Providing normative information increases intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine.

Despite the availability of multiple safe vaccines, vaccine hesitancy may present a challenge to successful control of the COVID-19 pandemic. As with many human behaviors, people's vaccine acceptance may be affected by their beliefs about whether others will accept a vaccine (i.e., descriptive norms). However, information about these descriptive norms may have different effects depending on the actual descriptive norm, people's baseline beliefs, and the relative importance of conformity, social learning, and free-riding. Here, using a pre-registered, randomized experiment (N = 484,239) embedded in an international survey (23 countries), we show that accurate information about descriptive norms can increase intentions to accept a vaccine for COVID-19. We find mixed evidence that information on descriptive norms impacts mask wearing intentions and no statistically significant evidence that it impacts intentions to physically distance. The effects on vaccination intentions are largely consistent across the 23 included countries, but are concentrated among people who were otherwise uncertain about accepting a vaccine. Providing normative information in vaccine communications partially corrects individuals' underestimation of how many other people will accept a vaccine. These results suggest that presenting people with information about the widespread and growing acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines helps to increase vaccination intentions.

Understanding How People Make Decision about Preventive Behavior against COVID-19: A Case from Rural Areas in Western Iran

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most significant health challenge humans experienced since World War 2, and its course can be affected by the stringency in undertaking individual and collective protective behavior. In this study, the health belief model structures in adopting the protective behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic were assessed. A sample of 375 household heads living in the rural areas of Lorestan Province was selected through a multi-stage stratified and random sampling method. Structural equation modeling showed that knowledge, perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, self-efficacy, and cues to action affect the protective behaviors of Iranian rural households during COVID-19. Cues to action and knowledge were the most important predictors of protective behaviors in rural households. The results suggest the necessity to emphasize enhancing knowledge to highlight the negative impacts of COVID-19 and train rural households regarding the proper and effective preventive measures. © 2022, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.

Global survey on COVID-19 beliefs, behaviours and norms.

Policy and communication responses to COVID-19 can benefit from better understanding of people's baseline and resulting beliefs, behaviours and norms. From July 2020 to March 2021, we fielded a global survey on these topics in 67 countries yielding over 2 million responses. This paper provides an overview of the motivation behind the survey design, details the sampling and weighting designed to make the results representative of populations of interest and presents some insights learned from the survey. Several studies have already used the survey data to analyse risk perception, attitudes towards mask wearing and other preventive behaviours, as well as trust in information sources across communities worldwide. This resource can open new areas of enquiry in public health, communication and economic policy by leveraging large-scale, rich survey datasets on beliefs, behaviours and norms during a global pandemic.