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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. 

Adaptive decisions require that decision makers factor in the subjective values of different possible outcomes, and the probability of these outcomes occurring. Subjective values depend, among other things, on how far an outcome is away in time. This can be captured by assessing an individual’s delay discounting of different options. An individual’s risk preference also affects how attractive particular choice options appear to them. In humans, probability discounting and delay discounting are often related. People who show more risky behaviors also tend to be more impulsive and less patient. Based on such findings, single-process models of delay discounting and probability discounting have been suggested. In the current study, we tested if this relationship is equally present in chimpanzees, one of human’s closest extant evolutionary relatives. We presented 23 chimpanzees with a patience task and a risky-choice task. The patience task was designed to explicitly distinguish between delay preference and self-control (i.e., the ability to wait a given delay). Still, we found no strong correlations between risk and delay preferences. As this task has not been used with humans before, we implemented a computerized version and tested it in a sample of twenty adult participants. Initial results indicate that the task is well suited to capture patience, and it makes a promising candidate to be used in behavioral delay discounting experiments in humans. 

A key component of economic decisions is the integration of information about reward outcomes and probabilities in selecting between competing options. In many species, risky choice is influenced by the magnitude of available outcomes, probability of success and the possibility of extreme outcomes. Chimpanzees are generally regarded to be risk-seeking. In this study, we examined two aspects of chimpanzees' risk preferences: first, whether setting the value of the non-preferred outcome of a risky option to zero changes chimpanzees’ risk preferences, and second, whether individual risk preferences are stable across two different measures. Across two experiments, we found chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes,n= 23) as a group to be risk-neutral to risk-avoidant with highly stable individual risk preferences. We discuss how the possibility of going empty-handed might reduce chimpanzees' risk-seeking relative to previous studies. This malleability in risk preferences as a function of experimental parameters and individual differences raises interesting questions about whether it is appropriate or helpful to categorize a species as a whole as risk-seeking or risk-avoidant. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates’.