“We found that directing people’s attention to the risks posed by not getting vaccinated, like getting measles, mumps and rubella and the complications associated with those diseases, changed people’s attitudes positively towards vaccination – and that was for even the most skeptical participants in the study”, said study author Zachary Horne, a cognitive science researchers at the University of Illinois. Volunteers were then arbitrarily allotted to one of three groups. One group received a parent’s description of what it was like to have a child with measles, warnings about the importance of vaccination, and photos of a child covered with measles and rubella rashes, or a young boy’s face horribly swollen by mumps.
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The third was a control group that read about something that didn’t have to do with vaccines.
The campus McKinley Health Center recommends that students planning to take classes this fall get a vaccine booster. Another group received information about the absence of a link between vaccines and autism. The second, a “disease risk group”, looked at on the risks linked with measles, mumps, and rubella. [5 risky Vaccine Myths]. Though the study was found to be based on fraudulent data and later retracted, and the doctor lost his medical license, fear spread among parents, leading to a small but vocal faction who continue to refuse to vaccinate their children. A 2014 measles outbreak, for example, infected 383 people in the Midwest, many of them unvaccinated Amish in communities in Ohio. Measles, once declared “eliminated” in the U.S., with 60 cases per year, on average, between 2001 and 2010 has roared back, with 644 cases last year. After all, the effect of scaring a parent straight may be temporary, but the damage done to a child who contracts a vaccine-preventable disease can be for life. The authors of the new study said their intervention was more in-depth than the previous one.
This approach did not change attitudes at all, the psychologists report.
“We felt that direct education would be the most effective, and honest, way to persuade people to have positive attitudes toward vaccines”, Powell told Healthline.
The researchers said there may be even more effective ways to increase support for vaccination, such as by showing a video with families and doctors taking the positive approach. “What’s going on with anti-vaccination parents, we think, is because they haven’t seen kids with measles and mumps, those consequences aren’t that real to them”. Using images is particularly important in regions where these diseases are no longer common, researchers found.
While some people hold very extreme anti-vaccination beliefs, many more have heard that vaccines are controversial and could be persuaded either way, Holyoak said. “In cases like this, pictures might be an especially helpful aid to scientific education”.
“Rather than confront people’s fears over the safety of vaccines directly, we emphasized the positive benefits of vaccines”.
Those wondering if they have immunity can get it checked with a blood test done through health care providers, Pryde said.
“Our observed effect is probably the low end of what can be achieved”, Powell said.
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“It’s more effective to accentuate the positive reasons to vaccinate and take a nonconfrontational approach – “Here are reasons to get vaccinated” – than directly trying to counter the negative”, explains Prof.
