Despite the fact that vaccinations save lives, vaccination rates are dropping. People deciding about vaccination often search for information online, where non-scientific, vaccination-critical information is abundant.
Vaccination-critical information seems to be more persuasive than evidence-based, vaccination-supporting information. This could be caused by an important but understudied cognitive bias, the ‘feature positive effect’ (FPE). This project studies whether online vaccination content shows manifestations of the FPE by using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to analyze a large number of social media messages. This research is a necessary first step to help understand the persuasiveness of vaccination-critical content, improve evidence-based vaccination information, and debias vaccination decision making.
