Covid-19 Crisis: Gretchen Chapman, PhD on The Psychology of Vaccinations

Gretchen Chapman, PhD researches how we make decisions about vaccines. She is a Professor in the Social & Decision Sciences department at Carnegie Mellon University and works across disciplines in both fields of judgment and decision making as well as health psychology.

She is the recipient of an APA early career award and an NJ Psychological Association Distinguished Research Award, a fellow of APA and APS.  She is a former senior editor at Psychological Science, a past president of the Society for Judgment & Decision Making, the author of more than 100 journal articles, and the recipient of 20 years of continuous external funding.

Our discussion covered a great deal of her work based on laboratory and field experiments, where she has tested behavioral interventions, simultaneously exploring the theoretical mechanisms of decision making and also yielding policy insights into methods for improving health behavior and health outcomes.

We talked about vaccination rates on influenza (between 33% to 50% of adults), measles (around 95%) and what impact a potential coronavirus vaccine might have on other vaccinations.

Her expert knowledge was particularly valuable in a world with lots of noise.

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