By Andrew Thurston
“Misinformation is more impactful than the correction” says Michelle A. Amazeen, an associate professor of mass communication.
For the past year, Amazeen and Arunima Krishna, an assistant professor of public relations, have explored the spread of vaccine misinformation and the efficacy of different efforts to halt it. Although their study started before COVID-19 tore across the United States—and their research has focused on vaccines in general—Amazeen says the coronavirus pandemic has “magnified how important the work is that we’re doing.”
“Misinformation is more impactful than the correction.”
—Michelle A. Amazeen
As part of their research, they created a fictitious Facebook post telling the emotional story of a boy who supposedly developed autism after receiving the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Amazeen and Krishna showed the post to around 1,000 participants, then tested three approaches to countering its false message: the story of an uneventful vaccine success (a kid got the vaccine, but nothing bad happened), a conversion event narrative (a reformed anti-vaxxer lauding the positive impact of a vaccine) and a factual chart listing the true numbers of adverse events. All were displayed as comments to the original post.