Mapping lay concepts of health

Health is widely treated as multidimensional, yet little is known about how these dimensions are structured in lay thinking or how such structures guide health-related judgments. We used a conceptual scaling approach to derive participant-specific conceptual maps that position the term unhealthy relative to three clusters of related concepts reflecting Disease, Lifestyle, and Functional Ability aspects of health. Participants’ conceptual understanding of unhealthy was most closely aligned with a Lifestyle interpretation of health, followed by Disease, while Functional Ability played a comparatively minor role. We also observed substantial inter-individual differences in pluralism. Dominant alignment in participants’ conceptual maps predicted how they applied the concept in a subsequent vignette task, with higher accuracy among participants expressing stronger beliefs. These findings indicate that lay understandings of unhealthy are not neutral reflections of medical definitions but are typically anchored in lifestyle-related considerations while varying substantially across individuals. Crucially, predicting concept application from conceptual organization alone suggests that the structure of lay concepts meaningfully constrains how they are used in judgment. Accounting for the dominant alignment and heterogeneity may inform psychological theories of health, contribute to philosophical debates about its nature, and support more effective health communication.