaccines or the vaccines themselves. It was reported that this trust affects the willingness to be vaccinated [16,41]. However, we believe that the ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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