Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination relative to similar countries. Understanding the psychology of vaccine refusal, particularly the possible sources of variation in vaccine resistance across U.S. subpopulations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to increase vaccination across different regions. Here, we demonstrate that county-level moral values (i.e., Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity) are associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates across 3,106 counties in the contiguous United States. Specifically, in line with our hypothesis, we find that fewer people are vaccinated in counties whose residents prioritize moral concerns about bodily and spiritual purity. Further, we find that stronger endorsements of concerns about Fairness and Loyalty to the group predict higher vaccination rates. These associations are robust after adjusting for structural barriers to vaccination, the demographic makeup of the counties, and their residents' political voting behavior. Our findings have implications for health communication, intervention strategies based on targeted messaging, and our fundamental understanding of the moral psychology of vaccination hesitancy and behavior. Public Significance StatementWhy do people refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 even when vaccines are widely available, safe, and efficacious? We show that differences in moral values can help us understand discrepancies in vaccination rates across U.S. counties. Specifically, Purity This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.Morteza Dehghani https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9478-4365 Mohammad Atari and Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi contributed equally to this work.Nils Karl Reimer played the lead role in formal analysis and an equal role in data curation, methodology, writing of original draft, and writing of review and editing. Mohammad Atari played the lead role in writing of original draft, a supporting role in methodology, and an equal role in data curation and writing of review and editing. Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi played the lead role in data curation and visualization and an equal role in investigation, methodology, writing of original draft, and writing of review and editing. Jackson Trager played a supporting role in data curation, writing of original draft, and writing of review and editing. Brendan Kennedy played a supporting role in project administration, supervision, writing of original draft, and writing of review and editing. Jesse Graham played a supporting role in funding acquisition, supervision, and writing of review and editing.Morteza Dehghani played the lead role in conceptualization, funding acquisition, and supervision; a supporting role in writing of original draft; and an equal role in writing of review and editing.

The research Ethics committee of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology (ELTE) granted a central permission (permission nr: 2019/47). Many other labs obtained IRB approval too, which approvals can be found here: https://osf.io/j6kte/ . Participants had to give informed consent before starting the experiment. Only participants recruited through Mturk or Prolific received monetary compensation.Note that full information on the approval of the study protocol must also be provided in the manuscript.

Sexual assaults are a social problem in Iran; however, psychological factors that predict perceptions of sexual assault remain largely unexamined. Here, we examine the relationship between moral concerns, culture-specific gender roles and victim blaming in sexual assault scenarios in Iranian culture. Relying on Moral Foundations Theory and recent theoretical developments in moral psychology in Iranian context, we examined the correlations between five moral foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity), a culture-specific set of values called Qeirat (which includes guarding and (over)protectiveness of female kin, romantic partners, broader family, and country), and victim blaming. In a community sample of Iranians (N = 411), we found Qeirat values to be highly correlated with victim blaming, and that this link was mediated by a number of culture-specific proscriptions about women’s roles and dress code (i.e., Haya). In a regression analysis with all moral foundations, Qeirat values, Haya, and religiosity as predictors of victim blaming, only Haya, religiosity, high Authority values, and low Care values were found to predict how strongly Iranian participants blamed victims of sexual assault scenarios.

Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination as of September 2021. Understanding the psychology of collective vaccine refusal, particularly the sources of variation across U.S. sub-populations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to increase vaccination across different regions. Here, we demonstrate that county-level moral values (i.e., Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity) are associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates across 3,106 counties in the contiguous United States. Specifically, in line with our hypothesis, we find that fewer people are vaccinated in counties whose residents prioritize moral concerns about bodily and spiritual purity. Further, we find that stronger endorsements of concerns about fairness and loyalty to the group predict higher vaccination rates. These associations are robust after adjusting for structural barriers to vaccination, the demographic make-up of the counties, and their residents' political voting behavior. Our findings have implications for health communication, intervention strategies based on targeted messaging, and our fundamental understanding of the moral psychology of vaccination hesitancy and behavior.

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