Researchers Explore How Vaccine Beliefs Are Formed
The scientific community has long acknowledged that vaccines work and have saved millions of lives. However, a large community of "anti-vaxxers", particularly in the US, believes that vaccines are a health risk to children.
Now, scientists are trying to figure out how these beliefs are formed and how they spread.
Researcher Gordon Pennycook says that when it comes to complex ideas and concepts, our intuitions are often wrong, so we need to spend more time thinking about them. The problem, he says, is that we don't always do this because it takes a lot of mental energy.
This is linked to the Dunning-Kruger effect. It explains that people often overrate their skills or knowledge, and that the least skilled or least knowledgeable people are most likely to overrate themselves.
For example, people with little knowledge of vaccines may feel particularly confident about what they do 'know', whether it's correct or not. And when people feel confident, they aren't likely to try to challenge their own beliefs.
This creates a filter on new information. Information that a person agrees with is accepted, while evidence that proves them wrong is ignored. According to Panayiota Kendeou, that is the main problem when it comes to vaccinations.
Kendeou is an expert on misinformation and has researched how incorrect or misleading information is assessed by a person reading it. She says that when reading new information, people need to pay special attention to who made the claims and whether those claims make sense.
She adds that reading and accepting new information can be difficult if a person is feeling fearful. Fear of an immediate threat – even one that's not real – restricts a person's ability to think critically. However, a 2015 study found that if people who don't support vaccines are told about the very real dangers of not vaccinating children, they were more likely to change their minds.
Kendeou says that there are ways to combat bad information on vaccines, but changing people's beliefs is not easy.
"Having good logical arguments is a great first step," she says, adding that it's important to remind people to pay attention to where they are getting information from and to think critically about that information.
In order to teach students how to spot false or misleading information, some US states now require schools to include "media literacy" in their curriculums.
