Battling Vaccine Hesitancy: Asking and Not Telling?

We often hear that science and evidence rarely will change minds when it comes to biotechnology or climate change,  (or vaccine hesitancy). But some think maybe there is a strategy to get out in front of misinformation. In a previous post I discussed an article 'Finding a Vaccine for Misinformation.' The authors discuss 'inoculating' consumers through gamification so that they are less susceptible to misinformation. 

"Introne believes that he can use this approach to target the weakest links in false narratives and bring people closer to changing their minds. He says that if he can deliver information that doesn’t conflict with a person’s belief state but still brings them around to a more accurate point of view, “then I’ve got a pretty powerful thing.”

Thinking more about this I was reminded of an article in the Journal of the Federation for American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) where Jayson Lusk and Brandon McFadden observed the following:

1) consumers, as a group, are unknowledgeable about GMOs, genetics, and plant breeding and, perhaps more interestingly

2) simply asking these objective knowledge questions served to lower subjective, self-assessed knowledge of GMOs (i.e., people realize they didn't know as much as they thought they did) and increase the belief that it is safe to eat GM food. 

So essentially, just asking skeptics the right questions appeared to mitigate the Dunning Kruger effect and decreased resistance to evidence based views on the safety of genetically engineered foods. Asking, rather than telling in this scenario seems consistent with the strategy of innculating consumers against misinformation and disinformation. 

References: 

News Feature: Finding a vaccine for misinformation.Gayathri Vaidyanathan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Aug 2020, 117 (32) 18902-18905; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2013249117 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/18902

McFadden, B.R. and Lusk, J.L. (2016), What consumers don't know about genetically modified food, and how that affects beliefs. Faseb, 30: 3091-3096. https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.201600598