Dissertation: Casual (causal) attribution and consumer perseverance on health remedies, Menebo, 2022

Note - error in the dissertation title is in the original

Abstract:

Some alternative remedies have been proven to be pharmacologically ineffective and therefore unable to heal any illness and are a burden to publicly funded health insurance.

Nevertheless, the market for such remedies is steadily growing and is predicted to reach a global market size of around USD 404 billion by 2028, posing a global health burden.

A vast amount of literature has explored why people initiate use of alternative remedies.

However, not so much on why maintain use.

Counterintuitive to elementary knowledge about consumer behavior, case reports have indicated that some alternative remedy users persevere with a product even when the illness it is intended to treat is not overcome.

This seemingly results from causal attribution bias, in which users attribute the cause of non-recovery more to themselves than to the product. I

n this dissertation, I documented evidence of this counterintuitive form of causal attribution as well as the propensity on the part of consumers to persevere with a failed remedy.

Moreover, I explored the predictors of individuals’ susceptibility to such behavior and investigated the consequences with respect to consumption variables relevant to marketing management.

The results from empirical investigation confirmed that the tendency for susceptibility to causal attribution bias differs depending on how much a remedy emphasizes mind–body integration and to what extent users of a remedy embrace this ideology.

It was documented that alternative users tend to persevere for a longer (vs. a shorter) number of days with alternative (vs. conventional) remedies until they give up and conclude that it does not work even after knowing that the illness was not initially overcome.

Moreover, it was shown that alternative remedies are in general less evaluable than conventional remedies.

Such a feature of low evaluability caused less attribution of failure to the product and made participants persevere longer with an unsuccessful therapy but also resulted in significantly higher levels of WTP.

Furthermore, this effect increased with an increase in an individual’s BPI level, a dispositional belief trait held by every individual to a greater or lesser extent.

The research’s findings advance the literature on product loyalty and causal attribution.

Managerial wise, the findings help health authorities in their campaign against the proliferation of ineffective health practices by identifying the attribute of the remedy that causes it and/or distinguishing personality of victims that are most susceptible.

https://openarchive.usn.no/usn-xmlui/handle/11250/2833387

 

The research news site forskningno had an article today about the dissertation:

Folk slutter ikke med alternative legemidler og behandlinger, selv når de ikke virker
google translation: People don't stop using alternative medicines and treatment, even when they don't work

Quote:

Moges Menebo has found two factors that particularly determine whether we place the responsibility on ourselves or the product, when an alternative product does not work as expected.

• How much the product emphasizes that body and soul are connected.
• To what extent the user absorbs the idea of the connection between body and soul.

His research documents that users of alternative medicines and treatments tend to last longer than users of conventional alternatives, before giving up and concluding that the product does not work.

- This effect persists, despite the fact that they have knowledge that the disease was not overcome in the first place. The participants in my experiments not only persevered with a failed therapy, they also showed an increased willingness to pay for the alternative treatment, despite the lack of results.

 

Some holistic practitioners try to convince the client, the product has not failed, the client has.

This also goes for alternative psychological therapies.

ETA: gaslighting

ETA#2: off topic, but when I think about it, the amount of gaslighting pwME are vulnerable to is enormous - possible criticism from many types of practitioners

 

Since researchers of pseudoscience do the same thing, and I fully include all of psychosomatic medicine here, it's probably fair to say this says nothing about the patients themselves, rather a general state of permissiveness for woo from which medicine is not at all immune. The obsession over CBT and other behavioral treatments is borderline fanatical, does not permit dissent and strongly relies on belief, both for physicians and patients.

Once people invest themselves emotionally into something, and it's 100% fair to say that psychosomatic ideology is purely emotionally driven, is not a rational process, it's much harder because of sunk cost. But this is not at all limited to patients, the creep of pop psychology into healthcare has lead to the exact same behavior.

It would be great if this could be studied, but the question is can it actually be fairly studied? Given how massively emotional it is for the people involved, how obvious it is that they can't let go of those beliefs because of their investment?

 

When one's holistic practitioner says everyone is helped, or indeed is recovered due to an alternative supplement or therapy, it is fairly likely the practitioner, as well as the client themselves, will engage in blaming the client if they do not improve.

 

It's obviously not accurate nor scientific at all for holistic practitioners to tell clients/patients that all their previous clients are recovered, and back to work etc., due to a treatment or treatments.

And yet clients may frequently be told this. This is a powerful message for the ill, desperate and hopeful. It keeps people motivated to continue, despite evidence to the contrary.

Have these practitioners taken the time and expense to follow up with past customers?

Have these former customers/patients abandoned the treatments and consults due to lack improvement?

If the practitioner no longer sees a patient, are they counted as cured, a success by the practitioner?