Do you have advice on how to convince anti-vaxxers to get their shots?

No dearth of advice on the internet how to convince anti-vaxxers to get their shots or rather more accurately, encourage them to get their children vaccinated. From professors to young mothers, an array of well-meaning people seek to show them the error of their ways. Does this approach work? More pertinently, could it? Is it possible to change minds without understanding why they think the way they do? I too used to think that summoning an abundance of rigorous, irrefutable facts would suffice. Is it though? Would it work on me? Honestly, I'm not sure.

Facts, figures, data appeal more to the intellect, less to emotions. A bullet-point list of truisms likely to provoke approving nods from vaccine aficionados would fall off anti-vaxxers' backs like the proverbial water. Just the way it goes with entrenched beliefs, appeals to reason alone don't suffice. The amalgam of conspiracy theories about government, big pharma, science, the medical profession that typically fuel anti-vaxxers is based on a mix of unrealistic expectations, mistrust and fear, fear for the well-being of their children. Wouldn't appeal to reason boomerang, likely perceived as patronizing? As well, the internet so easily fosters a bubble mentality. Stay ensconced in echo chambers that parrot one's own viewpoint and one need never subject oneself to the discomfort of questioning one's belief. The problem won't go away through mocking/hectoring/lecturing, and is likely of our own making.

An argument more likely to pierce such a bubble would be personal accounts of former anti-vaxxers who changed their minds, and got themselves and their children vaccinated. Such people once inhabited similar mind-sets. Their accounts would resonate more because they'd appeal to emotion instead of to reason alone. They'd address the underlying fear that drives much of this thinking. Former anti-vaxxers had the same fear and yet they found a way to surmount them. Recently, some former anti-vaxxers have come forward with just such stories of changes in stance (1, 2). Sharing these essays with current anti-vaxxers would do both them and the rest of us more of a service compared to an exchange across entrenched beliefs that's only likely to become increasingly rancorous.

How is the problem one of our own making? Exploring this issue opens a bigger can of worms about current human culture and collective memory and in its wake leaves more uncomfortable questions. Each of us comes from somewhere, a specific family, culture, history. Each of us living today has to only go back one, two or three generations at most to find accounts of relatives who died or were maimed from polio, small pox, pertussis, rubella, rabies, tetanus, vaccine-preventable diseases all. What happened to their stories? Why aren't the accounts of their lives and tragic, vaccine-preventable disabilities or deaths part of their families' lore? Surely it can't be that anti-vaxxers have absolutely no one in their 20th century family tree who died from a vaccine-preventable disease? That would just defy statistics. This is the deeply unsettling bit.

School and formal education attend to one aspect of  identity formation and beliefs. The other part comes from family and community. The recent anti-vaxxer movement in places like the US and Australia suggests that something fundamental may be changing in the way generational information and knowledge is transmitted within families and communities. Or maybe I'm the fool for walking down this path. Maybe selective amnesia always attended collective human memory. In which case, we are and will always be fools condemned to repeat the past, to paraphrase George Santayana. Yet somehow I suspect I'm not wrong in thinking increasingly isolated online living and entrenched mistrust against one big group or the other goes hand in hand. If I'm right, our current mode of increasingly disembodied online living is only more likely to bring out the potential for irrationality in each and every one of us. Maybe anti-vaxxers and other fringe groups are merely harbingers of worse to come.

Foot-notes

1. Kashana Cauley, The Atlantic, Mar 6, 2015. I Used to Be an Anti-Vaxer
2. Sage Stargrove, The Guardian, Feb 28, 2015. I'm finally getting vaccinated. But not because of your shaming

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-advice-on-how-to-convince-anti-vaxxers-to-get-their-shots/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala