If you would like to read the full published paper, you can find it here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19698137
Most people know that UV radiation is harmful. Most people still do not apply sunscreen every day. This paper asks a simple question: why?
The answer is not ignorance. The answer is what we call the Intention Gap. This is the space between knowing that UV is harmful and actually applying sunscreen daily. It is a structural problem, not a personal one. And it has two specific causes.
The first is Sunscreen Resistance. This is the friction a person carries toward sunscreen, built up from a bad past experience with a greasy or darkening product, or from inherited assumptions that sunscreen is unnecessary for their skin tone or not relevant to their daily life. Resistance does not announce itself. It just quietly stops the habit from forming.
The second is Consequence Salience. This is how real and urgent the future damage feels right now. A person can know that UV causes long-term harm and still feel no urgency in that knowledge, because the damage is invisible in the short term. For darker skin tones, even the delayed signal of tanning or sunburn is muted. This is the silent burn at work.
The paper expresses this as a simple relationship: the Intention Gap grows when resistance is high and shrinks when consequence feels real.
To close the gap, two things need to happen in order. First, the product experience must be good enough to remove resistance. A sunscreen that feels comfortable and easy to use replaces the old negative memory with a new one. Only then can education raise the felt urgency of UV harm. The sequence matters. Education cannot land while resistance is still high.
This framework has implications for how sunscreens should be designed, how sun protection should be communicated, and how families can build the habit for good.