The Incidental Economist has a couple of posts about how ridiculing parents who don’t vaccinate their kids is unhelpful:
Aaron Carroll: Could we stop asking politicians gotcha questions about measles please? And anyone else for that matter?
Bill Gardner: Enough hating on anti-vaccination parents, please.
They’re probably right in terms of the narrow question of how best to prevent outbreaks of diseases for which there are vaccinations. The background is a measles outbreak that seems to have been exacerbated by people who believed junk science or ignored science altogether about the relative dangers of vaccines versus real or imagined side effects of the vaccines. Ridicule probably makes such parents entrench themselves and become even more staunchly against vaccination. It’s a form of tribalism.
What gives this debate more juice, in my opinion, is that it’s not just about vaccinations. It’s about the proper role of science in policy making and about the proper limits of individual liberty in policy making. Anti-intellectualism is nothing new in American politics — a politician won’t go broke championing “common sense” over those eggheads in their ivory tower. What seems a little newer – and this might just be my limited knowledge – is a rhetorical commitment to individual liberty that overwhelms any notion that an individual might owe any sort of duty to the community. An anti-intellectual commitment to liberty at all costs generally squares with what we’ve seen out of the Tea Party movement. But with the anti-vaxxers, there seems to be a twist. These are, often enough, suburban, Oprah-watching moms. A sense that “they ought to know better” might add more intensity to the response.
So, I think what you’re seeing in these responses is not frustration limited to the question of how best to stop the spread of measles. It’s frustration with what seems like a selfish, deliberately obtuse world view that persists even where the evidence is clear and even where the benefit to the community so vastly outweighs the actual risk to the individual. “We had these horrible, horrible diseases licked and you people are screwing it up for everybody for almost no reason at all.”
Update: Talking Points Memo has A Brief History of How People Got Duped by the Anti-Vaccination Myth.
Update 2: This column by Chris Mooney about hostility between climate change camps seems somewhat related. It’s tribal:
The new study, by a group of Australian psychologists and social scientists, examines the clash between climate adherents and so-called “skeptics” as an “intergroup conflict” (a psychological buzzword) driven, in significant part, by anger at those on the other side.
Or to put it another way, the debate is a cultural clash between two groups with divergent social identities who define those identities, in part, by criticizing those on the other side.
“Believers and sceptics [sic] are united, but only insofar as they are united in opposition to each other,” notes the paper, whose lead author is Ana-Maria Bliuc of Monash University in Victoria.
. . .
One key aspect of in-group/out-group behavior is called “outgroup derogation” — negativity towards those who are members of the opposing group — and Postmes sees it here. “People tend to talk badly about the outgroup as a way of expressing solidarity with their own side,” writes Postmes.
People tend to talk badly about the outgroup as a way of expressing solidarity with their own side,” writes Postmes.
Damn straight it is tribal. Climate change deniers, like evolution deniers, place fealty to their tribe above demonstrable evidence and established science. But in the history of the world, smart and adaptable tribes survive, others perish.
The antivaccine cabal is a a lot more counter-intutitive, as you have noted. And they are as obtuse as the red crowd, perhaps more, in that their world view would not normally accept thoroughly discredited information as dogma. Perhaps, as some have noted, it is the baby boomer “do your own thing” a generation removed and writ large. Maybe it is because the best lack all conviction (maybe, who can say) and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Or maybe they are so genetically self-centered that any risk to their DNA outweighs the apparent right of everyone else’s to basic resistance against contagion.
“Ridicule probably makes such parents entrench themselves and become even more staunchly against vaccination.”
I just don’t buy that.
Ridicule triggers a defensive, emotional response. Whether that response is sustainable might depend on whether they have a group of like-minded supporters who will embrace them.
Interesting Mother Jones article on “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science.”
It’s not about getting the parents to change their minds, it’s about protecting the children society has entrusted with their care, and society at large.
Parents who do not vaccinate should lose custody. Regardless of whether or not their intentions are good (I have no doubt they are), they simply lack the critical judgment necessary to protect the health and well-being of the children in their care. Vaccination should be non-optional without a valid medical reason not to.
you are correct
Critical thinking was eradicated as a disease in the ’80’s.