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posted by Fnord666 on Friday April 17 2020, @02:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the minds-of-others dept.

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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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @03:02AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @03:02AM (#983926)

    If everyone else is vaccinated, they figure they don't have to and thereny avoid any possible side effects. Because they are special.

    They are selfish parasites.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @12:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @12:16PM (#984082)

    Not as selfish as passenger transport companies and open-borders activists. Why is anybody entering a country where Measles and TB are eliminated without being tested and/or quarantined? A ricin attack would kill less people than a serious outbreak caused by communal spread of pathogens like Measles, TB or SARS-CoV-2. Travel internationally and pay for your own tests and quarantine you selfish fucks!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @11:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @11:23PM (#984367)

    A parasite who wants to gamble their health and health of their children for your own convenience. Precisely what you vilify them for, and for precisely the same reason.
    You are not the most important person in creation, for anyone but yourself, dear snowflake. Learn to live with that and learn to account for other people's existence.

    Other people may be wrong, you too may be wrong (inconceivable, yes?), but you are not their owner. They are not on this planet on your sufferance. They owe you nothing. They care about themselves first, exactly as you do.