 At the beginning of the lecture on correcting misinformation, I mentioned the problem that the Centers for Disease Control has, communicating to parents that they need to get their children vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella, and that the rumor of a connection between that shot and autism is completely bogus, is based on nothing. Now, the CDC could communicate that information, but they ran into a problem when they did. That problem was studied by psychologists and political scientists, Brendan Nyan and Jason Reifler. And they found that using four different means of communicating that information, some of those means of communicating information really had no effect, and some of them actually backfired. That led them to coin the phrase, the backfire effect. When you present someone with counter information, or you make them question beliefs about something that they have a very strong emotional attachment to, that can actually cause them to double down on the original assumption, or at least make them hostile toward the new information, cause them to go into disconfirmation bias. And so to go back to the original case study about the MMR vaccine and the misrepresentation that it had something to do with autism, the only thing approaching a scientific study that proved such a connection was a study of 13 different children by the researcher, Andrew Wakefield. The problem with that study was that it was retracted by the journal that published it. So the only peer reviewed evidence that supposedly showed a connection, or even implied a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine was retracted by the journal that published it, because it was later shown that Wakefield changed the data of those 13 children that he studied to make their symptoms fit the timeline that would at least create a correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism. So you'd think that since the only reliable source of information about this connection was debunked, that people would give up making that causal connection. But instead, when it was retracted, that created a backlash among communities of people who had already come to that conclusion on their own. Instead of losing trust in Wakefield, they actually gathered around him as if he was some persecuted martyr, that the conclusion for which there was no evidence was so true that it didn't matter what the evidence was. And so when the Lancet, the medical journal that had originally published that study retracted it, instead of blaming Wakefield for fabricating data, the parents who believed his conclusion actually attacked the journal and the people who had done the research. The most conclusive critical examination of Wakefield's study was begun by the journalist Brian Deer. When interviewed the parents of the children that Wakefield had used as his test subjects and he compared the data they gave him about their children to the data that Wakefield recorded in his report. And he found that every single one of the children had had their information changed by Wakefield in order to fit this correlational sequence of getting the MMR vaccine and then within two weeks showing the first signs of autism. But when he compared what the parents told him to what Wakefield recorded, he found that only one child even seemed to have what Wakefield was describing as regressive autism. In other words, a child that did not already have signs of autism before the MMR vaccine. And even that child didn't start to show signs of autism until long after the MMR vaccine. So to be very precise, Brian Deer interviewed the mother of that child. He wanted to see if the child's onset of symptoms actually matched what Wakefield said it did. And the mother told him that her concerns about the MMR had been noted by her general practitioner when her son was six years old. So there was no documentation of this child's symptoms until more than four years after supposedly the symptoms began. In her memory, she said that the boy's troubles began after his vaccination, which he received at 15 months. Then she describes the symptoms that the boy showed, which are indicative of autism. He started screaming all night, started head banging, things that he'd never done before. And Brian Deer wants to make sure that he has as precise a timeline as possible. So he asked her, when did that begin, do you think? She says that began after a couple of months, a few months, but it was still, it was concerning me enough. I remember going back and there Brian Deer cuts her off and says, sorry, I don't mean to be like massively pernickety, but was it a few months or a couple of months? Obviously this is very important because if the MMR vaccine is the cause, then something that happens several months afterwards is not so likely, not so closely correlated that it could really be an explanation for a causation. And she says it was more like a few months because he had this slide down. He wasn't right, he wasn't right before he started. So again, Brian Deer wants to clarify, not quicker than two months, but not longer than how many months? What are we talking about here? And she says, for memory about six months, I think. So the significance here is, Brian Deer's trying to check data, just check Wakefield's study for accuracy. But after that interview with that mother, the next day the mother complained to Wakefield's editors saying that his method seemed more akin to the gutter press. We don't use the word gutter press so much in the US, but things like gotcha journalism or even just fake news when someone wants to dismiss something that's in the news that they don't like. But clearly what Deer was doing was the exact opposite. He was trying to be as precise as possible, trying to record the facts as precisely as he could. His goal was accuracy, but the mother's goal was not. The mother's goal was something different. She wanted to tell a narrative. And the difference is that the narrative simplifies the complexities of reality. It imposes a cause and effect explanation that might not be justified by a cold, rational look at the facts. And this confusion of correlation with causation is exactly what seems to be at the heart of every anecdote about vaccines and autism. One thing