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Abstract Relying on recent work in social cognition, we introduce the term health belief schema to summarize how an individual organises knowledge about health issues, in this case, knowledge about ‘who has heart attacks and why’. Using data from group discussions of this topic, we show several ways that social interaction influences the formation of an individual's health belief schema for heart attacks, and demonstrate that these schemata typically consist of differentially weighted risk factors. Lay knowledge and use of risk factors does not, however, mirror medical knowledge of risk factors, and we offer suggestions as to how health practitioners can benefit from an accurate perception of lay‐knowledge about heart attacks.
Morgan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.