There is pervasive cultural consensus on the value of childhood vaccines in the U.S.; so why do people *think* that being anti-vaccine reflects any particular cultural predisposition? - Cultural Cognition of Health

A reporter who was covering the current measles outbreak asked me a question about the connection between vaccine hesitancy—the reluctance of parents to get their kids vaccinated—and the contribution cultural or political predispositions make to vaccine risk perceptions.

In the background of the question were a couple of facts that this reporter gets but that a lot other reporters and people generally don’t: first, that parents in the US along with rest of the general public in this country are overwhelmingly pro-vaccine; and second, that the people who belong to the small segment of the population that is anti-vaccine are big time outliers in all the social groups—cultural, political, religious and so forth—that make up our basic inventory of “who” people are.

On the first point, briefly: Despite the media din to the contrary, the US has enjoyed impressively high childhood  vaccine rates—over 90%, the public health target, for all the recommended universal vaccinations, including MMR—for going on 15 yrs.  The percentage of parents not getting their kids vaccinated has remained below 1% that entire time.

Fortunately, the Wakefield affair, which did have a significant impact on vaccine behavior in the UK (maybe other countries, too, but the truth is, many European countries have lower vaccine rates than they should have had for a long time), didn’t have a comparable effect in the US.

On the second: As documented in various places including the CCP  Vaccine Risk Perceptions and Ad Hoc Risk Communication study, there is no meaningful correlation between vaccine risk perceptions and the sorts of characteristics that usually indicate membership in one or another cultural group.

The correlation between such risk perceptions and political outlooks, e.g., is close to nil.

Likewise, contrary to the empirically uninformed, illiberal, counterproductive “anti-science trope, ” the cultural groups whose members are divided on climate change and evolution are in fact in overwhelming agreement that vaccine benefits outweigh their risks.

Still, the reporter wanted to know, given all this, how come it appears to him and others that there is a correlation between anti-vaccine, or concerned about vaccine risks, and a cultural style that is, I guess, left-leaning in politics, anti-industry or –capitalist, highly “naturalist” etc.

What’s more, I don’t have an answer that I’m particularly confident in!

I do have some conjectures, and so I thought I’d share them here & ask others what they thought.

Also, at about the time I was writing this email, Chris Mooney was addressing this same question in thoughtful essay that I encourage others to read—I think my views are pretty close to his!

I’m really not sure what to say, but my hunch is that there is a huge sampling bias risk here when we try to draw on own experience to figure out vaccine risk perceptions.

It’s clearly the case — just no arguing w/ it, really! — that the vast majority of people in US, including parents, are not hostile to but in fact very favorable disposed to childhood vaccinations.  This is true across all the sorts of cultural groups that normally come to mind when we think of risk issues like climate change etc. where there really are very deep & strong cultural divisions.

Yet some people are clearly anti-vaccine. If we see them, what are we to make of them?

It’s hardly a surprise that they will have integrated their views into their cultural understandings generally.  That is, there will be coherence, for them , in their positions on vaccines and their ones on various other issues.

So if they happen, say, to be the kind of person who has an egalitarian, collectivist style & is anxious about environmental issues & suspicious of corporations and the like, then their positions on vaccines will likely be of a piece with that.

But then if we were to say to ourselves, — “a ha! Being anti-vaccine coheres with being that sort of person!,” we’d be making a mistake.  At a minimum, we’d be making a mistake b/c we’d be neglecting to consider all the people who share that person’s cultural style — and indeed hold the standard collection of risk perceptions that go along with it — but who don’t have anxieties about vaccines! Those people would outnumber the anti-vaccine mom or moms we are talking about — by orders of magnitude.

We’d also be at risk of making another mistake.

That particular anti-vaccine group of moms you ran into — they might not even be representative of all the other anti-vaccine folks.  Indeed, if you met them at whole foods (I have no idea if this applies to you, but you’ll get the idea), then likely your sense of what the anti-vaccine people are like is undercounting all the anti-vaccine people who don’t shop there.  They don’t shop there b/c doing so would be contrary to their cultural style.  They might be very conservative — maybe they are religious fundamentalists of one sort or another.  Those might be people you never happen to run into!  As a result, the people who are like that who are anti-vaccine will be missing from your mental census.

Of course, so will all the people “like that” who are not anti-vaccine.  They will, just as in the case of the moms at whole foods, outnumber the anti-vaccine members of their groups by orders of magnitude.  But possibly b/c they are more likely to encounter anti-vaccine types in the community in which they interact w/ people most of the time, they might also have a misimpression that anti-vaccine people actually are more likely to hold values like theirs!