The Health Belief Model (HL IB Psychology)

What is the health belief model?

• The health belief model (HBM):

  • The HBM was developed in the USA in the 1950s-60s

  • It was becoming apparent that certain behaviours like smoking and being overweight were hazardous to health

  • Despite the above awareness, people seemed unwilling to change their unhealthy behaviours

• Psychologists tried to highlight this resistance to positive behaviour change by using the HBM as an explanatory model

• The HBM describes the steps involved in a person deciding on action or inaction regarding their own health:

1. Perception of the possible seriousness of the potential health problem

2. Awareness of the risk of them suffering from a health problem

3. Motivation and responsiveness to internal or external cues to action

4. Cost-benefit analysis of the benefits of action vs. the risks of inaction

• At every step, the individual’s belief in their own self-efficacy will affect their perceptions and their final decision

• The decision-making process will also be subject to a person’s personality, background, education and personal history

• Thus the HBM is an dispositional explanation of the decision to change behaviour

The Health Belief Model explains individual health decisions as involving a cost-benefit analysis

Dispositional factors & health beliefs

• Dispositional factors not only affect health, they also affect health beliefs

• Two dispositional factors that influence a person’s beliefs about them developing a health problem and their ability to cope are:

  • optimism bias

  • self-efficacy

• Optimism bias is linked to risk perception: we overestimate the behaviours we engage in to protect our health and underestimate our bad habits

• Optimism bias means that we  perceive our risk of developing a certain illness as low and it can prevent us from taking necessary action

• Self-efficacy is belief in one’s own ability to change bad habits that may be damaging to health

• Ajzen (1985) updated an earlier theory to develop his theory of planned behaviour

• The theory of planned behaviour outlines three factors that predict behavioural intentions such as health beliefs:

  • Attitude towards the healthy behaviour

  • Subjective norms of those around us towards the behaviour

  • Self-efficacy - our belief that we can change our behaviour, which directly affects our motivation and perseverance in changing it 

Evaluation of the health belief model

Strengths

• The HBM provides a clear explanation for why people continue to engage in unhealthy behaviour in the face of evidence that they should stop in order to avoid illness

• The HBM has been used to inform the development of interventions to improve health behaviour

Limitations

• The HBM tends to ignore environmental and cultural factors in explaining people’s health behaviour

• The model does not account for the role of physical and psychological addiction in maintaining some unhealthy behaviours

Which study investigates dispositional factors and health beliefs?

• Masiero et al. (2015) conducted a study into the relationship between optimism bias and smoking and confirmed the presence of optimism bias affecting health beliefs in smokers

Masiero  et al. (2015) is available as the second of ‘Two Key Studies of Dispositional Factors and Health Beliefs’ – just navigate to the Dispositional Factors and Health Beliefs section of this topic to find them.