David Hauser (Queen’s University)

Presenter: David Hauser, Queen’s University

Title: Psychological gaps in health decision-making: How metaphors and reasoning styles can spur suboptimal health decisions

Abstract:

How can we help people make better health decisions? In this talk, I illustrate psychological gaps in popular health decision-making recommendations. Specifically, I discuss how recommendations for health messaging can encourage “fighting” metaphoric frames that promote suboptimal health beliefs. And, I explain how providing the public with more information is not sufficient for improving people’s health decisions, particularly for reducing vaccine hesitancy. Overall, the talk will describe how language and reasoning impact health decision-making and will offer suggestions for how such processes could be leveraged to benefit public health.