Principle 2: Anticipate cognitive shortcuts

🧠 The Challenge: We prefer to fail by not doing anything rather than by doing something. Omission bias, when people prefer inaction over action, may impact some vaccine-related decisions. (1)

💡 The Solution: Make the consequences of not vaccinating tangible, salient and unsettling. Remind people there is a real risk to not vaccinating, as vaccine-preventable diseases are still out there.

🧠 The Challenge: We tend to see what we believe rather than believing what we see. The heuristic confirmation bias describes a shortcut in which people favor information that confirms their beliefs while rejecting facts that contradict them. 

💡 The Solution: Frame vaccine communications within the general worldview of the target audience to reduce the initial dissonance that can trigger confirmation bias.

Watch this video to learn more about this effect.

Source:

(1) Brown KF, Kroll JS, Hudson MJ, Ramsay M, Green J, Vincent CA, Fraser G, Sevdalis N. Omission bias and vaccine rejection by parents of healthy children: implications for the influenza A/H1N1 vaccination programme. Vaccine. 2010 Jun 7;28(25):4181-5.