Shades of Grey in Vaccination Decision Making

Many studies have investigated how individual factors, message factors, and combinations of individual and message factors influence choice of information processing strategy. This commentary probes a complex contemporary personal and policy issue to illustrate the drawbacks of relying on subjects’ self-reports of reasoning strategy, or the conclusions of subjects’ decision-making processes, to distinguish between heuristic and systematic information processing. Moreover, it argues that to reach their audiences effectively, science communicators need both a sophisticated understanding of the tradeoffs in the science and health issues they cover, and a knowledge of the commonly used heuristics that influence individuals’ costs-benefits analyses.