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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: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Friday April 17 2020, @03:15AM (4 children)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Friday April 17 2020, @03:15AM (#983930)

    Aren't they afraid of their child catching the illness and experiencing its horrible consequences [youtube.com]? And when they ask "How can you counteract these processes?" ... can't you encode the scary stories of what happens when you get the disease?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by https on Friday April 17 2020, @05:11AM (3 children)

    by https (5248) on Friday April 17 2020, @05:11AM (#983996) Journal

    Doing nothing is (to their deluded thinking) not an action taken - so there's no way for their brain to encode an association of action and risk.

    That's my first guess as to why they're not afraid. Who knows. I don't understand it, and I sometimes fear that if I did I would be joining their ranks.

    --
    Offended and laughing about it.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @11:48PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @11:48PM (#984377)

      in this fearmongering world. Dumping more propaganda onto the public is not the answer, you just alienate rational people and push the irrational to more irrationality.

      And when nearly everyone gets vaccinated from something and nearly no one gets sick as a consequence, then the risks from the vaccination start to dominate the risks from the sickness itself. If a sickness kills 1% and a vaccine 0.001%, and you vaccinated a million people against it so that only 100 got sick, you will have 1 person dead from the sickness and 10 from the vaccine. This is how probabilities work; they are not known for political correctness.

      Read the "Historical events" part of this link for real-life examples:
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4599698/ [nih.gov]

      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:27AM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:27AM (#984387)

        I'm thinking the rational people would say, "Meh, not my favorite episode" and if video input could reliably push irrational people in *any* direction, you'd at least have *some* mechanism of steering their planning and behavior.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday April 18 2020, @05:05PM

        by sjames (2882) on Saturday April 18 2020, @05:05PM (#984608) Journal

        Sure, but the fact remains that without the vaccine, the disease would kill 10,000.