NPR had a good story recently about why people believe phony stuff. It started with a woman whose midwife claimed vaccines had made her child autistic and who believed nobody should get their kids vaccinated. A major recent study of children on the autism spectrum using data from several countries failed to find any links to maternal behavior, found clear evidence only of genetic factors, and left much of the causation unexplained.
Vaccines were not involved.
The notion that vaccines can cause autism appears to be based on an unfortunate coincidence: Generally, the symptoms of autism can't be seen until the social behaviors that are affected emerge in the first year of life at about the same time most kids get their first vaccines. That was the experience on which the midwife based her belief.
Years ago, a phony report of a link was published in The Lancet (a British medical journal), later to be withdrawn and disavowed by the publisher. Extensive research has failed to find any causal link between autism and vaccines. Why the false belief persists in the face of clearly contradictory evidence is the interesting question. Notice also that the anti-vaccine movement is beginning to have real costs with diseases thought to be eradicated suddenly reappearing.
The woman in the story found a lot of anti-vaxing social support online and initially decided against vaccinating her child. The NPR story talked about "social trust" where people believe other people with whom they develop relationships. The people speaking to the issues in this case were mostly other mothers who shared experiences to which this woman could relate, so she found those people credible.
The report also talked about "confirmation bias" where we accept material that supports our beliefs and reject things that don't. The human tendency to do this is strong, and it is the reason that first impressions are often the only impressions that matter, and why it's good to go first in a debate.
It is important to note that confirmation bias is not rational or conscious; our heads do it automatically, and it is overcome only with difficulty. Since the first input this woman received was against vaccinating, she had that as the belief she had to work against.
Both social trust and confirmation bias are facilitated these days by social media that allow us to receive opinions on a range of topics with little fact-checking, and to form communities with large groups of people we will never meet face to face. This is a new feature of life that may help account for the apparent explosion of questionable beliefs--or maybe the public outlets only allow us be aware of odd thinking that was always there. Thankfully, the woman in the NPR story did objective research on her own and finally got her kid vaccinated.
The NPR report is the best thing I have heard recently on our apparent assumption that we are entitled to believe any silly stuff we want to believe.
The 50-year anniversary of the moon landing reminds us that many people still believe it was a hoax. I heard recently, third-hand, of a college-educated woman who apparently believes Michelle Obama is a man and, of course, Barack is gay. That was a new one for me, and I wonder if that is a widely held belief among the Obama-haters.
When people chanted "lock her up" at Trump rallies with reference to Hillary Clinton, I tried to imagine how people could think that possibly the straightest arrow in America's political quiver was a crook. I also heard recently that Hillary had 53 people murdered in Arkansas before she left. And, of course, she was running a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant while campaigning for president.
Where does this stuff come from, and why would anybody believe it? In Hillary's case, I suspect having The New York Times smear you since 1992 helps, but there is obvious social support for this nonsense. I wonder how many other strange ideas are out there that I have yet to hear.
This is a difficult topic since I assume I am personally subject to the same biases and blind spots as those I am writing about. Being of a self-examining frame of mind, I try to question my own beliefs, looking for the irrational and foolish. I'm having a hard time with this since so far all of my own opinions appear to be fact-based and rational (and my computer lacks a snark font).
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Roger A. Webb of Little Rock is a retired UALR professor of psychology.
Editorial on 08/15/2019