happened and then another thing happened. So the first thing must have caused the second thing. But what Brian Deer was trying to see was whether even this much was true. Were these incidents even correlated closely in time? If these symptoms didn't show up until months after vaccination, that the two events aren't even closely correlated. And because Wakefield wrote that the boy's symptoms showed up after two weeks, not two months, it means that there is an unavoidable disagreement between Wakefield and the mother. But the mother disregards all of this and focuses her emotional reaction at Brian Deer. By calling him gutter press, she's demonstrating the hostile media effect rather than noticing that it was Wakefield who misrepresented her. She attacks the guy whose only offense was to ask her questions and record her response. That's not gutter press or gotcha journalism. That's what journalists are supposed to do. And the hostile media effect is just one example of disconfirmation bias. When someone confronts us with information that undermines our explanations, even our vaguely held explanations, they undermine our feeling of closure, our ability to explain the complexities of reality with simple stories. And we don't like that. We wanna disconfirm that. When we want to select evidence that backs up our foregone conclusions, that's confirmation bias. When we wanna look for just the evidence that disconfirms this new information, then that's called disconfirmation bias. And one of the tactics of disconfirmation bias is the hostile media effect. Rather than dealing with the truth of what the person is saying, or in this case, just what they're asking, you just attack the person. The hostile media effect can invoke an ad hominem fallacy. It's no doubt bolstered by identity protective cognition. And when those beliefs from which we draw our identity are challenged, we respond, even at the neural level, the same way as we would respond to a threat against our physical health. A bear attacks us in the woods. That same sort of fight or flight response. So we can understand some of the hostility toward Brian Deere is based not on his research. It's not arguments focused on his data. It's just an emotional reaction that treats him as a threat because it's actually a false belief that people are protecting. And in the prior case study, we read a Virginia McCarthy's blog post titled, In the Vaccine Autism Debate, What Can Parents Believe? And in this blog post, McCarthy gives her core argument when she says that I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. One thing happened first, then the other thing happened, therefore the first thing must have caused the second thing. Even if it happened in that sequence, that's still correlation. It doesn't prove causation. But most of the rest of that blog post has nothing to do with making an argument to show evidence much less to refute Brian Deere's evidence. And we know that this op-ed that she wrote in the Huffington Post was written just four days after Deere's extensive report about Wakefield was published in the British Medical Journal. So that is clearly a reply of a sort. But as I showed in the last video on this case study, she clearly hadn't even read Deere's report. She doesn't counter any of the argument that he presents. She doesn't dispute any of the specific information he lays out. And she even raises questions that he clearly already answered. She has no facts on her side that refutes Deere's data and she has no logical counter argument. But all of this presumes that she is interested in figuring out the truth. And it's pretty clear that she's not the least been interested with learning anything new. Her goal isn't to learn anything. It isn't even to change anyone's mind. At least not anyone who's read Deere's article. Her goal is to communicate with people who already believe what she believes. And her strategy is to pretend that there is a debate, even though there is no debate among people with a professional level of medical or other scientific expertise. And we can see that because she continues to use the correlation argument as if it wasn't an obvious fallacy. So instead of a debate between medical experts, she makes it a debate with medical experts on one side and anti-vaccination parents on the other. That's why she keeps referring to quote actual parents as if medical experts were pretending to be parents. And it should be immediately obvious to any reader that a parent without medical training would not be able to precisely diagnose the onset of the symptoms of autism. Autism isn't like coming down with a cold of breaking your arm. You can't say here's the moment at which it happens. Here's the day at which the first symptom showed up. And the symptoms could mean a lot of different things. You have the same symptoms when you get the flu as you do when you get strep throat, even though the flu is caused by a virus and strep throat is caused by bacteria. It's also the same symptoms you get when you have an allergic reaction to pollen in the air. And autism symptoms are extremely ambiguous for the first several years of life. But observing those symptoms does make a parent perfectly capable of generating a causal narrative and then anchoring to that narrative. And narratives give us that feeling of closure, especially when we can blame ambiguous phenomenon like this on a bad guy. So instead of weighing evidence, McCarthy generates a narrative about heroes and villains. The medical experts are in league with the drug companies to give children autism so they can make more money. And Wakefield is the saintly truth teller who's being persecuted for his selflessness. Deer's report proved that Wakefield committed fraud in order to receive a payment from a lawyer suing the makers of the MMR vaccine. If the debate was between the entire community of medical experts and proven fraud who was taking bribes, it would be pretty obvious who to trust and who not to trust. But McCarthy has reframed this debate as one between parents and the medical quote establishment. And that word establishment lumps the experts together with the profiteers of the drug companies into one imagined conspiracy. This instantly evokes a good versus evil narrative so