Jerk Tweets Sexist Remark, Prompts Me to Muse About the Meaning of "Freedom"

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people" - Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

It took a long time before this saying made any sense to me. Surely everyone knows that women are people, right? What else would they be? Space aliens? Robots? Very convincing holograms?

That was a joke --- I knew, even when I first heard the saying, that it was referring not to the tautology that female Homo sapiens are Homo sapiens, but to the philosophical concept of personhood. At the time, though, I couldn't imagine that anyone did not extend personhood fully to women, so the saying still struck me as bizarre.

Well, here is a wonderfully clear example of someone doing just that:

Tweet from Pax Dickinson saying "Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. How's that for an unpopular truth?" Image taken from the Public Shaming tumblr

This guy was, until recently, the Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, a popular news website with an emphasis on business and technology (particularly information technology) news.

But I don't care so much about who the speaker is so much as I do about what he is saying: Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. What? People are freer when fewer of them can vote? How does that make any sense?

I would submit that it only makes sense when you assume that the "individuals" he's talking about are men. Women's freedom is compatible with women's suffrage --- see recent elections in which women's votes made the difference between a Republican rape philosopher and a more liberal (if not always pro-choice) Democrat.

Women's votes made the difference in 2012 in the Indiana U.S. Senate race between Richard Mourdock (the "pregnancy from rape is God's will" guy) and Joe Donnelly*, in the Connecticut Senate race between Linda McMahon and Chris Murphy**, in the Massachusetts Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren***, in the Ohio Senate race between Josh Mandel and Sherrod Brown****, in the Pennsylvania Senate race between Tom Smith and Bob Casey*****, and in the Virginia Senate race between George Allen and Tim Kaine. 

Women's votes failed to make the difference in the Wisconsin Senate race between Tommy Thompson and Tammy Baldwin, and in the governor's races in Montana and Washington --- if only women had voted, the Democratic candidates would've won those races, but the Republicans' advantage among men was strong enough to carry them to victory anyway.

(It should be pointed out that, for the most part, abortion and other "women's issues" do not drive the gender gap in voting behavior --- there are much bigger differences between the sexes on whether to strengthen or cut back the welfare state and whether to pursue a hawkish or dovish foreign policy, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics. The hard-right candidates that women voters rejected in 2012 espoused both extreme anti-abortion, anti-contraception positions and a desire to greatly diminish the welfare state, so it's hard to tell whether their anti-choice zealotry was the deciding factor in alienating women voters. But the fact remains that, if only men had voted, a lot more of those anti-choice zealots would be sitting in Congress today.)


So, besides being more likely to vote against candidates looking to curtail their reproductive freedoms, women also vote for candidates they think will strengthen the social safety net. What does that have to do with personal freedom?

Well, I think having a robust social safety net is critical for maximizing individual freedom: there are a lot more choices available to you if you don't have to worry about losing your home and being unable to feed yourself and your family if you lose your job. You're more free to blow the whistle if you think your employer is doing something unethical, to fight against what you see as unfair or exploitative working conditions, and to engage in political activism or commentary outside of work without being afraid that these things will cost you your job. You are also more free to leave a job for whatever reason. There's a reason FDR named "freedom from want" as one of his Four Freedoms, and why he used that word --- freedom --- instead of, say, "rights" or "entitlements" or "needs."

There's also a subset of welfare-undermining measures that serve only to criminalize poverty, to subject people needing government assistance to intrusive, degrading treatment and erode their freedom. Things that fall into this category are mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, requiring welfare recipients to document that they spent a certain number of hours each week either working or engaging in approved job-seeking or job-preparatory activity, tying the amount of money a family receives to how well their children are doing in school, or requiring people applying for welfare to be fingerprinted.

People who favor such mean-spirited measures usually think there are legions of idlers living on welfare just because they don't want to work, and spending their benefits on luxury items. 

(They are mistaken --- almost every form of public assistance that exists in the US is time-limited or situation-specific, like unemployment insurance (which expires after a certain number of weeks that varies by state), the program people are usually thinking of when they say "welfare" (which is officially called TANF: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which has, among many other limitation, a five-year lifetime cap on benefits), or WIC (which you can only get if you are pregnant, nursing, or have children younger than five years old). The one program that doesn't come with a predetermined expiration date is food stamps, which you can only get if you make 130% of the federal poverty rate or less, and which you can only use to buy food).

