Psychological Value Theory:Predicting Health-Seeking Behavior from Symptom Perception

We recruit Psychological Value Theory (PVT) to understand how symptom value influences health-seeking decisions. Estimates of the Psychological Value of relief from a particular symptom were previously collected and used to predict the speed of participants’ decision and the choice they make in three discrete choice experiments. Experiment 1 presented participants with a scenario and asked them to identify which of two symptoms they would seek healthcare services to treat. For each participant on every trial, two randomly chosen symptoms were inserted into the scenario. Experiment 2 addressed how the Psychological Value of a group of symptoms is predicted from the individual symptoms. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 using groups of two symptoms, and predicted choice based on three grouping functions. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 using a yes/no task, whereby participants were asked if they would pursue a health care visit for a single set of symptoms. The results showed that PVT accurately predicted speed and choice in all three experiments. The Psychological Value of relief from a symptom was the primary driver of choice along with a response bias in favor of avoiding symptoms labeled “severe.” Health-seeking decisions are well modeled by a general-purpose, value-based computational model (PVT), with the Psychological Value of relief from health symptoms as a primary driver of health-seeking behavior.