How Mortality Salience and Self-Construal Make a Difference: An Online Experiment to Test Perception of Importance of COVID-19 Vaccines in China

ABSTRACT

To better understand why Chinese residents’ COVID-19 perceptions of the importance of vaccination change dramatically over time, this research used an online lab-like experiment to test the antecedents of individuals’ perception of the importance of COVID-19 vaccines. We find that participants who view themselves as separate from others (i.e. independent self-construal) perceive COVID-19 vaccines as more important than Hepatitis B vaccines (i.e. control group), regardless of how salient mortality is for them. In contrast, among participants who view themselves as a part of their social groups (i.e. interdependent self-construal), awareness of death (i.e. mortality salience) plays a moderating role. Specifically, when mortality is salient, COVID-19 vaccines are considered more important than Hepatitis B vaccines; when morality is not salient, vaccine type does not make a difference on perceptions of vaccine importance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A one way (mortality salience) ANOVA on participants’ scores on PANAS showed that mortality salience did not have an effect on PA (α = .88; F < 1, p = .471) or NA (α = .87; F < 1, p = .704), with overall means of PA and NA of 2.99 (SD = .84) and 2.56 (SD = .82), respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [No. 010414370113, KYQN2022005, SKYC2022009] and the National Nature Science Foundation of China [71772083, 72172059, 72102109].