But whether or not the idlers exist, it's important to focus on the fact that these people --- the people who favor draconian measures to curb welfare fraud --- are more concerned with ferreting them out than with getting aid to those who need it, and subjecting those people to minimal state intrusion and hassle. That does not sound like a person who is concerned with human freedom; to me, that sounds a lot more like a person who cares little for people and a whole lot for pinching pennies.

There are some personal-freedom issues on which women tend to favor more restrictive policies than men do: according to this poll, women are less likely than men to support legalizing marijuana, to give just one example. But the conclusion one draws from that, taking into account everything I've said above, isn't that men are pro-freedom and women are anti-freedom; it's that most people favor at least some restrictions on individual freedoms, and that there are some differences between the sexes in terms of what should be allowed and what should be forbidden. The only way you arrive at "Women's suffrage is incompatible with individual freedom" is by defining "individual freedom" so selectively as to leave out any personal-freedom issue on which women are more liberal than men.

*Donnelly is pro-life, but unlike Mourdock he would allow an exception to a general ban on abortion for victims of forcible rape. He also voted for the Affordable Care Act and for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

**McMahon supported the Blunt amendment, which would've allowed employers to opt out of providing insurance coverage for contraception. She also wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is slightly more popular among women than among men (i.e., for women it's almost a 50/50 split, while men are opposed by a slim majority). 

***The biggest issue at stake in this race was obviously regulation and reform of the financial sector, which is not a "women's issue" but is, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, a greater priority with women voters than with men, though this poll shows huge majorities of both sexes favoring reform.

****Mandel seems to have campaigned on his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and the fact that his opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, voted for it. Mandel also opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and including sexual orientation and gender identity in anti-discrimination laws. 

*****Casey is pro-life, but unlike Smith he would allow an exception to a general ban on abortion for victims of rape or incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger. He voted for the Blunt amendment, but has also voted to protect Planned Parenthood's federal funding under Title X, and to rescind the Mexico City Policy (aka the "global gag rule" forbidding aid organizations from even referring people for abortion services). He also supported the Paycheck Fairness Act and introduced a bill to require colleges to do more to prevent (and track, and prosecute) sexual assault and domestic violence. Smith, as I mentioned, favors a total ban on abortion with no exceptions, and is one of the lesser-known Republican rape philosophers.

Is Fear of Vaccines a Liberal Thing?

That's what I had always thought --- that the right wing can have their creationists, their global warming deniers, their opposition to stem-cell research, and whatever else, but we on the left have to claim the lion's share of the anti-vaccination crowd.

Photo taken by Flickr user captaincinema

I believed this mostly for two reasons: first, most of the anti-vaccination rhetoric I had heard focused on scary chemicals that may or may not be present in vaccines, and scary-chemical rhetoric is also a staple of diverse left-leaning causes ranging from the legitimate (i.e., environmentalism) to the kooky (alternative medicine, the cult of the "natural"). The second reason is that, to the extent that the anti-vaccine celebrities I'd heard of can be said to have politics, their politics tend to be Democratic. The one obvious example is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat and prominent environmentalist, and the two other anti-vaccine celebrities I can think of, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, aren't involved very much in U.S. politics, but the profiles of them I linked to suggest that they're Democratic-leaning.  

Anti-vaccine booth at the 2008 Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein

The famous science writer Chris Mooney was also under the impression that anti-vaccine-ism is a crank ideology peculiar to the left, though I'm not sure he is anymore.

The mass freakout on the right over Gardasil made me reevaluate that impression, though.

It's true, Gardasil is a special case because it's a vaccine for adolescents --- and, initially, adolescent girls, although it's now recommended for all young people --- meant to protect against the cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus, which spreads through genital contact. That puts it squarely in the middle of the Religious Right's Freakout Zone, which encompasses anything involving young women and sex.

I would've been perfectly content to accept just that explanation for the anti-Gardasil backlash, but then Michele Bachmann came out with her howler about Gardasil causing developmental disabilities. That sounded so much like what I had been hearing from Jenny McCarthy et al. that I started wondering whether anti-vaccine crankery was actually bipartisan.

There have been a lot of polls about people's attitudes toward vaccination, but I can't find very many that also include respondents' political affiliation. 

Chris Mooney wrote about two polls suggesting that anti-vaccine sentiments are spread evenly across the political spectrum: a USA Today/Gallup poll from 2009 that asked people to identify themselves as liberal, conservative or moderate and then asked them whether they had heard of Jenny McCarthy and whether they agreed with her or not; and a Pew poll, also from 2009, that asked, among lots of other things, whether children should be required to be vaccinated or whether that choice should be left to their parents.

