Don't Vax Me Bro

Vaccine resistance comes from childhood legacy of mistrust

Apr 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-04-vaccine-resistance-childhood-legacy-mistrust.html

Have Mercy

The researchers turned to their database, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which has been tracking all of the nearly 1,000 people born in 1972 and 1973 in a single town in New Zealand, and ran a special survey of their participants in the middle of 2021 to gage vaccination intentions shortly before the vaccines became available in New Zealand. 

The Dunedin data showed that 40 years ago in childhood, many of the participants who said they were now vaccine-resistant or hesitant had adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, neglect, threats, and deprivations.

via Duke University:  Terrie E Moffitt et al, Deep-seated psychological histories of COVID-19 vaccine hesitance and resistance, PNAS Nexus (2022). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac034

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac034

Vaccination campaign messages often prove ineffective

May 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-04-vaccination-campaign-messages-ineffective.html

• A study in eight European countries shows that information on the benefits of vaccines can even reduce the willingness to get immunized. 
• Messages effective only in Germany (vs Bulgaria, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK).
• In Spain and Italy, it had the opposite effect.
• These were the variables they studied:
• citizens' trust in their government
• literacy with regard to healthcare issues
• share of the population who believe in certain conspiracy theories
• Health literacy was the main determinant
• Older people tended to be less receptive on the whole to all of the messages

via Technical University Munich, University of Trento, London School of Economics and Political Science: Janina I. Steinert et al, COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in eight European countries: Prevalence, determinants, and heterogeneity, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm9825

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abm9825

Also: Silvia Angerer et al, How Does the Vaccine Approval Procedure Affect COVID-19 Vaccination Intentions? SSRN Electronic Journal (2022). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4073498

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4073498

Public Service Announcement:

Researchers' tools show who is most easily duped by 'financial bullshit'

May 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-tools-easily-duped-financial-bullshit.html

• Answer - young men with relatively high incomes who overestimate their financial expertise
• Also - people who are less analytical and have lower verbal intelligence
• "Pseudo-profound Bullshit" - vaguely related words that sound insightful and impressive, but which don't actually mean anything; it's not untrue but misleading
• Bonus - Individuals who are good at producing bullshit are perceived to be—and actually are—more intelligent than others
• Bonus Bonus, Who is Least Susceptible - older women with lower incomes who don't overestimate their financial expertise

via Linköping University: Mario Kienzler et al, Individual differences in susceptibility to financial bullshit, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2022.100655

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2022.100655

Securing the Noosphere

Russian Facebook ads featured anti-immigrant messages, puppies, women with rifles
Oct 2017, Ars Technica

The study of memetics as the spreading of information, and articles about the science of psychological influence of narratives as studied by DARPA, are just some of the posts that have come up here on Network Address. (See the Post Script below.)

Many years prior two us seeing something like this happen (Russian Facebook election interference), something which is very easily understood by a lot of people, and the threat of which is also very easily understood by a lot of people. Totally not into scaremongering, but definitely into the study of memetics and how it works. As we can see now, it is a very important topic.

It should be noted here that the contagion theory of memetics propogation has been deflated as of late. It's just too simple. There's lots of work being done on what makes a thing viral, and it gets less and less to do with infectious disease theory. Something about affect and timing and network distribution.

Regardless, the infectious disease model was never the one used for memetics. By its very name in fact, memes were thought to behave as genes (and were thus named by Richard Dawkins in his 1982 book, The Extended Phenotype). The 90's saw some other folks pick up the idea and write some books, but by the eearly 2000's it was dead. Leading up to 2010, it became a sort-of underground thing, thanks to the ease of creation and transmission of the macro image series (this is, perhaps, the formal name for this instantiation of a meme). The meme - the new meme, not so much as Dawkins described it, but as a macro image series specifically - seems to have thoroughly saturated mainstream culture, as evidences by the fact that your mom probably makes them and shares them with her friends. Or in other words, memes are mainstream because Russian digital soldiers are making them and sharing them with scared, synapse-deficient Americans.

Anyway, hopefully the meme is getting its due recogntion, and hopefully it can be seen not just as a funny picture, but the unit of cultural transmission that it was intended to represent.

image source


Post Script
Recombinant Memetics and Narrative Networks
Network Address, 2013
No surprise, DARPA's been doing research on narratives for quite some time now; how else to explain the process of inculturation perpetrated on susceptible patriots by terrorists?

The Inward Turn of the Narrative
Network Address, 2012
1970's book by German scholar Erich Kahler, whose view of the modern world is “the steady evolution of consciousness in the direction of the demythification and secularization of wider and wider areas of human life”. Good read on cultural complexification

The Meme Wars Instruction Manual May Be Written By Robots
Network Address, 2013

Thought Contagion
Network Address, 2012
Summary of a book about how belief spreads through society (the new science of memes)
Aaron Lynch, 1996

And this one is just for fun, and for the art history folk out there:
The Macro Image Series and the Dematerialization of Artifact
Network Address, 2013