that even though all the science is on one side, accepting that evidence is framed as an attack on the victims, the mothers of children with autism. And of course, McCarthy is framing herself as the champion of these victimized parents. Her whole public identity is tied to that role. If Wakefield is a fraud, that would implicate her in the fraud so she can't let the evidence speak for itself. Instead of dealing with Deer's evidence at all, she adopts a new war chant argument. We talked about this in the introduction to the Rosierian argument. This is a first person argument where you're not trying to learn anything or weigh evidence or come to any new discovery and you're not even trying to communicate with the person you're addressing, the person whom you're debating. All you're doing is showing your team that I'm the good guy, I believe our truth and I'm going to fight. Look how brave I am in this fight. But that first person argument isn't even attempting to change someone's mind. It's just an emotionalistic way to rally us and try to intimidate them. So McCarthy enters the debate in this article as well as on television appearances and other op-eds. Not because she has any chance of changing the minds of people who know about Wakefield's fraud, but so that she can rally the community of people who already believe in this conspiracy. She increases her prestige in her own group even as she's making a fool of herself in front of everyone else. Now this is not to say that she doesn't believe what she's saying. Believing is easy when you're emotionally invested in a foregone conclusion. Hating the facts and the fact finders is equally natural. But the argument she makes has no chance because she never even bothers to understand the argument that she's trying to attack. She credits Wakefield with reporting what parents told him even though he didn't do that. He changed what they told him and reported different data. So when McCarthy says that she's even more determined to fight for the truth, she's presuming she already has the truth. So no counter information needs to even be looked at. And this is disconfirmation bias taken to an extreme. In reply to McCarthy's op-ed, the science writer, Jonah Laird, published an article called cognitive dissonance. He says the demonstration of the Wakefield fraud has made McCarthy even more convinced that vaccines cause autism. And he attributes this to the cognitive phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. This term cognitive dissonance goes back to the 1950s when the psychologist Leon Festinger wrote a book about a UFO cult that was organized by a woman who believed that the apocalypse was coming, that anyone who followed her would be saved from this apocalypse by these UFOs that would land and take them to another planet. And after the predicted date of this apocalypse, when obviously nothing happened, there was no apocalypse that happened, no spaceship showed up, Festinger wanted to see how people would explain the thing that they had once believed. And what he found was they didn't stop believing it. They thought that her explanation that the reason the apocalypse never happened was because they believed in it. It might seem like an obvious after the fact attempt to deceive someone, but people that had believed the apocalypse was coming after it didn't show up were firmly convinced that they had never been wrong, that something was going to happen, but then didn't. And so you can't disprove that the apocalypse was coming, but was canceled. That would be the null hypothesis. You can't disprove any of it. All you can do is say there was no evidence to believe it was ever likely in the first place. The thing, according to Lehrer, that connects Ginny McCarthy and the anti-vaccination movement with this UFO apocalypse cult is the fact that their predictions had been falsified, but the group, instead of giving up those predictions, had become even more confident, more convinced. They reacted to this feeling of dissonance, the dissonance of being wrong, by becoming even more certain that they were right. Now as an explanation of what's going on, aimed at an audience of people who already understand that there's no connection between the MMR and autism, this makes perfect sense. But just imagine how McCarthy herself or one of these parents would respond not to the substance of Lehrer's argument, but just to the comparison. You're comparing a group of concerned parents to a UFO apocalypse cult from 60, 70 years ago. It might be a logical comparison, but emotionally it's a very aggravating comparison. It's likely to evoke a hostile reaction. And as we've seen McCarthy and many of these parents are already on a war footing. They're not interested in listening to logic. All they're concerned about is who's in our group and who's them. And if you're not in our group, you're attacking it, you're persecuting us. And that leads us to this article by Susan Dominus, which was written just a few months after the exchange between Brian Deere, Jeanne McCarthy and Jonah Lehrer. New York Times author Susan Dominus comes here to Texas to see Wakefield as he presents his case to a group of parents in the city of Tombow, which is near Houston. It's a group of about 250 people and they're chanting things like, we stand by you. Thank you for the many sacrifices you have made for the cause. To be clear, this is after multiple publications of Brian Deere's research, showing that Wakefield had produced a fraudulent study. Deere's initial investigation published in the British Sunday Times was then confirmed by the General Medical Council in Great Britain. It was then investigated again by the British Medical Journal on its own and then the British Medical Journal asked Brian Deere to publish a summary of his results. All of that had happened four months before this meeting and yet instead of looking at this analysis, these parents were coming to war. They were coming to this pep rally to praise their savior. So clearly something is going on here other than a rational analysis of evidence. And we can see this in the way that Dominus describes Wakefield's interaction with his audience. He does things like assuming a certain amount of scientific fluency on their parts. So he doesn't talk down to them by using words like a taxic in histopathological review and vaccine excipients. He's presuming that these parents know a lot and this might have two effects. It might make them feel like he thinks they're intelligent but it also allows him to make claims that they would not be able to dispute if they didn't know what those words specifically meant. And he also says things like, what happens to me doesn't matter. What happens to these children does matter. This again presumes that everything he said was right that the MMR vaccine causes autism because if it doesn't, he's actually putting these children in greater danger than they would be otherwise. He's exposing them to the measles, the mumps and rubella diseases which can cause death but can also cause brain damage far worse than an autism. But it clearly works. One of the parents says to our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one. Now keep in mind, the only thing that happened here is Wakefield lost his medical license and had his paper retracted. He wasn't imprisoned for decades and he certainly wasn't crucified. But that's literally the emotional valence that his persona has for these parents. Another reason for this might be, as Dominus says, he is a rare voice of certainty in the face of a disease that is at its core mysterious. Remember that when people feel a loss of control or they're reminded of a time, they couldn't solve a problem. They're much more likely to see patterns that aren't there than they are when they feel confident and when they feel in control. And of course, a false causal pattern looking for something that caused a really ambiguous and mysterious phenomenon is much more likely when you're feeling anxiety. So if Wakefield offers these parents a sense of closure, a sense of, well at least I know what caused this, then they're much more likely to believe the pattern he's offering them as an explanation. But that leaves the parents with another difficulty to deal with which is what about this evidence that Wakefield gave them fraudulent information? What about this evidence that disproves that explanation that they want so desperately to give them that feeling of closure and potentially of control? Well first, they have to find a way to get rid of it. Their disconfirmation bias kicks in and the easiest way to disconfirm information you don't like is again with the hostile media effect. In this case, attack the person who found the information and publicized the information. And so that is primarily targeted at Brian Deere. But of course, the problem isn't just Brian Deere, it's also the fact that because Wakefield has told parents this false causal explanation that vaccines are to blame for autism and because parents have stopped vaccinating their children because of it, we have increasing numbers of measles, mumps and rubella and even other diseases that are preventable through vaccines like the flu have increased. So rather than accept the blame for that, Wakefield is invested in protecting his own identity from any kind of scrutiny. The easiest way to do that is with global conspiracy theory, a witch hunt in which all medical researchers and journalists who present counter evidence are part of this vast global conspiracy. And in that frame, counter evidence can be recharacterized as evidence of an attack, not as evidence of wrongdoing. And any lack of evidence for his own claim that there's a causal connection between the NMR vaccine and autism, that too can be contributed to this conspiracy. Well, they've been hiding the evidence. This is an individual level backfire effect. The more evidence is presented of his fraud, the more pseudo evidence he has of a global conspiracy against him. He even dismisses deaths from the measles as part of the conspiracy. A false flag event generated to justify global domination by Merck pharmaceuticals in the conspiracy narrative. And again, that narrative is intuitive. It makes sense. Nevermind that there's no evidence for it. It feels true. And if you accept the facts as they are, well, you might be part of the conspiracy. But conspiracy theories are tied to social groups. As we've seen in past readings, we don't usually pick our identity groups based on our beliefs. We pick our beliefs based on our identity groups, even when those beliefs are pretty far-fetched. So what is this drawing people to this identity group where they're more likely to take on this conspiracy theory? Dominus suspects that he's adored by parents because he validated some of their most agonizing concerns when they felt few others would. And as we've seen in the past, that is something that does make us feel connected to a group. We're looking for validation, and so we're looking for people who will validate us, and we wanna reject people who don't validate what we believe. Wakefield's pseudo-evidence empowers parents as medical experts. Michelle Guppy, the woman who organized this event in Tombal, Texas with Wakefield speaking, said, I mean, I remember Dr. Wakefield was there, her voice starting to quaver. And you know, it was just the validation. I don't care if my son was overtreated or cured, just the validation that we as parents who knew something was wrong got an answer. Just the fact that someone listened and tried to do something. Someone said, yeah, this is not just autism. Your son has a real medical issue that we can treat. I think that validation is all that parents want. Just that someone is taking the symptoms we report and looking at them to see what we can do about it. Her emphasis is on the validation and the promise that there's something that they can do about it, even though that promise is not supported by any evidence. When she says, I think that validation is all that parents want, that should seem strange. If my child had autism, I would wanna know the truth. I would wanna know what can we do for the symptoms? What can we do to make his life better? Validation would not be high on the list, at least not on the list that I would be consciously aware of. But that seems to be Wakefield's secret. If he validates the false beliefs of parents, he validates their identity. He validates their sense of themselves as good parents who are trying to do something. He's feeding their need for closure rather than their need for truth. So it might not be quite surprising when Dominus tells us that there were armed guards present at this church where these parents were coming to listen to Wakefield, a place where you would not expect violence to break out. But Michelle Guppy says that she hired the armed guards in order to, quote, make a statement that this is neutral ground and it's going to be civil. Well, armed guards don't tell you that it's gonna be civil. Armed guards tell you that this is dangerous. This is a hostile territory that you're in danger. And they definitely increase the war mentality of us versus them. So the people like the medical experts who know that what we believe is wrong, they're now a physical danger. They are the bear. Guppy even tells the writer, Dominus, be nice to him or we will hurt you. Now it's hard to imagine she said this in any kind of serious tone. But even if she was joking, even if she said it in a sarcastic tone, when she's flanked by armed guards, even a joke doesn't really come across as that funny. It comes across as a threat with plausible deniability. So what's really clear from this explanation is that this meeting has nothing to do with finding answers, finding the truth, testing hypotheses, verifying information. It has everything to do with emotion, with rallying the us group around a false belief and attacking anyone who's one of them as if they were literally a physical danger. As if a pediatrician with a syringe in hand was going to physically attack and harm the children of these mothers. And if we just look at that social side, Wakefield provides this social validation and at the same time provides an enemy to blame for all the bad things that have happened in their lives. And we compare that to the way doctors typically address the situation. We can start to see them falling into that narrative of the evil, cold-hearted machine-like medical establishment that's just there to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate and sell their products, even if it's harming these children. Two of the medical experts that Damos interviews in this article say that for years, parents' concerns about their autistic children's gastrointestinal problems were too often dismissed, partly because doctors associated these concerns with quackery and vaccine fears and the false hope that diet could cure autism itself. So this is one thing Wakefield said all along was that the MMR vaccine causes this gastrointestinal disease and this gastrointestinal disease causes autism. And when parents would report gastrointestinal problems to doctors, the doctors would then say, oh, that's part of that conspiracy theory and they would dismiss whatever the parents said. Whether or not those symptoms were dismissible isn't as important to the parents as being listened to. And being associated with this sort of conspiracy theory is likely to not cause the parents to question their own belief, but to be insulted, the same as if they read Jonah Laird's article and saw nothing other than, are you saying that I'm part of this quack cult that believes in UFOs and the apocalypse? They're not going to listen to the argument at that point, they're just gonna see that they are being attacked, they're being insulted, their identities are being threatened. So now that we've read about the Rosierian argument and Carl Rogers' strategies for delivering advice, especially correcting misperceptions that people have that they're very attached to, we start to understand why Wakefield is so effective and why the doctors are so much less effective than the truth of their arguments should lead them to be. Rogers said that when parties to a dispute realize that they're being understood, that someone sees how the situation seems to them. The statements grow less exaggerated and less defensive and it's no longer necessary to maintain the attitude that I am 100% right and you are 100% wrong. The influence of such an understanding catalyst in the group permits the members to come closer and closer to the objective truth involved in that relationship. In this way, mutual communication is established and some type of agreement becomes much more possible. It's Wakefield in this example that's following the advice that people are looking for information that is directly relevant to the maintenance of or enhancement of the structure of the self. In other words, this increases my feeling that I am a good person and the doctors are inadvertently triggering that defensiveness. Rogers says the structure and organization of the self appears to become much more rigid under threats and to relax as boundaries when completely free from threat and the educational situation which most effectively promotes significant learning is one in which A, the threat to the self of the learner is reduced to a minimum and B, differentiated perception of the field is facilitated. In other words, if I don't think my identity, my sense of myself as a good person is under threat, then I'm more likely to disconnect myself from this false belief. But if I'm under threat, then I'm going to cling to that false belief, try to use confirmation bias to back it up and use disconfirmation bias against anyone who challenges it because I'm still acting as if they were attacking me rather than my belief. So the strategy that the doctors had been using had been to just throw information at the parents and knock their beliefs out of the way. But parents then adopted the exact same posture. They would throw at the doctors any random claims that they found on internet sites that had no medical expertise but sounded like they did or they would throw Andrew Wakefield's talking points at the doctors and not listen to the doctor. And of course, the doctor wouldn't listen to them. The alternative to that would be to treat the parent of a child with autism as part of a conversation, an interlocutor, someone to whom you listen and then correct but also validate at the same time. So if the parent has concerns about children's gastrointestinal issues, those are probably real issues. They were probably not caused by the MMR vaccine but listened to the parents' complaints and then see how you can address those. And if