Vaccine Skeptics Actually Think Differently than Other People
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:
Vaccine skeptics actually think differently than other people:
In 2000, the measles virus was declared eliminated from the United States. Despite cases coming in from outside the country, there were few outbreaks because most people were vaccinated against measles. And then 2019 happened.
The U.S. saw 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states -- the greatest number reported since 1992, with nearly three-fourths linked to recent outbreaks in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles.
After events like this, many people express confusion about others' hesitancy or unwillingness to get vaccinated or to vaccinate their children, a concept called vaccine skepticism. As vaccine skepticism has become increasingly widespread, two researchers in the Texas Tech University Department of Psychological Sciences have suggested a possible explanation.
In an article published recently in the journal Vaccine, Mark LaCour and Tyler Davis suggest some people find vaccines risky because they overestimate the likelihood of negative events, particularly those that are rare.
The fact that these overestimations carry over through all kinds of negative events -- not just those related to vaccines -- suggests that people higher in vaccine skepticism actually may process information differently than people lower in vaccine skepticism, said Davis, an associate professor of experimental psychology and director of the Caprock FMRI Laboratory.
"We might have assumed that people who are high in vaccine skepticism would have overestimated the likelihood of negative vaccine-related events, but it is more surprising that this is true for negative, mortality-related events as a broader category," Davis said. "Here we saw an overestimation of rare events for things that don't have anything to do with vaccination. This suggests that there are basic cognitive or affective variables that influence vaccine skepticism."
[...] "Do some people encode scary stories -- for instance, hearing about a child that has a seizure after getting vaccinated -- more strongly than others and then consequently remember these anecdotes more easily?" he asked. "Do they instead have certain attitudes and search their memory harder for evidence to support this belief? Is it a bit of both? How can you counteract these processes?
"I'm excited that we're finding basic, cognitive factors that are linked with vaccine skepticism: It could end up being a way of reaching this diverse group."
Mark LaCour, Tyler Davis. Vaccine skepticism reflects basic cognitive differences in mortality-related event frequency estimation. Vaccine, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.02.052
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