With above photo, anti-vaccine protest signs at a Tea Party Express rally held on April 8, 2010 in St. Paul, MN. Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue

Larger version of printout attached to sign in lower half of the above pair of photos

Mike the Mad Biologist wrote about another Pew poll from 2009, this one asking people whether they would get the swine flu vaccine if it were available to them. It found Republicans and Independents more likely than not to refuse it (54% to 41%), while Democrats were almost 2:1 in favor of getting the vaccine. Republicans were also the most likely (54%), and Democrats the least (35%), to say that the news media were overstating the danger of swine flu.

Another poll, this one conducted just a couple months ago by You Gov, found that greater percentages of Republicans than Democrats said they were "not so confident" or "not confident at all" that the current vaccine schedule recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services is safe. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say they were "very confident" or "somewhat confident," although strong majorities of both parties fall into those two groups.

That poll also asked people which conditions they think vaccines can cause, and Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to say vaccines cause autism.

I don't know what the New World Order is, but this graphic is a great example of attributing nefarious motivation to vaccine makers

It's also worth pointing out that there are different fears that underlie different people's opposition to vaccines. Some people might be afraid of Big Pharma profiting off their sickness; others might be afraid of the government telling them what to do with their bodies, or with their children's bodies, and other people might be afraid of the Scary Chemicals in vaccines. 

You can see appeals to all of these different fears in anti-vaccine rhetoric: most obvious (to me, at least) is the Scary Chemicals rhetoric that emphasizes what kinds of scary-sounding things are in vaccines (or, in the case of thimerosal, used to be in vaccines), but there's also the tactic of discrediting anything a medical professional says about vaccines by saying they're being paid off by the pharmaceutical companies. 

One type of anti-vaccine rhetoric I hadn't noticed before I started writing this post is the kind that objects to mandatory vaccines. Even when there's a very good reason for it, like requiring health-care workers to be fully vaccinated because they're in contact with lots and lots of 1) sick people and 2) people whose immunity is compromised.

People protesting a proposal to make swine flu vaccination mandatory for health care workers in New York state in 2009. Both photos taken by Louise McCoy for The Epoch Times

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how a libertarian-minded person, probably a lot like the people in the two Tea Party pictures above, might see mandatory vaccination as yet another unwarranted government intrusion into their affairs.  

This old article in the Seattle Weekly about the antivaccination movement in Washington state makes note of the movement's bipartisan appeal:

A closer look at [Washington state Department of Health] data reveals the potent mix of demographics that makes vaccine resistance such a sturdy presence in the state. Some of the highest [vaccine] exemption rates are in eastern Washington, where any kind of government mandate --- whether immunization or taxation --- is viewed with hostility. 

At the opposite end of the political spectrum are the liberal enclaves of western Washington, which are also resistant to vaccines. At Vashon Island's public elementary school, 25 percent of students have skipped at least one vaccine. At the Seattle Waldorf School, ... the number is a whopping 47 percent. 

These schools are part of well-educated and affluent communities that one might think would be most likely to follow the recommendations of scientists and doctors. But in fact, as journalist Seth Mnookin points out in his new book The Panic Virus, they perfectly reflect the base of today's anti-vaccine movement. Its constituents are part of what you might call the suburban counterculture --- parenthood and affluence mixed with creative aspirations, a crunchy-chewy lifestyle, and an inclination to question authority.

Finally, let's look at laws making it easier for people to opt out of vaccination.

Here is a list of states whose laws allow parents to refuse to vaccinate their children for "philosophical" reasons:

• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Idaho
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• North Dakota
• Pennsylvania
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Washington
• Wisconsin

As you can see, it's a pretty mixed bag of "red states" and "blue states."

Memento Mori: Thoughts of Mortality Can Subtly Bias People's Ideas about Human Origins

Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

-- John Donne, from Holy Sonnet X (also called "Death, Be Not Proud")

BPS Research Digest described a recent study in which a group of psychologists looked at the influence of thoughts of one's own death on people's attitudes toward two different ideas about human origins: evolutionary theory and the variant of creationism known as Intelligent Design.
The researchers --- Dr. Jessica L. Tracy, who is an assistant professor of social and personality psychology at the University of British Columbia's Vancouver campus, where she is also director of the Emotion and Self Lab, Dr. Joshua J. Hart, who is an assistant professor of psychology at a small liberal arts college in New York called Union College, and UBC graduate student Jason Martens --- went to rather more trouble than is usual in these social-psychology studies in their search for a diverse study population.

