BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Integrating Sociocultural Theories to Inform Public Health Response:Unique Relationships between Moral Foundations, Cultural Cognition Worldviews, and COVID-19 Attitudes and Behaviors
Provisionally accepted
- Oregon State University Cascades Campus, Bend, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Key variables from Moral Foundations Theory and the Cultural Theory of Risk were examined in relationship to COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors. Two surveys were conducted with unvaccinated U.S. adults (n=1,025) that assessed five moral foundations (care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity), two dimensions of Cultural Cognition Worldviews (individualism-communitarianism and hierarchy-egalitarianism), COVID-19 vaccination likelihood and related attitudes (including measures of perceived risk, protective behavior, and trust), political orientation, and demographic characteristics. The individualism-communitarianism scale, derived from the Cultural Theory of Risk, was the most impactful predictor across surveys. When controlling for responses to all other measures, participants who placed greater emphasis on individualism tended to report a lower likelihood of getting a COVID-19 vaccination, to perceive a lower level of risk from COVID-19, and to express greater distrust in the safety of vaccines developed by the government. Many other moral and cultural worldview dimensions were uniquely predictive of COVID-19 attitudes as well, while political orientation and demographic characteristics were generally weak or non-significant in multiple regression models. Findings underscore the sociocultural foundations of health behavior.
Keywords: Cultural world view, COVID-19, Moral foundations Foundations theoryTheory, vaccine attitudes, individualism
Received: 07 Apr 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wolsko and Marino. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Christopher Wolsko
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.