Health Communication Effectiveness: Using Underlying Processes to Understand the Relationship Between Risk Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions

Abstract

We show that the relationship between consumers' health risk attitudes and behavioral intentions following exposure to health communication messages depends on the match between the type of processes that underlie attitudes and intentions formation. Based on the dual-process literature, we propose that when risk attitudes and behavioral intentions are both formed by deliberate processes, they tend to be positively correlated. On the other hand, when people's automatic attitudes are activated through a memory inhibition manipulation, the directional response of these automatic attitudes diverges from the directional response of behavioral intentions. We employ concept maps, a novel measurement tool in the study of health communications, to measure consumers' cognitive representations in order to tease apart automatic vs. deliberate attitudes.

Keywords: health risk, attitudes, behavioral intentions, health communication

JEL Classification: I19, M37