Study On Vaccine Conspiracy Theorists Reveals...

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A new study published in the journal Pediatrics that said that arguing with anti-vaxxers is pretty much useless.

This was a study done by political scientist Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth college and three of his colleagues.

These authors did a previous study that showed that when a conservatives read a fake a newspaper article containing a quotation of George W. Bush asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, followed by a factual correction stating that this was not actually true, they believed Bush's falsehood more strongly afterwards—an outcome that Nyhan and Reifler dubbed a "backfire effect."

This study tested the effectiveness of four pro-vaccine messages. Their results, not a single one of those messages was successful in increasing parent's intent to vaccinate their kids. And in some cases, those messages made people less likely.

Recent research suggests that a conspiratorial, paranoid mindset prevails among some antivaxxers.

That research published in the journal Plos one found links between conspiratorial thinking between not only vaccines but climate change and GMO's.

So if you're a conspiracy theorist, according to this previous study, you're more likely to be against vaccines, gmo's and climate science.

But vaccines scored the highest. The study says "People who tend toward conspiratorial thinking are three times more likely to reject vaccinations," compared to those sample people questioned about GMO's and climate change. Three times more than both of those.

So what were those four pro-vaccine messages that were used?

One was called Autism Correction, and motherjones explains it as a "factual, science-heavy correction of false claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism, assuring parents that the vaccine is "safe and effective" and citing multiple studies that disprove claims of an autism link. The second message, dubbed "Disease risks," simply listed the many risks of contracting the measles, the mumps, or rubella, describing the nasty complications that can come with these diseases. The third message, dubbed "Disease narrative," told a "true story" about a 10-month-old whose temperature shot up to a terrifying 106 degrees after he contracted measles from another child in a pediatrician's waiting room.

The final message was called disease images, where they showed images of children with Measles, mumps and rubella.

The results showed that the least successful messages were the "Disease narrative" and "Disease images." Hearing the narrative actually increased respondents' likelihood of thinking that getting the MMR vaccine will cause serious side effects, from 7.7 percent to 13.8 percent. Similarly, looking at the images increased test subjects' belief that vaccines cause autism.

Both of those messages backfired.

As far as Autism correction, according to the study it worked as a whole to somewhat reduce belief that in the falsehood that vaccines cause autism, but it also decreased the % of parents saying they would vaccinate their kids.

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