Understanding the Other Side Makes It Possible to Change Minds

UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER SIDE MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO CHANGE MINDS

Adam Mongrain is a journalist who once felt nothing but contempt for vaccine skeptics. “It wasn’t that I knew they were wrong about vaccines,” he said. “It was more than that. I believed myself intellectually and morally superior to those people . . . I mastered a face, a kind of appalled, disapproving look for any time anybody even broached the subject of vaccine skepticism.”

Mongrain’s attitude began shifting after he became friends with, and later married, a single mother who was staunchly opposed to vaccinating her child. He couldn’t dismiss her as an idiot. Before the subject of vaccines ever came up, he had already gotten to know her and respect her as an intelligent and caring person. Instead, Mongrain started trying to wrap his mind around how an intelligent and caring person could be a vaccine skeptic. As their relationship progressed, he realized several things.

First, it’s not crazy for someone to be skeptical of the expert consensus on vaccines. There are tragic precedents for caution—lead paint, tobacco, and bloodletting are all things the public was once assured were safe. So when experts say confidently, “Trust us, vaccines are completely safe,” can you really blame anyone for being skeptical? Mongrain’s wife had personal reasons to mistrust doctors as well. When she was a teenager, she had suffered a bad drug trip, and worried about lingering side effects of the drugs on her brain. When she went to see a doctor, she left frustrated at the way he dismissed her concerns without listening to her.

Once you’re already primed to be suspicious of vaccines and mainstream medicine, it’s easy to find evidence confirming those suspicions. There’s a huge alternative medicine industry churning out articles about children becoming autistic after getting their shots. In fact, Mongrain’s sister-in-law was part of that industry. She was a self-described “naturopath” who had studied vaccines extensively and believed they were toxic. When Mongrain’s wife felt torn about vaccination, she would talk to her sister, and come away with her vaccine skepticism renewed.

None of this behavior is unique to vaccine skeptics, Mongrain realized. Reading sources that confirm your beliefs, trusting people whom you’re close to—everyone does that. It’s just an unfortunate fact that this universal tendency sometimes yields harmful results.

Once he felt like he could understand the antivaccine position, Mongrain looked for opportunities to broach the subject with his wife without being a condescending jerk. He found one in the summer of 2015. That’s when he learned that a vaccine called Pandemrix had been found to trigger narcolepsy in children—a fact that the medical community and the mainstream media had been slow to acknowledge out of a fear of giving ammunition to the antivaxxers.

The medical ship didn’t take too long to right itself, fortunately, but Mongrain felt that the story was still a legitimate concession he could make to his wife’s concerns. “A story like Pandemrix allowed me to engage her in good faith, to admit that sometimes medicine makes bad calls and that the media can be complicit,” he said. “I brought it up to my wife to show that I care about her worries, that I don’t think they are beyond the pale.”

Acknowledging the weaknesses in your “side” can go a long way toward showing someone from the other side that you’re not just a zealot parroting dogma, and that you might be worth listening to. After several such low-stakes, nonconfrontational, good-faith conversations with Mongrain about vaccines, his wife decided of her own accord to sign her daughter up for vaccinations later that year.