Disease Cause Attribution and Patients’ Preference for Low versus High Self-Management Treatments

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This research investigates how the attribution of a disease cause influences the preference for treatments. Various diseases are thought to develop as an outcome of an interaction between genetic factors and lifestyle. We investigate whether consumers have different preferences for treatments when they believe the cause of their disease is a genetic factor and when the reason is their lifestyle. Specifically, we compare preferences between treatments that require different levels of self-management. For instance, as a treatment for skin disease, a doctor may propose two treatments, daily antibiotics application or weekly biologic agent injection. The latter treatment demands a lower level of patient self-management, whereas the former requires a higher level of self-management. Across three studies, this research demonstrates that the attribution of disease can affect the preference between treatments with different levels of selfmanagement. In addition, the study results show that the influence varies by individual traits, such as fatalistic determinism and self-control. Study 1 shows that people with a low determinism were likely to prefer a treatment that required a lower level of self-management when they believed the disease was attributed to genetic factors rather than lifestyle. By contrast, preference was not influenced by the disease attribution for people with a high determinism. Study 2 and study 3 demonstrate that people with low self-control had a stronger preference for a treatment with a lower level of self-management when they attributed the disease to genetic factors than when attributed to lifestyle due to the perceived controllability of the disease. On the other hand, the attribution did not influence the treatment preference for people with high self-control.