Abstract

Global health challenges such as obesity, Covid-19, and excessive alcohol consumption cannot be

tackled without governments implementing health policies, yet many policy makers fear a public

backlash if they implement an unpopular policy. Understanding how policy support forms and

changes can therefore provide policy makers with guidance on how to avoid a backlash. This talk

provides an overview of the importance of studying public support for policies, the existing evidence

on how and why people change their minds about policies, and how these psychological insights can

be applied in practice.

About James:

Dr James Reynolds is a Lecturer at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) within the School of

Psychology. He specialises in applying psychological and behavioural science to solve public health

problems. His PhD focussed on cannabis use, aiming to understand how chronic cannabis use affects

cognition and executive function. After completing this in 2015 he worked as a Research Associate at

the University of Sheffield investigating self-regulation within the context of alcohol use, tobacco

use, dietary behaviours, and physical activity. In 2016 he moved to the University of Cambridge

where he worked for nearly 5 years. This involved running major multi-site trials to test the

effectiveness of environmental-based interventions at changing eating behaviours. He also won a

grant from Global Food Security to write a report on how these types of interventions can reduce

population-level meat consumption. The other half of his work at Cambridge was focussed on what

the public think about policies designed to change health behaviours. He led on many experiments

and reviews designed to understand why the public oppose life-saving policies and what we can do

to increase public support for these policies. Since starting as a Lecturer at Aston he won the ERC’s

Starting Grant – a €1.5million grant over 5 years to continue this work on increasing public support

for health policies.