The Role of General Risk Preferences in Messaging About COVID-19 Vaccine Take-Up

Development of an effective vaccine that protects against COVID-19 is widely considered one of the best paths to ending the current health crisis. While the ability to create and distribute such a vaccine in the short-term remains uncertain, the availability of a vaccine alone will not be sufficient to stop disease spread. Instead, policymakers will need to overcome the additional hurdle of rapid widespread adoption. In a large-scale nationally representative survey, the current work identifies general risk preferences as a correlate of take-up of an anticipated COVID-19 vaccine. A complementary experiment leverages this insight to create effective messaging encouraging vaccine take-up. Individual differences in risk-preferences moderate responses to messaging that provides context on vaccine efficacy, while messaging that describes benefits of vaccination for herd immunity speeds vaccine take-up irrespective of risk-preferences. Findings suggest that marketers and policy-makers should consider general risk-preferences when targeting vaccine-related communications