Building a sustainable management pipeline: Key predictors of nurse management aspirations in Ireland.

The persistence of vaccine hesitancy during recent epidemics shows that preventive behavior cannot be explained by instrumental rationality alone. Vaccination decisions arise from an interplay of material incentives, emotions, social expectations, and uncertainty about both disease dynamics and social reactions. Traditional epidemic and imitation-based models capture strategic and diffusion aspects but often overlook the psychological and normative forces driving real-world responses [,]. Understanding how these forces interact is crucial for anticipating compliance and designing effective interventions. Social norms—people’s perceptions of what others do (descriptive norms) and what others approve of (injunctive norms)—strongly shape vaccination behavior [,,]. Descriptive norms guide behavior through informational cues and are most influential under uncertainty about others’ actions, whereas injunctive norms operate via moral and reputational channels []. Aligning these two norms enhances compliance, while misalignment undermines it [,]. Large-scale studies show that providing accurate normative information—such as evidence of high vaccination rates—increases willingness to vaccinate, particularly among uncertain or mistrustful individuals []. Experimental evidence from “pandemic-like” environments also shows that individuals respond very differently to descriptive and injunctive cues; in particular, Woike et al. [] found that only injunctive messages consistently reduced risk-taking, while descriptive messages could even backfire by increasing it. These findings underscore the importance of treating social norms as multidimensional influences rather than uniform informational signals, highlighting the need for models that capture how descriptive and injunctive expectations coevolve. Emotions are equally central. Regret theory [] shows that individuals evaluate outcomes relative to forgone alternatives, incorporating counterfactual emotions into choice. Anticipated regret increases vaccination uptake by raising the emotional cost of inaction [,], while worry mediates the link between perceived risk and compliance [,]. Thus, emotional forecasting and normative expectations jointly shape preventive behavior, motivating an integrated modeling approach.