Too often, these studies make claims about "people" based on surveys of psychology undergraduates at one university. In this study, one of the five mini-experiments involved people from all over the US who filled out surveys online. They ranged in age from 18 to 75, with a median age of 37, so most of them were substantially older than the college students questioned in the other four experiments. They also came from (one assumes) a broader distribution of socioeconomic classes; socioeconomic data are not given for any of the student groups, but the general-population group includes people from a wide range of income levels: 12% of respondents reported making less than $20,000 a year, 25% made between $20,000 and $40,000, 20% made between $40,000 and $60,000, 11% made between $60,000 and $80,000, 8% made between $80,000 and $100,000, and 9% made more than $100,000 a year. (Fifteen percent of respondents chose not to say how much money they made). The general-population sample also included people with more widely varying educational backgrounds: 26% had a high school diploma or less, 33% had been to college but hadn't gotten a degree, 32% had a college degree, and 9% had a postgraduate degree.

The other four groups consisted entirely of college students; two of the groups were all psychology students recruited from either UBC or Union College, one group was college students recruited online from all over the U.S. and Canada, and the last group was natural-science students* from UBC and Union College.
Each group of participants was asked to specify their religion and rate how religious they thought they were, and then to read a passage written by either Richard Dawkins or Michael Behe discussing either evolution or Intelligent Design, and rate their attitudes toward the two belief systems and their representative authors.

Right before they did this, they were asked to imagine one of two unpleasant things (death vs. painful dental work) and write briefly about their feelings. The reason for including this morbid exercise was to see if bringing mortality to the forefront of people's minds had any effect on their preference for a naturalistic or deistic worldview.
They found that, for most people, being reminded of death does tend to make you more receptive to Intelligent Design and more hostile to evolution. This is true regardless of one's educational attainment, religion or religiosity. It was also true regardless of one's attitude toward evolution as measured before the experiment.
(Some more explanation of that last sentence: yes, being more religious meant you were more likely to be receptive to Intelligent Design whether you were asked to contemplate death or not; likewise with being Christian rather than belonging to any other religious tradition, or claiming no religion. But within each category, the researchers saw the same effect of the memento mori nudging people toward Intelligent Design and away from evolutionary theory. Oddly, being reminded of death did not prompt people to rate themselves as more religious, even though it had a noticeable effect on their ideas about human origins.)

While how much education a person had didn't make any difference in how they responded to the memento mori, the type of education did have some dampening effects. Compared to the general-population and general-student-population groups, the psychology students expressed less hostility to evolutionary theory in response to the memento mori, although they showed the same increase in receptivity to Intelligent Design.

Resistance to these effects was strongest in the natural-science students, who actually responded in the opposite way to the memento mori; when confronted with the thought of death, they reported feeling a stronger affirmation of evolution and repudiation of creationism.

The authors hypothesized that people would react to the thought of death by looking for something that confers some lasting meaning on human life; for most people, a divine Creator fills that role readily enough. One of their experiments --- one of the two using psychology undergraduates as guinea pigs --- addressed this hypothesis directly: they compared the responses of students who had read a passage by Carl Sagan aimed at dispelling fears that the scientific understanding of the universe is nihilistic with those of students who did not read this humanistic passage, looking to see if exposure to a Middle Way between deism and nihilism didn't moderate the shift toward Intelligent Design prompted by the students' meditating on their own deaths.

Here is the Sagan passage:

It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. And understanding the nature of the world and the nature of ourselves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about. Truth should be pursued, and science helps us pursue it; science gives us meaning. All we have to do is maintain some tolerance for ambiguity, because right now science does not have all the answers. This tolerance goes with the courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations and knowledge tell us. The more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from something outside science, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves. If we are merely matter that is intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less, or does that make matter more? We make our purpose. And we have to work out what that is, for ourselves.

Ahhh. Humanism. (Go on, bask in it!)

Sure enough, students who read this passage did seem to be less threatened by evolution, even with thoughts of their own individual mortality foremost in their minds: they responded to the thought of death by reporting less of a warm feeling for Intelligent Design, and more for evolutionary theory.