we look back at Dominus' article, we can find some points to validate, even some of the points that Wakefield raises as well as some of the points that the parents raised that aren't false, points that we can say, yes, what you said is right, this part is wrong but this part is right. So the belief that parents had gotten that changes in diet could cure autism as if autism was like type two diabetes or something. The research did not support the use of casein or gluten-free diets in the general autistic population. The diets adapted in extreme measures could cause health complications of their own. But the press ignored other key implications of the findings that there might be a subsection of autistic patients who would benefit from dietary interventions and that the role of the immune system in gastrointestinal dysfunction in children with autism warrants additional investigation according to this gastroenterologist. The neuroscientist Pat Libet does not believe that a faulty gut is the cause of autism as Wakefield theorized, but the two problems might develop in some subset of people on the autism spectrum in tandem that is together. He does not believe a sum of Wakefield's followers hoped that by treating intestinal maladies he will cure the underlying autism. But, and this is a quote, but is it the case that if you have gastrointestinal problems that can exacerbate your child's behavioral issues, the answer is absolutely yes. You could even go so far as to call Wakefield a kind of pioneer. He's a pioneer who got a lot of things wrong and who did a lot of things wrong, but if you think about the geographic pioneers that settled the areas that we live in, well, they had a lot of really inaccurate beliefs and they did a lot of things that were unconscionable by modern standards, but they also did good things that benefit the rest of us now. So you could compare Wakefield to a kind of pioneer. He did have one not so controversial conviction and that is the symptoms of gastrointestinal distress in an autistic population unable to verbalize that discomfort could be a problem. If a child who because of autism is not able to communicate, if that child is suffering and needs a parent's help but doesn't know how to ask for help, then behaviors like banging their heads against crib walls and hitting their stomachs up against hard surfaces, those make perfect sense because they don't know how to say to their mothers, my stomach hurts. They're trying to alleviate that pain themselves and by ignoring those symptoms, doctors have been ignoring real distress that the children were having and that vicariously the parents were having as well. So if our goal is to just deliver the truth, just the data and the most logically valid argument that would interpret that data, then we could do that in a toolman argument. We could just say, here's the data, here's the warrant that leads to the conclusion, here's the conclusion, back up the data, use the rebuttal to qualify the conclusion. That's all that's necessary for an audience who is very rationally minded, very scientific and very committed to finding a truth and very willing to admit that they don't already have the truth. That's not most people and that's not most of us on most things. So how do we reach out to people who have these other psychological characteristics that we all have that feed into our emotions and those emotions interfere with our ability to think self-critically? Well, throwing those answers, throwing that toolman argument at that audience is not likely to have the effect we would like. But if we take an extra step, if we add some premises, or at least if we mention some parts of this opposing argument that aren't wrong, even if those parts don't actually help our argument, aren't logically necessary to a toolman argument, they might help connect our audience, make our audience into interlocutors. Let them see that they are being heard, that we are listening to them, we are taking into account their questions, answering their questions where we can, pointing out that the questions are unanswerable if we have to. But including part of their argument in our own argument, and not just dismissing it, not immediately refuting it, but finding something to validate, finding someplace to say, yes, this element you've contributed to this conversation helps the conversation. Because an interlocutor helps develop the conversation whereas an audience member may not. An audience member just receives information. The interlocutor gets to contribute. And one thing that the parents of children with autism can contribute or have contributed to this ongoing conversation is the connection of intestinal issues, gastrointestinal issues that doctors seem to have overlooked or dismissed or were not thought were relevant. Even if those issues aren't causally connected to autism, even if the MMR vaccine doesn't cause these intestinal issues and these intestinal issues don't cause autism, their relevance to an autistic population is significant because the autistic population has to deal with those cramps, those pains, and they can't communicate it. So this is something doctors definitely want to address. Even if they're only correlated, they're still relevant to, say, a doctor visit or to figuring out how to help a child across the board, not just with one issue, but with all issues that child might have. So let's look back at the Rosierian argument as it's laid out in Young, Becker and Pike's book, The Rhetoric Discovery and Change. You want to introduce the problem and demonstrate that the opponent's position is understood. You're not using a strawman argument. Then you want to give a statement of the context in which the opponent's position might be valid. So general warrants that might be valid sometimes, data that might be accurate, but it might be just partial. I at least point that out, point out that this data is accurate before you get to saying, well, there's other data that we have to factor in. Then give a statement of your position, including the context in which your position is valid, and then give a statement of how the opponent's position would benefit if he were to adopt elements of the writer's position. If the writer, you can show that the positions