How to talk about vaccines with those who do not want to be immunized

Nearly a year after the US Department of Food and Drugs approved the first Covid-19 vaccines, you probably don’t need me to convince you of their effectiveness. As I write this text, more than 4.28 billion people have already received at least one dose, which means 55.8% of the entire world population.

Despite this huge adoption, however, it is also likely that you know at least one person in your family or group of friends who has not yet received the vaccine because of personal choice, not because of low availability of the immunizer. These people are often characterized as being “anti-vaccination” who reject science—and we sometimes hear that any attempt to engage in debate with them is just a waste of voice.

The reality, of course, is more complex. It is certainly true that some committed conspiracy theorists are willing to spread disinformation, but these small but highly noisy groups do not represent the majority of people who have not yet had their vaccine.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, low confidence in vaccines in some parts of the world was described by health experts as a “global crisis”. There are now real concerns that this could affect efforts to end the pandemic. For some time, researchers have been looking for ways to help governments persuade people still hesitant about vaccines. It’s no surprise that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but a big part of the strategy is talking and engaging people who are still reluctant to get vaccinated.

In fact, many reluctant people are simply undecided — and scientists say talking to them can help them look at the evidence. And it’s not just governments and health authorities that can do this. “Social days are crucially important,” says John Cook, a cognitive scientist at Monash University in Australia. “Revealing our views on our social media can be influential.”

However, whether or not your acquaintances listen to your views will depend on your style of dialogue—it just doesn’t make sense to gather the data if you present it the wrong way.

Based on multiple studies of effective communication, I’ve produced a list of evidence-based advice on how best to discuss the science behind vaccines—and what to avoid.

1) Choose your battles

The first rule of thumb in effective communication—in any area—is to target the right audience. And recent research suggests that many of us may not be paying attention exactly to the people who might respond well to your message.

A recent study by Christopher Bechler, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, surveyed people’s attitudes toward behaviors such as wearing a mask. In one experiment, participants were given a chance to pass on useful information about the topic to people with a wide range of opinions.

Participants tended to choose those with a very negative view of the subject. But Bechler found that the information shared had very little impact on these people’s opinions. Instead, the message was most effective in strengthening the position of those who were already, albeit only slightly, in favor of the mask as a safety measure. “They were much more open to the message”, says the researcher.

The implications for vaccine messages are clear. “We would rather change someone’s point of view from anti-vaccine to pro-vaccine,” says Vanessa Bohns, social psychologist at Cornell University and author of You Have More Influence Than You Think (You Have More Influence Than You Think). “But we can have a bigger impact by talking to someone who is already leaning in that direction.”

2) be humble

The second rule of effective communication is linked to humility as we try to understand the other person’s point of view. “It’s important to have a two-way conversation, where we listen with empathy and genuinely seek to understand what the other person’s objections are,” says Cook, who recently co-authored a free Covid vaccine communication manual. 19. “Trying to change a person’s mind by making them feel stupid is not a path to success.”

Bohns agrees. She claims that many of us may also have had doubts — but we tend to forget about that fact once we’ve made the decision in favor of the vaccine. “When we are trying to convince someone else, we are already expressing that certainty, which makes it very difficult for us to find them where they are.”

She says it would be much more effective to acknowledge our initial concerns and explain how we arrived at the decision we ended up making. “People react badly when they feel someone is judging them — and I believe that can happen when you express too much certainty,” she says. “It’s the difference between telling people what they should do, rather than telling them what we did and why.”

In his book on persuasion, Bohns points to a study on health messages led by Ann Kronrod of the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The team found that when providing advice, most people tend to prefer very assertive messages, delivered as if they were a command. When they receive advice from others, however, many respond much better to lighter suggestions.

In one experiment, half of the participants heard the following: “Doing sit-ups for five minutes a day can strengthen your abs. You can do it!” The others received more assertive advice: “Do ab exercises for five minutes a day. Strengthen your abs. Do it!” A week later, Kronrod’s team asked participants about their physical activity.

People who were already open to the idea of ​​exercising tended to respond well to both messages. Those who were already resistant, however, responded much better to the more delicate suggestion, while the stronger command ended up discouraging them.