Here is the authors' summation of their findings:

The present findings demonstrate that reminders of one's mortality --- inducing a state of mortality salience --- promote relative support for [Intelligent Design Theory], and skepticism toward [Evolutionary Theory]. Individuals respond to existential threat by becoming more accepting of a theory that offers a greater sense of meaning by depicting human life as having ultimate purpose (while appearing consistent with the scientific worldview), and/or less supportive of the theory that is the true mainstay of the scientific worldview but seems to offer little in the way of existential comfort. These findings also suggest that a desire to find greater meaning in human life accounts for this effect (at least the effect of mortality salience on belief in IDT), because it is reversed by making ET more meaningful, and among natural-science students for whom ET is already meaningful. The findings are notable because they (a) help explain why some people are motivated to believe in IDT and doubt ET in terms of fundamental psychological drives; (b) account for the underlying causal process; and (c) emerged regardless of preexisting religious ideologies, religious affiliation, or (with one highly limited exception, discussed below) views of evolution. The last point suggests that although religion influences baseline beliefs in IDT and ET, it cannot account for the impact of MS on these views. Given previous research suggesting that many MS effects are heightened, or occur only, among individuals with certain preexisting belief systems or cultural associations, the fact that we found no moderators of MS effects --- other than the extent to which naturalism is seen as meaningful --- suggests that embracing IDT or rejecting ET may be a unique, broadly appealing mechanism that addresses the existential concerns of religious and, for the most part, more scientifically oriented individuals alike. In contrast, explicitly religious ideologies tend to be fairly parochial, limiting their appeals and making them viable defenses only for those who already believe in a supernatural god.

Yet, an exception emerged in Study 5, where individuals whose life goals require strong acceptance of ET showed the opposite responses. Like those explicitly taught, in Study 4, to view naturalism as a source of meaning, natural-science students responded to MS with stronger antagonism toward IDT. This provides converging support for the causal process found in Study 4, and suggests that rejecting IDT can be a source of existential comfort for a limited population of individuals. These individuals are not simply those steeped in the scientific cultural worldview --- presumably psychology undergraduates fall into that category --- but rather those who more specifically view evolution as a critical part of their understanding of the world and a source of meaning and purpose.

They also point out in the final section of the article that these results might shed some light on why creation-vs.-evolution has remained such an intractable social issue: rather than being solely determined by religious doctrine, political ideology or (lack of) scientific literacy, people's embrace of creationism is also a response to the fear of death. Merely cataloguing the evidence for evolution doesn't address these underlying emotional issues; it tears away the defense mechanism while providing nothing to replace it. To my mind, that goes a long way toward explaining not only the deadlock between sides but also the rancor in this debate.

(Of course, many evolution-defending speakers do emphasize the existential perks of their worldview: a sense of wonder at being part of such a beautiful, intricate, ever-changing universe; the feeling of joy as you discover deeper and deeper layers of life's complexity; a stronger sense of kinship with other forms of animal life, etc. Why, even Richard Dawkins, the theorist featured in this study as representative of the godless, naturalistic worldview, has written a lot --- most notably in his book Unweaving the Rainbow --- about the beauties and benefits of that worldview. So the emotional angle isn't all there is to this, though I think it is important and not usually given the prominence it deserves).

*The authors do not explain what fields are included in this umbrella category "natural sciences." As it is commonly used, it encompasses fields having nothing whatsoever to do with evolution, like physics, or chemistry, or astronomy or geology. So I would quibble a bit with their assertion that strong acceptance of evolutionary theory is necessary for one to progress in the "natural sciences" --- it is quite possible to complete a degree in a non-biological science field without ever encountering it.


Tracy, J., Hart, J., & Martens, J. (2011). Death and Science: The Existential Underpinnings of Belief in Intelligent Design and Discomfort with Evolution PLoS ONE, 6 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017349

Poll Data on Vaccines Looks Contradictory, But Isn't

Yesterday I ran across two seemingly contradictory factoids about public opinion on the autism-vaccine issue: this column in this month's Scientific American cites a poll* finding that just under half of U.S. adults either believe vaccines cause autism or aren't sure whether they do or not, while Left Brain/Right Brain reports on survey data** analyzed in two articles (full text here and here) in Pediatrics that found 79% of U.S. parents believe vaccines are safe.

So, which of these is true?

I'll start by pointing out that the subset of people who said they were "not sure" about the vaccine-autism issue could probably also fall into the subset of people who said they thought vaccines were safe in the other survey --- people's positions on issues can be pretty elastic, depending on how questions are asked and what kind of answers they think the pollsters want to hear. I think people who fall somewhere in the middle might have even more wiggle room than those who come down more strongly on one side or another.

