Development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine is widely considered as one of the best paths to ending the current health crisis. While the ability to distribute a vaccine in the short-term remains uncertain, the availability of a vaccine alone will not be sufficient to stop disease spread. Instead, policy makers will need to overcome the additional hurdle of rapid widespread adoption. In a large-scale nationally representative survey (N = 34,200), the current work identifies monetary risk preferences as a correlate of take-up of an anticipated COVID-19 vaccine. A complementary experiment (N = 1,003) leverages this insight to create effective messaging encouraging vaccine take-up. Individual differences in risk preferences moderate responses to messaging that provides benchmarks for vaccine efficacy (by comparing it to the flu vaccine), while messaging that describes pro-social benefits of vaccination (specifically herd immunity) speeds vaccine take-up irrespective of risk preferences. Findings suggest that policy makers should consider risk preferences when targeting vaccine-related communications.

开发有效的COVID-19疫苗被广泛认为是结束当前健康危机的最佳途径之一。尽管短期内分发疫苗的能力仍不确定，但仅提供疫苗不足以阻止疾病传播。相反，决策者将需要克服迅速广泛采用的附加障碍。在一项大规模的全国代表性调查（N = 34,200）中，当前工作将金钱风险偏好识别为预期COVID-19疫苗使用的相关因素。补充实验（N= 1,003）利用此洞察力来创建有效的消息传递方式，鼓励人们采用疫苗。风险偏好的个体差异适度地响应了提供疫苗功效基准的消息传递（通过将其与流感疫苗进行比较），而描述疫苗接种的亲社会利益（特别是畜群免疫）的消息传递则加快了疫苗的使用，而与风险偏好无关。研究结果表明，政策制定者在针对疫苗相关的交流时应考虑风险偏好。