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Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community has been understandably eager to combat misinformation about issues such as vaccine safety. In highly polarized information environments, however, even well-intentioned messages have the potential to produce adverse effects. In this study, we conn...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9858741/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36682880 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.12.045 |
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author | Krause, Nicole M. Beets, Becca Howell, Emily L. Tosteson, Helen Scheufele, Dietram A. |
author_facet | Krause, Nicole M. Beets, Becca Howell, Emily L. Tosteson, Helen Scheufele, Dietram A. |
author_sort | Krause, Nicole M. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community has been understandably eager to combat misinformation about issues such as vaccine safety. In highly polarized information environments, however, even well-intentioned messages have the potential to produce adverse effects. In this study, we connect different disciplinary strands of social science to derive and experimentally test the novel hypothesis that although particular efforts to debunk misinformation about mRNA vaccines will reduce relevant misperceptions about that technology, these correctives will harm attitudes toward other types of vaccines. We refer to this as the “collateral damage hypothesis." Our study specifically examines a corrective message stating that “mRNA vaccines do not contain live virus,” and our results offer some support for our hypothesis, with the corrective triggering increased societal risk perceptions of live vaccines. We also find that the effect is, predictably, most evident among those whose vaccine acceptance is low. Building on the theoretical grounding we outline, we test a “damage control” adjustment to the corrective message and present evidence supporting that it mitigates the collateral damage. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9858741 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-98587412023-01-23 Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation Krause, Nicole M. Beets, Becca Howell, Emily L. Tosteson, Helen Scheufele, Dietram A. Vaccine Article Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community has been understandably eager to combat misinformation about issues such as vaccine safety. In highly polarized information environments, however, even well-intentioned messages have the potential to produce adverse effects. In this study, we connect different disciplinary strands of social science to derive and experimentally test the novel hypothesis that although particular efforts to debunk misinformation about mRNA vaccines will reduce relevant misperceptions about that technology, these correctives will harm attitudes toward other types of vaccines. We refer to this as the “collateral damage hypothesis." Our study specifically examines a corrective message stating that “mRNA vaccines do not contain live virus,” and our results offer some support for our hypothesis, with the corrective triggering increased societal risk perceptions of live vaccines. We also find that the effect is, predictably, most evident among those whose vaccine acceptance is low. Building on the theoretical grounding we outline, we test a “damage control” adjustment to the corrective message and present evidence supporting that it mitigates the collateral damage. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2023-01-23 2023-01-20 /pmc/articles/PMC9858741/ /pubmed/36682880 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.12.045 Text en © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Krause, Nicole M. Beets, Becca Howell, Emily L. Tosteson, Helen Scheufele, Dietram A. Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation |
title | Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation |
title_full | Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation |
title_fullStr | Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation |
title_full_unstemmed | Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation |
title_short | Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation |
title_sort | collateral damage from debunking mrna vaccine misinformation |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9858741/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36682880 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.12.045 |
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