The undecided group in the Harris/HealthDay poll, at 30% of respondents, was quite a bit bigger than the group professing a belief that vaccines cause autism (18%).

Thus, the proportion of all people who don't actively believe that vaccines cause autism in that survey is 82%, similar to the 79% of people who said they considered vaccines to be safe in the survey from two years ago.

Also, the two surveys sampled slightly different subsets of the U.S. population: the Harris/HealthDay poll was open to anyone over 18 (n = 2,026), while the two Pediatrics articles restricted their data set to respondents with minor children (n = 1,552). One of the articles went further, using only data from parents of children younger than 6 (n = 475).

Compared with the general population of the U.S. (reflected in 2010 census data), the group of people studied in the two Pediatrics articles is younger (the all-parents group was split about 60/40 between people under 40 and people 40+; two-thirds of the parents of young children were under 35; in the U.S. as a whole, a little less than half of all people, and about 60% of all adults, are older than 40), a lot richer and more likely to be female (split about 60/40 in favor of women).

What most interested me was the implication, in the article on parents of young children, that some of the people who think vaccines are generally safe, and believed vaccination was important for a child's health, are also worried that vaccines might cause autism:

Parents reported their attitudes regarding the safety and necessity of vaccines (Tables 2 and 3). The majority of the parents were either confident or very confident in vaccine safety (79.0%) and believed that vaccines are important to children's health (79.8%). Similarly, 73% of parents somewhat or strongly believed that the benefits of vaccines outweighed the risks. ...

Parents were asked to respond to a series of 11 potential vaccine-related concerns and were also given the opportunity of stating that they had no vaccine-related concerns (Table 4). Just more than one-fifth (20.8%) of the parents reported that none of the 11 issues listed were of concern to them. The most common concern reported by the parents was that it is painful for children to receive multiple shots during 1 doctor's visit (44.2%). Other concerns reported by >25% of the parents included their child receiving too many vaccines in 1 doctor's visit (34.2%), vaccines causing fevers in their child (28.3%), children getting too many vaccines in their first 2 years of life (27.8%), and vaccines causing learning disabilities such as autism (26.2%).

The article's authors suggest that these parents are probably weighing the potential risk of autism against the protection from disease, and choosing to vaccinate despite their misgivings because they think the benefits outweigh the risks. (Data from the Harris/HealthDay poll would also tend to support this idea of a cost-benefit analysis; even among people who believe that vaccines can cause autism, a majority thinks schools should require children to be vaccinated).

The other article, the one that studied all parents of minor children, also looked into what sources parents considered credible in the matter of vaccine safety.

Overwhelmingly, the person they trusted most was their children's doctor (76% said they trusted their children's doctor "a lot," 22% said "some" and only 2% said they did not trust their children's doctor); just as overwhelmingly, people put very little stock in what celebrities have to say about vaccine safety (in a clean reversal of the figures for doctors, 2% of parents said they trusted celebrities "a lot", 24% said they trusted them "some", and 74% did not trust them at all). For all the other types of people --- health-care providers apart from their children's doctor, government officials, friends and family, and parents who believe their children were harmed by a vaccine --- most people said they felt "some" trust. Similarly, of the people who look at media relating to vaccine safety, most placed "some" trust in all of the media categories listed: medical organizations' websites (the only category that also had a large number of people saying they trusted it "a lot"), government websites, newspaper or magazine articles, TV, vaccine manufacturers' websites and anti-vaccine websites.

These survey results suggest to me that people aren't the gullible sheep skeptics often accuse them of being. They are wary of anecdotal evidence, give more weight to experts' opinions than to laypeople's, and give the most weight to those authorities they consider neutral, or to have their child's best interests specifically in mind. Also, even without an extensive grounding in virology, immunology or epidemiology, they seem to grasp the importance of universal vaccination in maintaining herd immunity.

People are wiser than the conventional wisdom gives them credit for being.

Freed, G., Clark, S., Butchart, A., Singer, D., & Davis, M. (2011). Sources and Perceived Credibility of Vaccine-Safety Information for Parents PEDIATRICS DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-1722P

Kennedy, A., Basket, M., & Sheedy, K. (2011). Vaccine Attitudes, Concerns, and Information Sources Reported by Parents of Young Children: Results From the 2009 HealthStyles Survey PEDIATRICS DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-1722N

*Poll conducted by Harris Interactive and HealthDay, on January 11-13, 2011

**The annual HealthStyles survey, conducted by the CDC and the public-relations firm Porter Novelli, throughout the month of January in 2009