What Are the Words that Would Work?

How to talk to people who fundamentally disagree with you is one of those topics I have trouble with. There's lots of advice and most of it seems well-intended but one-sided, as if people on "my" side — conceding that there are sides — have to do all the work of connecting.

"Try to see it from their point of view," they say. Which seems like a no-brainer, but it's pretty hard to do when the other point of view seems clearly based in racism or on a particular interpretation of the Bible they were taught. "Don't insult them or their intelligence" — well I don't mean to, but when it comes to religion vs. atheism, for instance, not believing in god automatically implies that you think believing is based on something less than logic, doesn't it?

In a recent post on Science-Based Medicine, the SkepDoc, Harriet Hall, reviewed a book called Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement by Jonathan Berman. One of the things he describes is the general features of anti-vax people, who generally cross political boundaries.

Those who don’t vaccinate tend to have:

a lower level of trust in health care professionals, a lower level of trust in government, a concern that a child’s immune system could be “weakened” by too many immunizations, a belief that immunization requirements abridged freedom of choice and that parents know what’s best for their own children, a greater level of trust in alternative health practitioners, and a past history of having sought information from sources on the internet or alternative health practitioners.

Anti-vaccine parents are deeply concerned with being good parents. They seek out information from sources they trust, like friends and family. They are more distrustful of people they don’t know personally. They are subject to the normal human tendencies, biases, and shortcuts of thinking. They distrust authorities and respond more favorably to stories than to statistics. They worry about chemicals with long names they don’t understand. They fear that putting things into our bodies that are not natural will make them impure.

Hall summarizes Berman's advice on how to effectively counter anti-vax thinking like this:

People do change their minds, but we can’t do it for them. Perhaps a kind stranger answers their questions. Perhaps they connect with someone paralyzed by polio or blinded by measles. Perhaps an illness in their family prompts them to do more (and better) research.

Vaccination is a success story. We should tell that story and should “sing louder than those who sing out of key.” Anti-vaxxers are motivated by the same desires that motivate us all: the desire to be a good parent and do what is best for our children. We can help by understanding the kinds of anti-vaccine arguments and how they are involved with group identity.

We've all heard that people respond to stories and not statistics, and I'm sure that's true, on the whole. One story of a child who died or was severely injured from a vaccine-preventable disease likely has more effect than well-presented public health data about a whole state. But at the same time, a single story about a child whose parent thinks they were injured by a vaccine has just as much weight, or maybe more, because of the human tendency toward negativity bias. 

We need more help from psychologists, as we've had from sociologists like George Lakoff and his popular books on framing. I know there's helpful work on this for climate change communication particularly, but it doesn't seem to break through into the mainstream, or maybe we as messengers are, ourselves, just too human to carry it out.