Believe it or Not, Anti Vaxxers Aren't Actually Stupid

April 7, 2020

It’s important to remember that anti vaxxers are not stupid. They are responding to social rewards, cues from family and friends, tribal instincts that are rooted in a far more powerful part of the brain, that has been far more important to our survival as a species than logic. Logic and reason are relatively new developments in the evolution of the brain. Anti vaxxers are rewarded by their ingroup (friends and family) for being ‘alternative’ and thinking outside the box. Our brains are far more primed to respond to these kinds of rewards than logic. They are short circuiting their prefrontal cortex (logic) in favor of a far more primal, emotional instinct (probably based in the amygdala). So if you call them stupid they are going to react viscerally, like you are a threat to their tribe. They are not going to respond with reason. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Think of the anti vaxxers you know They are probably people for whom family and friends are very important, people who operate on instinct, emotion and intuition. They are likely to consider themselves ‘alternative’ and believe in some form of magic (new age spirituality, religion, etc). Amirite?

This played out swimmingly in my recent vaxxer post. The anti vaxxers responded to my ‘tone’ not my reasoning and even unfriended or blocked me (kicked me out of the tribe) because those are the things that are important to them; emotional tone, family and tribal affiliation.

So how do you get through to an anti vaxxer? Especially nowadays when the importance of science, reason and working together for the good of everyone is so apparent? I don’t know, but I do know that logic, reason and insults don’t work. Maybe if we can bring them around through thinking about the good of all humanity, the fitness of the much larger tribe, through some kind of larger appeal to emotion and connectedness? I don’t know what the answer is but it’s become very apparent that we need to figure this one out stat