compliment each other, that each supply is what the other lacks so much the better. So in this case, to introduce the problem, the problem is anti-vaccination campaigns lead to measles outbreaks, that they expose children to preventable diseases. At this point, I want to lay out the opponent's arguments, like parents observe symptoms congruent with autism sometime after vaccination. Gastrointestinal problems are correlated with autism. People are skeptical of the profit motive in medicine like the MMR vaccine is a patented drug that does make money for some companies. Parents have anxiety at the number of vaccinations though children are receiving, children receive a lot more vaccinations than the children did 10, 20, 30 years ago. And there are increasing numbers of children diagnosed with autism and that has gone up since the introduction of the MMR vaccine. All of these elements of the opponent's position are true. Now there are other explanations than the ones the parents are giving them but I want to first validate, say yes, these observations are true. I want to validate a mother's memory that yes, I'm not disputing that your child had these issues. I'm not disputing that these issues occurred sometime after the MMR vaccine. In doing that I'm saying yes, you're a good mother and I trust you as a mother. So this isn't the medical expert versus the mother. Gastrointestinal problems do seem to be correlated with autism and these issues could exacerbate symptoms and alter behavior in children who are unable to express their discomfort. Being skeptical of a profit motive is obviously very good. If your goal in buying a product is to remain healthy, you have to remember that the person from whom you're buying this product has the goal of making money. They might have an additional goal of keeping you healthy but that is secondary to making a profit. A company that doesn't make a profit is going to go out of business or at least the CEO is gonna be replaced by the shareholders. A company that doesn't do anybody any good but makes a profit is gonna stay in business. I can understand why people are anxious that the number of vaccinations has gone up. There are more vaccinations now than there were in the past and there are increasing numbers of diagnoses of autism since the 1980s, which is when the MMR vaccine was developed. All of these things are true. I'm gonna affirm that they are true first but there are alternative explanations for all of these. So I'm gonna get to those second. Obviously, if parents observe symptoms congruent with autism, the fact that they happened after vaccination are no more relevant than the fact that they happened after all sorts of other things that happened in the child's life. In fact, because the MMR vaccine is usually given at 18 months and it's only after 18 months that the noticeable symptoms of autism tend to show up, that would indicate that it's just the time in the child's life when both of those things tend to occur. Gastrointestinal problems are very likely correlated with autism. So do what you can to see if you can alleviate those gastrointestinal issues. I would again validate that skepticism of the profit motive but then remind parents that Andrew Wakefield himself was paid before he began his study, the retracted study that was published in the Lancet, he was paid by a lawyer, nearly a million dollars to come to a conclusion before he even went out searching for data. So if that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is. The data they're holding onto was the result of a conflict of interest similar to the ones that they're worried about with the drug companies. The number of vaccinations has gone up but that's because there are more cures for more diseases than there were before. More vaccinations is a good thing. That's fewer diseases that your children are susceptible to. And the increase in the number of children with autism coinciding with the introduction of the MMR vaccine, again this is correlated data and again we have separate causes for both of these. In the 1980s, the designation of autism was very vague. Psychologists lumped autism in with under the umbrella term of mental retardation. So children with Down syndrome and children with autism were sort of thrown in the same category even though they had vastly different underlying issues. Superficially they may have had some similarities such as the children weren't able to communicate with the same level of say social intelligence at the same ages. Other than that these things are very different but people didn't realize that until around the 1980s. That's when the diagnosis of autism became much more specific. And also autism is a spectrum as we now realize. So people that used to be described as having Asperger's syndrome are now included in the autism spectrum whereas before they were thought to have something different. And so it's not this one category of things either you have autism or you don't but it's this spectrum of severity where some people are highly functional and can get through society without even being noticed as being in any way different. Whereas other people can't function in society and many that are sort of in between can function under certain circumstances. Those, the subtlety of that distinction is only within the last 10 years that the psychologists have made the distinction that precise. So that's why there's many, many, many more people with autism diagnosed over the last 20 or 30 years. So all of these premises to the opposing argument for a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism do not logically lead to that conclusion. They are mostly based on true data that is not validated by the particular warrant. And this is not just for my benefit especially if I'm a nurse or a doctor. I wanna let the parents know that this isn't just so I can sell you another drug. This is so that your child will be protected from the measles, mumps, rubella or whatever other vaccines are being used. So I wanna emphasize to this parent that repeated studies have turned over no evidence. People have tried to retest and replicate Andrew Wakefield's study and none of them got the same result. So it's not from a lack of testing. And while no rigorous scientist is