The Effect of Corrective Information on Parents' Intention to Vaccinate Future Children

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The good news was that the corrective information actually was successful at reducing belief in the myth that vaccines cause autism. But when we looked at the bottom line from a public health perspective, which is whether parents would vaccinate a future child, we find that none of those messages about the dangers of disease increased parents' intention to vaccinate. That effect moreover was concentrated among the parents with the least favorable attitudes towards vaccines.

If you try to correct someone who you know is wrong, you run the risk of alarming their brains to a sort-of existential, epistemic threat, and if you do that, when that person expends effortful thinking to escape, that effort can strengthen their beliefs instead of weakening them.

In this episode you'll hear from three experts who explain why trying to correct misinformation can end up causing more harm than good.

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