FROM METAPHOR TO MECHANISM: A NEURO-COGNITIVE AGENDA FOR COMMUNICATION RESEARCH IN AN ERA OF HEALTH MISINFORMATION

Abstract

Misinformation about health has escalated into one of the biggest issues of public health, disrupting informed decision making and trust in health sources. Traditional studies of communication have focused more on the persuasive mechanism (e.g., framing) without looking at the interventionalist interaction of the mechanisms in the underlying processes in the brain. This paper will contend that effective health communication research can only make incremental progress with strategic integration with cognitive neuroscience. Given these interdisciplinary implications, scholars might not rely on inferences about cognitive activities anymore to directly observe the neurobiological activities during the belief formation, the processing of persuasive messages, and the processing of misinformation. Based on a thought-provoking analysis of the cognitive theories in (mass) communication research, this paper presents the common methodologies of cognitive neuroscience and integrates recent discoveries from neuro-communication discussions. Further, we propose a forward-looking research agenda, emphasizing three key areas, including the neuroscience of fact-checking, the neural basis of affective polarization in health problems, and how visual misinformation is cognitively processed. This agenda  is expected to serve as a roadmap for the future development of a more brain informed communication science with the ultimate goal of developing interventions that can combat the effects of health misinformation based on empirical evidence. This approach also seeks to further our knowledge of the relationship between communication processes and their implications for the health of the population.