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The science of compliance
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TRANSCRIPT
An entire new sphere of research is developing strategies to persuade vaccine-hesitant individuals to get the jab — you could call it "the science of compliance."
Church Militant's Martina Moyski explains this developing field devoted to swaying people's private medical decisions.
Last month, researchers at Yale published a study focused on how to manufacture universal consent for taking the so-called vaccine. The researchers studied how best to push the message that widespread vaccination remains the best option for controlling the spread of COVID-19 and ending the pandemic.
Saad Omer, Yale researcher and WHO official: "The end game of this pandemic is a safe and efficacious vaccine that a high number of people take."
They measured which appeals — like self-interest, community interest, guilt or embarrassment — would result in "intended vaccine uptake" and found the most successful messages were those that viewed "vaccination as a collective-action problem."
Omer: "Speaking to people's values has the potential of moving people in terms of their taking an action."
For more than a year, Britain's government has been using the results of such studies in ad campaigns, stoking fear to induce COVID compliance.
British COVID video: "If we don't do what we need to do, it's going to be here for a long time. For those people who think this is not a serious illness, they need to take a good look: This is as scary as it gets."
British citizens objecting to their government's tactics have launched a counter-advertising campaign called "Recovery." It displays anti-fear posters in central London and on a van that circles the BBC studios.
On either side of the Atlantic, it appears the message is not how best to control the virus but how to control the people.
In the Yale researchers' attempt to discover how to persuade people to take the jab, they also found that people could "embarrass their friends into taking the jab" if they also appealed to their sense of community.
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