“It’s My Moral Responsibility to Protect Others!” Examining the Effects of Moral Framing and Message Format on Influenza Vaccination Attitude and Intention

ABSTRACT

Vaccinations serve a dual purpose: safeguarding the vaccinated individuals while also preventing potential transmission to others. However, the pro-vaccine message has primarily emphasized the personal health risks and harms of not getting vaccinated, while rarely highlighting the moral responsibility of getting vaccinated to protect others. Guided by the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) along with the narrative persuasion framework, the current study conducted a 2 (moral framing: vaccination to protect oneself vs. protect others) X 2 (message format: statistical vs. narrative) between-subject online experiment to examine the effects of moral framing and message format on vaccination decision-making. The results revealed that individuals exposed to a pro-vaccine message framing vaccination as a moral responsibility to protect others from harm reported significantly higher levels of perceived moral responsibility and elevation, more positive attitudes toward the flu vaccine, and an increased intention to get vaccinated compared to a pro-vaccine message emphasizing vaccination for self-protection. Counterintuitively, presenting the moral responsibility of receiving the flu vaccine to safeguard others in a statistical format was discovered to be more effective in fostering favorable attitudes toward vaccination and increasing the intention to get vaccinated. This study offers a valuable insight: promoting vaccination as a moral duty could be a promising strategy for motivating individuals to get vaccinated.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. An alternative model based on the theoretical assumption that perceived moral responsibility, elevation, and attitude toward the flu vaccine serve as parallel mediators was also tested. However, this model did not yield a good fit to the data (χ² = 292.12; df = 4; p < .001; RMSEA = .18; CFI = .65; TLI = .63; SRMR = .18).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Don Davis Program in Ethical Leadership Research Grant from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University.