Consumers love having choices, even when it comes to vaccines, according to new research from the
In studies conducted during the height of the pandemic, researchers found Americans are more willing to vaccinate against COVID-19 if they're allowed to choose between multiple vaccine brands rather than being assigned to one. As vaccination rates for preventable, infectious diseases like measles decline in
What psychologists call the 'pleasure of choice' may be a simple, though partial, solution to increasing vaccine uptake for many different diseases, said
'That's the scenario we faced with COVID-19 vaccines,' said Peters, also a professor in psychology. 'Whether it's choosing Coke over Pepsi or one outfit over another, there's a pleasure from choosing that causes people to feel more positive about what they get.'
Peters and her colleagues conducted two separate online surveys in
Unlike with the common flu shot, Americans had the unusual opportunity to decide between different vaccines for COVID-19, said Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, a senior research associate at the
To confirm if people were more likely to consider vaccination if given a choice among multiple vaccines, the researchers first surveyed Americans in early
Of those given a choice, 44 percent of participants reported being likely or certain to get vaccinated compared to 23 percent of those told which one they would get.
The pleasure of choice also seems to encourage vaccination among unvaccinated people. The researchers conducted a similar survey in
'The pleasure of choice is often discussed with consumer products, but it's not really something we think about with health care decision-making,' Shoots-Reinhard said. 'There hasn't been a lot of research where you get to choose a vaccine and, in this case, simply being offered one of the better vaccines didn't increase vaccine willingness. It really was offering options and allowing choice that gave vaccination intentions a boost.'
The pleasure of choice, however, is not a magic bullet to improving vaccine uptake, the researchers warn.
'Highlighting the pleasure of choice is only a partial solution,' Peters said. 'It's not going to be the only thing needed to convince people to get vaccines. But it did work across our studies with vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. So, when multiple kinds of vaccines exist, providing a choice may make a difference.'
Moreover, while choice makes people feel only more positive toward their chosen option, they also feel more negative toward the rejected options. If those options remain viable, however, that should be noted in public health messaging, the researchers said.
'Anytime people are offering choices, it should be emphasized that those rejected options may nonetheless be good options for you later,' Peters said. 'The pleasure of choice is all yours, but keep in mind these vaccine options will be around for a while and you may prefer a different option down the line. For example, although the single-dose
To see how vaccine education can be further improved to reduce hesitancy, Peters and Shoots-Reinhard also looked at how to best present vaccine safety and side effects in a 2022 paper. They noticed that current vaccine messaging informs people of the potential side effects but often leaves out how likely they are to occur.
When presenting online survey participants with the numerical likelihoods of experiencing side effects from hypothetical vaccines, 70 percent of those who got the numbers reported being likely to vaccinate compared to only 54 percent who didn't get that information.
Although the COVID-19 landscape has greatly changed since 2020 and 2021, and therefore this research cannot be exactly replicated today, the pandemic presented a rare opportunity to study a highly evolving, global health emergency that affected and continues to affect so many people. Vaccines are an important public health tool that go beyond the coronavirus, and the findings are a silver lining in how vaccine efforts in the
'It's about giving people more and better information and allowing them more control over their lives,' Peters said. 'We want people to get the information they're missing and be able to make their own informed decisions.'
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This project was supported by the
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