Values key to vaccinations
Morals can stop many parents
When it comes to persuading parents in the United States who are hesitant about vaccinating their children, the public health messages often rely on facts and science to explain how immunization not only protects those children but also shields other vulnerable people from dangerous infectious diseases.
But information campaigns that emphasize fairness or preventing harm sometimes backfire and can worsen vaccine hesitancy, research has shown. A study published Monday in Nature Human Behaviour suggests a more effective way to reach vaccine-hesitant parents may be to focus on two potentially powerful moral values that underlie people’s attitudes and judgments: individual liberty and purity.
Compared with parents who approve of vaccines, parents who are most reluctant to vaccinate are strongly concerned with liberty and purity, the researchers found. In this framework, liberty is associated with belief in personal responsibility, freedom, property rights and resistance to state involvement in citizens’ lives. Concerns about purity center on boundaries and protection from contamination.
Although the vast majority of parents across the country vaccinate their children and follow recommended schedules for this basic preventive medicine practice, vaccine skepticism and outright refusal in recent years have led to places where there are communities of under-vaccinated children who are more susceptible to disease and pose health risks to the broader public.
The new study used a social psychology theory known as Moral Foundations Theory to assess the underlying moral values most strongly associated with vaccine-hesitant parents. Their findings correspond with the reasons many vaccine-hesitant parents give for delaying or refusing some vaccines, and with many of the claims on anti-vaccination websites.
Avnika Amin, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Emory University, and Emory colleagues conducted online surveys of 1,100 U.S. parents of children under 13. They assessed the parents’ level of vaccination hesitancy and explored how important different moral values were to them when deciding if something was right or wrong.
They found that other factors, such as age, sex, level of education or political views didn’t seem to affect the relationship between concern about vaccinations and their concerns for liberty and purity, she said.
Another group of researchers at Loyola University in Chicago, working independently from Amin’s group, validated the main findings of the Emory group in another study.
Other recent research suggests that religiosity, as well as concerns about moral purity, consistently predicted vaccine skepticism. In a study published Friday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers at the University of Amsterdam and University of Kent explored the ideological roots of science skepticism about climate change, vaccination and genetic modification in food.
Based on online surveys of people in the United States, the researchers found that a person’s strong religious beliefs were the best predictor of vaccine skepticism, and religious conservatives had low support for science overall. Religiosity, they said, was the best predictor.