By Maria Konnikova
The New Yorker - May 19, 2014
Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at
Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of
pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three
years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of
whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple
relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental
attitudes toward vaccines?
Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no
evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and
autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers
of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of
children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost
died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all.
The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could
make people change their minds.
The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the
interventions worked. The first leaflet—focussed on a lack of evidence connecting vaccines and autism—seemed
to reduce misperceptions about the link, but it did nothing to affect
intentions to vaccinate. It even decreased intent among parents who held
the most negative attitudes toward vaccines, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect.
The other two interventions fared even worse: the images of sick
children increased the belief that vaccines cause autism, while the
dramatic narrative somehow managed to increase beliefs about the dangers
of vaccines. “It’s depressing,” Nyhan said. “We were definitely
depressed,” he repeated, after a pause.
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