gonna say there's 100% certainty that there's no connection between anything, we can at least say that there is no evidence and no reason to believe that there is any causal connection between any vaccine and autism. And also the MMR vaccine prevents contracting and spreading measles, mumps, and rubella diseases that can cause sickness, death, and disability including mental disabilities that are worse than autism and cephalitis that can be caused by some of these diseases where a child's brain starts to swell and that swelling pushes the brain tissue up against the inner walls of the skull and actually destroys brain matter. So for the parents who say that I'd rather my child get measles than autism, well first of all that's not a choice that you're actually having to make. But also by exposing your child to the measles you are risking mental disabilities far worse than autism. Now you will probably notice that a lot of these things, especially the part about the Rosierian argument validating some of the concerns that are used in the oppositional argument, might run against some of the advice that we got in say the debunking handbook by Cook and Lewandowski where they say don't repeat the myth because every time you repeat the myth you make it seem more likely. So we will definitely want to try to counter that in some way but we also see here that validation is very important for breaking through into showing our interlocutors that they are being heard, that they are being valued as part of the conversation, that they are good people. And if that's the case then there might be a trade-off between validating our interlocutor and reinforcing the myth through repetition. That's probably a trade-off that in an emotional argument like this is going to pay off. But we also want to take into account that we don't want to repeat the myth or every time we repeat one of the validations, repeat the condition, the qualification that yes gastrointestinal issues might be correlated but that doesn't mean they're causally connected. We might affirm that yes the rates of diagnosed autism have gone up since the introduction of the MMR vaccine that's correlations and each of them has separate explanations. The same thing with the onset of symptoms around 18 months which is also when the MMR vaccine is usually given. We want to validate those observations then debunk the causal explanation so that it doesn't continue to influence that parent's thinking. But do it in that order so that the parents feel that they're being heard. That we have listened to their argument enough to understand all of the premises involved. Now what I have done in this video has been a rhetorical proposal. Just like a rhetorical analysis looks at someone else's argument and says here's how it works, here are the components, here's how they fit together, here's where they maybe could be improved. This rhetorical proposal says we should make this argument this way. It's not focused on approving that there's no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. I am presuming that you, my audience, already know that. The thing that I am arguing here is that we change the way we administer that argument instead of just throwing data at people instead of pointing out logical connections like correlation is not causation. I'm assuming you already know all of this, but I am arguing that we do something more than just include that. I'm arguing that we include these other elements that validate people's observations while at the same time we debunk the inferences that they're making from them. And we do that as a means to open people's minds so that their identities, their feelings, that they are good people, are not anchored to this false belief. So a rhetorical analysis can do a lot of things, but I would suggest you at least do these six things that is introduce the rhetorical situation. Remember how Lloyd-Bitzer defined the rhetorical situation? Then I'm going to cite a specific counter-argument. I'm not gonna depend on a strawman argument where I sort of generalize, well, people like this, the anti-vaxxers think this way. That opens me up to really not getting that argument right. I really wanna understand what the opposition's argument is. So cite at least one specific example, a specific article like in this case, Ginny McCarthy's op-ed piece. Then identify a rhetorical problem, not the problem that vaccination rates are going down and the measles outbreaks are happening, but the problem that raw data and cold logic are not changing people's minds. That's the rhetorical problem. More specifically in this video, I've talked about disconfirmation bias, talked about the backfire effects. Cook and Lewandowski introduced other issues like the continued influence effect and overkill backfire effect and that sort of thing. Choose one, maybe a few of those, explain what that rhetorical problem is, cite a source that validates that you're not just making up this rhetorical problem on your own that somebody like Carl Rogers or in this case, the article by Brennan Nye and Jason Rifler, Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion where they use terms like backfire effect and explain how that interferes with parents' acceptance of the Centers for Disease Controls information. Use that source to show that there is a developing body of research around this concept, this rhetorical problem and then propose a new strategy that can be added to the basic argument like the toolman argument. In addition to the toolman arguments, warrants and data, what else can we add that will help get around this rhetorical problem? So in this case, I'm arguing for the Rosierian argument and I'm using specifically the Rosierian argument as it's defined by Young, Becker and Pike in the book, Rhetoric Discovery and Change. That's the next assignment for a rhetorical proposal not for a Rosierian argument just yet. Your final revision is gonna be a Rosierian argument of your toolman argument. You're gonna follow this advice. But first, write a proposal. Write a proposal with your audience being people who already agree with you on your toolman argument. But your argument for this proposal is here's how we change that argument into something a little bit more effective.