Dominican Psychologist Attends White House Convening on Public Health Communication

Dominican University of California professor Dr. Benjamin D. Rosenberg, a social-health psychologist with expertise in health behavior and motivation, participated in a White House convening on the role of community partnerships to strengthen public health communications and promote health equity.

The December 6 event was held to highlight the work of about 50 organizations, grassroots health coalitions, and other public health partners that supported public health communication and community-led programs to support the uptake of COVID-19, flu, and RSV vaccines. The event was hosted by the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy in recognition of National Influenza Vaccination Awareness Week.

The White House guests discussed the role of community partnerships in sharing health information and building trust in public health services to keep communities protected from infectious disease threats.

Dr. Rosenberg’s research examines how people respond when they believe their freedom is being threatened. During the pandemic, he examined why, despite evidence about vaccine effectiveness, people fought back against mandates, or getting vaccinated, or wearing a mask.  

“Having an external group of experts advising on the science and the implementation of vaccines, quite literally, saved millions of lives,” Dr. Rosenberg says.

However, involving more social scientists – like psychologists, sociologists, and economists – in crafting effective or targeted messages about vaccines and other public health mandates would have helped to “turn down the volume on some of the unhelpful political rhetoric,” he adds.

“Voices of behavioral scientists of all kinds need to be included in conversations about vaccine rollout and hesitancy,” he says. “I think this aspect has been severely lacking since the first Covid guidelines rolled out way back in early 2020. People with expertise in human behavior, motivation, health behavior, compliance to medical advice, health communication and persuasion, and messaging must be consulted.”

Too often conversations occur between experts who know the hard science, including why the vaccines work and how disease spreads – but lack input from behavioral scientists.

“To effectively communicate and motivate people, we need both. The framing and content of any health recommendation can affect people's willingness to comply – particularly in such a polarized climate where health and science have become politicized. These complex issues require bench scientists and social scientists to effectively respond.”

Dr. Katelyn K. Jetelina, author of the public health science newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, invited Rosenberg to join the convening. Last year, Dr. Rosenberg and Dr. Jetelina co-authored an article in Your Local Epidemiologist about the role cognitive biases play in changing people’s views of big events, such as the early days of the pandemic or mass shootings. They also wrote an article in Scientific American about ways to inspire people to get a Covid vaccine.

In his Health and Motivation Lab at Dominican, Dr. Rosenberg and his undergraduate students apply ideas from social psychology to health-related issues, examining the way emotional and motivational states affect people’s reactions to persuasive health messages, and why people engage in seemingly irrational unhealthy behaviors.

In 2023, Dr. Rosenberg collaborated with faculty from Dominican’s Global Public Health Department on a paper titled “They'll take a gun to me before I get that shot,” which sought to complement the large-scale survey and clinical studies delineating people's justifications for remaining unvaccinated.

In recent years, Dr. Rosenberg has been quoted by numerous media outlets – including The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, MSN.com, Marin Independent Journal, ABC News, and KCBS Radio – about the critical but often missing step of involving social scientists with expertise in persuasion, behavior change, and social influence when developing COVID-19 messaging. 

Dr. Rosenberg appeared on an episode of the NPR Hidden Brain podcast – “You’re Not the Boss of Me!” In it he explored why people may be resistant when told what to do or when they experience a loss of autonomy.

Following the larger White House convening, Rosenberg also participated in a smaller group meeting to continue the conversation with researchers from Duke University, West Virginia University, Yale University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Brown University.