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This content will become publicly available on February 5, 2026

Title: Children’s socio-moral reasoning about vaccine-like behaviors
Framing public-health behaviors as benefiting others, rather than the self, can increase behavior uptake in adults. However, there are mixed results on the effects of such messaging in a vaccination context, and it is unclear how children reason about the social and moral implications of vaccination. In this study, we present school-aged children ( N = 60) with hypothetical vaccine-like behaviors and manipulate whether they benefit the self or others, and whether they prevent low or high severity harm. We find that children readily endorse these behaviors when they prevent high severity harm, and that the beneficiary of the behavior does not impact children’s endorsement. Younger children thought vaccine-like behaviors were morally important regardless of who they protected; However, as children get older, they thought about the vaccine-like behaviors in moral terms when they protected others. We discuss potential implications for how communications about vaccination may impact children’s reasoning about others.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2050471
PAR ID:
10583805
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Sage Journals
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of Health Psychology
ISSN:
1359-1053
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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