Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How can we leverage the cognitive science of lay theories toinform interventions aimed at correcting misconceptions andchanging behaviors? Focusing on the problem of vaccine skep-ticism, we identified a set of 14 beliefs we hypothesized wouldbe relevant to vaccination decisions. We developed reliablescales to measure these beliefs across a large sample of partici-pants (n = 1130) and employed state-of-the-art graphical struc-ture learning algorithms to uncover the relationships amongthese beliefs. This resulted in a graphical model describingthe system of beliefs relevant to childhood vaccinations, withbeliefs represented as nodes and their interconnections as di-rected edges. This model sheds light on how these beliefs re-late to one another and can be used to predict how interventionsaimed at specific beliefs will play out across the larger system.Moving forward, we hope this modeling approach will helpguide the development of effective, theory-based interventionspromoting childhood vaccination.