Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: How Do People Value Life in Health Care Allocation? Inconsistencies and Mechanisms.

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This dissertation research examines the decision processes underlying how people value lives saved in situations of resource scarcity. Three policies a person could use are examined: (1) treating all lives are equal, (2) prioritizing people who will gain the most benefit (e.g. additional life years) from an intervention, and (3) prioritize young people regardless of the number of years they have left to live. These metrics imply different strategies for health resource allocation, especially when such resources are scarce. Vaccination scenarios are used to probe which metrics lay people use in different situations and how the type of question influences the metric used. In direct questions, people are asked about their abstract principles (e.g., all lives are equal, prioritize the young, etc.). In indirect questions, people are given an allocation problem (e.g., there are 1000 people at risk but only 500 vaccines; who should get the vaccines?). The co-PI will test different psychological accounts for why people might express different metrics in these two types of questions.The broader impacts of this research derive from the fact that the public's support for health policies may be malleable: While the pro-young tendencies may drive support for specific policies for how to prioritize scarce health resources (i.e. the 2009 H1N1 vaccine was prioritized for people under age 25), they depart from the oft-cited moral standard that "all lives are equal". Such tendencies may be concealed in more direct measures, such as in questions directly asking whether lives of young people are more valuable than those of older people, because answering yes in this case is a more apparent contradiction to the deep-rooted "all lives equal" moral standard. Studying these inconsistencies provides important information on how to design public health policies and how to present them to the public.