Stopping the scourge of 'vaccine hesitancy'
Highlights
- Professor Mark Alfano explores how social media fuels vaccine hesitancy by reinforcing misinformation and echo chambers.
- He uses data and behavioural science to identify people who may be open to evidence-based conversations about vaccination.
- He argues that trust, empathy and personal stories can change minds more effectively than facts alone.
Is there anything more divisive and vitriolic than the vaccination debate?
Every hour of every day on Twitter, Facebook and the comments sections of news sites, keyboard warriors go into battle debating the pros and cons of immunisation.
High on emotion and low in civility, these conversations commonly descend to name-calling and nastiness.
“It’s an extremely polarised discussion,” says Mark Alfano, Professorial Fellow at ACU’s Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. “People tend to be there just to argue and shout.”
Professor Alfano would know. In the past few years, he and his co-researchers have spent days trawling Twitter for accounts spouting pro and anti-vaccination messages.
But rather than discovering scores of people on either side engaging in fierce debate, he found that both pro and anti-vaxxers tend to yell into their own echo chambers.
“The two sides basically don't talk to each other,” he says. “There's a tiny amount of crosstalk, but almost nothing, and there's no one in the middle taking a mixed position.”
It’s called confirmation bias, the phenomenon that prompts people to seek out information that supports their own views.
On Twitter and Facebook, that means only following accounts or joining groups that confirm what you already believe to be true.
“There’s this feedback loop, where people stop listening to those who disagree with them,” Professor Alfano says. “And if everyone I'm hearing from is telling me that something is dangerous or unsafe, then I'm going to be more likely to think, ‘well, that's just the way it is’.”
Despite widespread agreement in the scientific community that vaccines are safe, a reluctance to immunise appears to be growing.
In parts of the United States and New Zealand, vaccine-preventable diseases like the measles are making a comeback.
Is social media to blame?
Not entirely. The anti-vaccine movement has been around since the very first vaccine.
But the proliferation of global digital communities has certainly contributed to the rise in vaccine hesitancy.
“Social media has made it possible for there to be many more bubbles and more extreme bubbles,” Professor Alfano says.
“If there's only 20 people in the world who share my bizarre belief and I'm constrained geographically, I probably don't live next to them. But if I'm not constrained geographically, we can find each other and tell each other that we've been right all along, while everyone else was wrong.”
The trend has many scientists and public health advocates worried.
Professor Alfano shares their concerns. And he has a plan to burst that bubble.
He and his co-researchers at ACU are developing an algorithm to find people who have sway in the anti-vaccination community, but who display a semblance of open-mindedness.
The algorithm will mine people’s digital footprint to look for signals — words, phrases, punctuation and emojis — associated with broad-mindedness and intellectual humility.