3) Establish a personal connection

When we engage in this type of conversation and actively listen to what the other person has to say, you can see that the concerns are often practical in nature. Recent studies suggest that the ease of accessing the vaccine is one of the best indicators of reluctance. If that’s the case, you can offer help with potential barriers, such as making an appointment for the person to get vaccinated or arranging transport to the health center. In other cases, you may find that there are specific misunderstandings about safety or efficacy that you can talk about.

If you find yourself in conversation with someone who is strongly opposed to the vaccine, you may find it more effective to emphasize the individual benefits of immunization, according to a study by Sinéad Lambe, a research clinical psychologist at Oxford University.

This year, Lambe’s team recruited more than 15,000 participants online and measured their initial attitudes toward vaccination. Each participant was then randomly assigned information about the vaccine, dealing with or with issues of safety, collective benefits (such as reducing the risk of transmission to others), and personal beliefs.

The information included statements such as: “Catching coronavirus can be severely life-shattering… And you can’t be sure, even if you’re relatively young and fit, that you won’t get seriously ill or struggle with long-term related problems to Covid: About one in five people are still sick five weeks after getting Covid-19, one in ten still have symptoms three months later. worry about what the virus might do to you…”

Participants were then remeasured for their vaccine reluctance levels.

Overall, personal benefit information proved to be the most persuasive to people who had initially expressed the greatest level of reluctance. She even got over a combined message that tried to explain how vaccines could help both the individual and others.

Lambe says she was initially surprised by the result, but it matches what previous studies have said, which suggested that people reluctant to get the vaccine tend to have less confidence in society. “So they may feel slightly excluded and may be less inclined to be motivated by the collective benefits [das vacinas]”, says Lambe.

4) Describe the methods behind the misinformation

Occasionally, you may identify that a person who is reluctant to get the vaccine has been misled by misinformation. It is common to hear that clinical trials were rushed, for example. In this type of situation, it is worth recognizing that it makes sense to question the quality of any scientific study, and then describe the long-term development of the vaccine technology in question, which had been tested for years before the advent of Covid-19.

You can also explore the size of the Covid vaccine trials — which had tens of thousands of participants — and the ongoing monitoring of side effects. You can also look at online charts to demonstrate the risks of getting Covid-19 compared to the risks of getting the vaccine.

In other cases, it may be helpful to explain the tactics used to spread misinformation. It’s common, for example, for people to present false credentials that make their arguments appear more credible—even if they don’t have real experience in the field. Sometimes pressure groups will even create polls signed by many of these bogus experts to challenge prevailing scientific opinion and create an illusion of debate.

Both tactics have been employed by the tobacco industry to undermine confidence in the growing scientific evidence against cigarettes. More recently, they have been used to undermine public understanding of climate change.

When it comes to Covid-19 and vaccines, some claim to have an understanding of virology and immunology superior to real experts — despite having no qualifications or credible scientific publications to support their alternative views.

Some of the people you know may also have been exposed to dubious reports that deliberately confuse correlation with causality. When more than half of the world’s population has been vaccinated, some of those who receive the vaccine will inevitably suffer from some other illness, unrelated to immunization. This tactic is used to suggest that there are hidden dangers in applying the vaccine — with medical data suggesting that serious side effects are incredibly rare.

It is very easy to be fooled by messages that are prepared this way. Cook’s research, however, suggests that explaining these kinds of deceptive techniques can help reduce a person’s belief in misinformation, particularly if they haven’t yet formed a clear opinion on an issue. The method is sometimes called “inoculation” or “prebunking” as this knowledge helps protect the person from falling into similar “fake news” in the future.

There is no completely certain way to change opinions on an issue. By following these four suggestions, however, you can have more constructive conversations with the people you come across. If you are successful in your attempt to correct their misunderstandings, they may later persuade others. “They can become lawyers [da causa]”, says Bechler. In this way, the truth itself becomes contagious.

* David Robson is a science writer based in London, UK. Your next book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life (The Effect of Expectation: How Your Mental Posture Can Transform Your Life) will be published by Canongate and Henry Holt in early 2022. It is available for advance purchase. Your Twitter account is @d_a_robson.