In January 2016,
Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page a photo of
himself holding his baby daughter with the caption “Doctor’s visit – time for vaccines!” Zuckerberg's post ignited a lively
discussion. Pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination people took the opportunity to
make comments and to turn on each other. Zuckerberg's
post soon became an open online forum discussing vaccines. Overall, approximately 1,400
comments were posted. These comments - triggered by the same stimulus and
hosted in the same Facebook page - represented a unique "natural"
experiment about rhetoric and sentiments involved in the vaccination debate.
A team of scholars from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia and La Sierra University in Riverside, California, analyzed the language of both parties by using a text analysis program, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Through the LIWC, researchers categorized words and sentences per some psychological variables. The study - A comparison of language use in pro- and anti-vaccination comments in response to a high profile Facebook post - was published in the October issue of Vaccine and its findings are quite interesting.
Its main conclusion concerns the degree of anxiety and emotional involvement showed by pro-vaccination comments. Rather counter-intuitively, people who supported vaccination were more prone to post emotional messages, poor in logic and scientific contents. In comparison, anti-vaccination messages were more rational, more logically structured, richer in scientific contents. One of the authors noted “skeptical comments (…) focus on health, biology, and research, they may be particularly compelling for parents who are uncertain about what decision to make about childhood vaccination and are seeking more information (…) This concerns us because the scientific evidence is very clear in demonstrating the safety and benefits of vaccines". Here, it is the paradox, pro-vaccination people defend their (scientifically grounded) point of view by using emotional and non-scientific arguments, while anti-vaccination individuals defend their (anti-scientific) position by using well structured, logic, and apparently, evidence-based, discourses.
Researchers commented that vaccination supporters are inadequate to defend their reasons because they tend to become overzealous and are not capable enough to master scientific arguments. I partly disagree with this conclusion. To be sure, as the debate between pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination groups becomes over polarized, it is understandable that emotional arguments become prevalent in pro-vaccination people, but this does not explain the opposite process among anti-vaccination individuals, who seem to become more rational and less emotionally involved.
If there is something that this debate clearly demonstrates, it is that both parties tend to play the game of the other side. Anti-vaccination people pretend being rational and scientific; while pro-vaccination persons "discover" sentiments and try to evoke fear in their audience. I don't think that this happens only for trivial or casual reasons. I suspect instead that such a "mimetic fight" provides important clues on how scientific and health communication could work also in other circumstances. Brief, the discovery of this bizarre mirror game is likely to be more significant than researchers suspected and it would deserve to be studied more in depth.
