Abstract
<p>Classical theories in health psychology explain individuals’ decisions about whether or not to engage in protective behavior such as vaccination during a health emergency as guided by trade-offs about personal risks and benefits. Yet, vaccinations involve a clear collective action component, where individuals can protect others by getting vaccinated, beyond the personal benefits. Following recent research, we develop the argument that individual differences in the motivation to engage in collective action should influence vaccination decisions during the most significant health emergency in the 21st century, the COVID-19 pandemic, above and beyond the predictors proposed by classical theories. We test this argument by combining survey observations from 380,516 unique Danish adults with population-wide registry data on COVID-19 vaccination status for 6.1 million individuals in Denmark, of whom 4.9 million received at least one vaccine dose. Using this unique data infrastructure, we compare classical psychological correlates of protective behavior with psychological measures of individual-differences in collective action motivation. The results demonstrate collective action motivation was more strongly associated with vaccination behavior than threat appraisal or coping appraisal across the vaccination sequence, spanning completion of the recommended primary vaccination course, booster receipt, time to full vaccination, and vaccination uptake among the children of survey respondents. Furthermore, high levels of collective action motivation strongly weakened the role of personal considerations that would otherwise deter vaccination uptake, both in terms of whether or not the individual gets vaccinated and how quickly the individual gets vaccinated. These findings provide important information on the prerequisites of successful vaccination campaigns during major health crises and how governments and authorities can facilitate them.</p>