Heart, Ears and Vocal Cords

Using story lines to discuss the COVID vaccine

I keep encountering the same problem: how can I reach people who are making decisions that are different from mine and are seemingly irrational. I know I’m even posing that question wrong, I shouldn’t be trying to reach them, but rather trying to connect with them, and presumably they have their own wisdom. But I can get worked up into a complete tizzy and start ranting about their irresponsible selfish behavior whether the topic is climate change, COVID vaccines or native plants.

One explanation for why we are so cleanly divided on issues is because we tend to believe story lines that fit our world view rather than altering our world view to accomodate the facts. This was never more obvious to me than in my role as a climate change scientist. Rather than believing the overwhelming consensus of experts, many Americans have doubted that climate change is real and caused by humans. We’re seeing it again with the COVID vaccine. And of course these divisions are damaging. Progress suffers when we delay action on climate or COVID, but it also suffers when we can’t hear what ‘the other side’s’ concerns are.

One of my early newsletters was an article on just this subject and was written by a conservative friend. It says much of what I would have I written on that topic. But I clearly need a revision course and some new tools. I’ve spent the last few days trawling the internet and distilled the advice I found into three main considerations which I call heart, ears and vocal cords. I’ve even developed a little hand dance to drum it in. Fist to chest, open hand over my ear and and an expansion of my hand from my mouth, like I imagine an Italian expressing “delicious”.

The rule of the heart is to be kind and respectful, to seek connectivity and common ground. Applying it, we aim to focus on the ideas we are discussing and not on the person or the philosophical group they might belong to. We will assume they have the best of intentions and endeavor to establish common ground with them. This may have to start with the big picture such as “We agree that health for all is a common goal.” Kindness, that’s the essence of the heart step.

The rule of the ears is to listen - actively. Although I understand this theoretically, this is not what I always do. Often, I listen so I can rebut other people’s arguments. Instead, we need to try to understand why our conversational partner has opposing opinions to us. In researching vaccine hesitancy, I came across one quote which drew me up short: “I don’t trust pharmaceuticals.” This really pivoted my feelings towards that person because I can completely understand if they think pharmaceuticals are driven by profits, not by helping people. Other people worry that vaccines have been rushed. I felt much better towards vaccine hesitant folk after understanding these points. One trick we can use in our endeavors to actively list others, is to repeat back to our conversation partner their argument, “Let me see if I’ve got this straight, you are concerned that the COVID vaccines can cause serious side effects.”

But the most poignant lesson for me, because it is new to me, has been the rule of the vocal cords. I need to learn to speak in a way that people can connect with - and this generally means a narrative. It turns out that inundating people with facts is not persuasive, for most people aren’t trained in the mental gymnastics that facilitate accurate interpretation of scientific results. Presumably, we’ve all heard that no one has died from a COVID vaccine, and only 11 in a million people who’ve recevie the Pfizer vaccine have had a serious reaction. You’d think that the over 500,000 Americans who have died from COVID would be enough to counterbalance a far less likely, nondeadly allergic reaction. Yet, it’s not: 1/3 of Americans say they won’t, or probably won’t, get vaccinated. The pundits say this is because many people don’t respond to numbers with warm and fuzzy feelings. Rather, we respond more strongly to narratives, which the liberal side of politics and science communication has tended to avoided.

The lesson, especially for the scientifically trained, is that instead of bludgeoning people with facts, we’ll be more effective communicators if we integrate a few key facts into stories that move people. When we tell stories, we are more likely to be heard and change the hearts of our conversation partners. This will be difficult for many of us. Notably, scientists typically abhor an antecdote as a method of conveying information because even true antecdotes can be nonrepresentative and lead to dangerous choices. But we must acknowledge what numerous peer reviewed studies find, story telling is far more powerful than numbers at changing our understanding. The spread of misinformation using antecdotes is a powerful, bad, example of this. In a book on the topic, Chris Mooney states that liberals seeking to engage conservatives need to shift their focus from ‘the truth’ to ‘what matters’. This rings true to me.

With this in mind, I might say to a vaccine hesitant friend “I get where you’re coming from with the worry about side effects from the COVID vaccine. But did you know that there have been zero deaths linked to getting the vaccine and you are a 1000 times more like to die from COVID than to have a reaction to the vaccine? I have a friend whose sister and her husband were hesitant to get vaccinated. So they delayed. She was still working but her husband was retired and stayed largely at home. When my friend’s sister got sick, she stayed home for a few days and tried to stay away from her husband, but it didn’t work. The husband got ill as well. They got COVID tests and indeed they were both positive. My friend’s sister went on to recover, but, tragically, the husband died in March. If either of them had been vaccinated, it could have been a very different story.”