Taking anti-vaccine arguments to extreme conclusions may persuade some unvaccinated people in the US to reconsider their opposition to covid-19 vaccines. Watching short, animated videos about how mRNA vaccines work can also improve perceptions of the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety.
Vaccine hesitancy remains a significant problem. Of people aged 12 and older, about in the US and in the UK aren’t fully vaccinated.
Researchers at the University of Arkansas and University of Nottingham in the UK assessed two interventions intended to improve attitudes toward covid-19 vaccination on 7000 unvaccinated individuals in the US and 1000 unvaccinated individuals in the UK. Data collection occurred online in January and February 2022 and the study isn’t yet peer reviewed.
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The first intervention was a 2-minute-long animated video explaining mRNA technology. After watching the video, participants could watch additional videos of the same style and length on vaccine side effects, development and testing.
“We wanted [the videos] to be detailed and technical so that we could respect the intelligence of the viewer, but there is nowhere in the video that says you should get a vaccine,” says at the University of Arkansas.
After watching, participants rated their perceptions of vaccine efficacy, intentions to get vaccinated and concerns about vaccine side effects. Compared with those who watched unrelated videos, people who watched the mRNA explainers had a 13 per cent more favourable perception of vaccine efficacy in both the US and the UK groups. For people in the US, intentions to get vaccinated were 4.7 per cent higher and concerns about vaccine safety 10 per cent lower among those who watched the explainer videos.
Challenging anti-vaccine beliefs
The second intervention was meant to address politically motivated reasoning. It used a persuasion tool called paradoxical reasoning, where participants were confronted with the most extreme interpretation of an underlying belief. The researchers noted that common arguments for avoiding vaccination include preference for natural immunity or questions over vaccine safety.
They developed two paradoxical reasoning examples around these beliefs. To challenge the idea that it is preferable to gain immunity to covid-19 through infection, participants were asked if they would purposefully infect themselves at a hospital. To confront concerns about vaccine safety, they asked participants if they would support a law requiring vaccines to be tested for a full human lifetime prior to approval.
“The goal of presenting the extreme view is to force people into thinking about trade-offs between this extreme position and a more moderate position,” says Brownback. “Normally if you present a stronger and stronger case, people move in that direction, but if you present the most extreme case, you’re actually getting sort of a reversal.”
While paradoxical reasoning proved to be more effective than the videos for US participants — there was a 7.4 per cent increase in vaccine intentions compared with 4.7 per cent — it had a no effect on vaccine intentions for UK participants. It wasn’t clear why this was the case, but the researchers hypothesise it is because vaccine hesitancy in the US is more heavily politicised than in the UK.
Despite the intriguing findings, it’s unclear how health officials could widely and effectively deploy the paradoxical reasoning approach to change attitudes about vaccination or whether the changes in attitude would lead to actual increases in vaccination. One week after the experiment, US participants continued to exhibit more positive attitudes towards vaccination compared with controls, but there was no uptick in vaccination rates. This may be because only 65 per cent of participants responded to the follow-up questionnaire or because one week isn’t enough time to get vaccinated, says Brownback.
Still, the videos have clear public health value, says at Columbia University in New York, who wasn’t involved in the research. “They seem to be relatively effective at least in making people more open-minded, and that’s the first step,” he says.
The videos could also easily be distributed on social media platforms or as commercials on broadcast news channels, says Morse. Brownback is now working with public health organisations in Arkansas to disseminate the videos more widely.
“[Vaccine resistance] has been such a hard problem that, if this was the solution, it could be almost as miraculous as the vaccine itself,” says Morse. “As a scientist, we always need to see more evidence and more proof. I feel it makes perfect sense to scale it up and see if it really works at the population level and how, if it does, could it be made more effective.”
Reference: Social Science Research Network,
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