Cognitive Mechanisms and Common-Sense Management of Cancer Risk: Do Patients Make Decisions?

Our chapter has two primary goals. The first is to describe a model of the mechanisms underlying the “common-sense processes” involved in the everyday management of health risks. The second, intertwined with the first, is to apply the model to decisions and management of cancers in three areas: screening, care seeking, and end-of-life planning. We first spell out two themes underlying how the model represents the processes involved in people’s everyday approach to “decision”-making for managing threats of cancers. The content of the Common-Sense Model (CSM) is spelled out, e.g., prototypes, representations of cancer, and treatments and action planning, as are the processes involved in the activation of mental models. The final sections address how these processes affect decisions to screen, treat, and decide among end of life alternatives.