Good parents are protective of their children and fear things they think could do them harm. Unfortunately, parents (like anyone else) can be mistaken about what is and is not harmful. This can occur because, ironically, people tend to reason poorly when they are afraid. This is ironic because such situations are when we really need our reasoning skills the most. One such situation is the controversy over vaccines and autism.
Dr. Paul Offit recently wrote a book on the subject, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, that has generated a great deal of controversy. One of the purposes of the book is to address the alleged causal link between vaccines and autism. His position, which is well supported by the weight of scientific research, is that vaccines do not cause autism and are safe for children.
Despite the fact that the weight of evidence shows that vaccines (including the thimersol that was once used as a preservative in some vaccines) do not cause autism, many people still believe there is a connection. Part of this is due to the fact that a now retracted 1998 study suggested a link between vaccines and autism. Part of this is due to the fact that lawyers, celebrities, and people in the media continue to claim that there is a connection. Even John McCain asserted his belief in the connection. In some cases, these people are honestly mistaken. In other cases, they stand to benefit from such claims.
Not surprisingly, Offit is the target of anger and even threats. In the case of people who are willfully misleading the public, this is to be expected. In the case of people who are honestly mistaken, this might seem surprising. After all, one would think they would be grateful to know the truth. Of course, there are those who doubt that Offit has the truth.
Offit’s critics contend that he stands to gain financially from vaccines and hence is biased. Offit profited from the sale of the vaccine RotaTeq and has also been a paid and unpaid consultant for the drug company Merck (which now manufactures RotaTeq).
From a critical thinking standpoint, this concern is reasonable. After all, a person’s credibility is reduced to the degree that they are biased and money is a strong biasing factor. When people raise this concern, they are reasoning well-provided that they are raising it on good grounds and not as a rationalization for their rejection of his claims.
While money is a biasing factor, when assessing the credibility of a source it is also important to consider the whole picture and not just one factor. To do otherwise would be fall victim to a bias. Offit’s personal history and behavior seem to indicate that he is more concerned about the well being of children than about money and people do speak highly of him. These factors might very well offset any bias from his financial ties to vaccines and, of course, his scientific credentials are quite solid.
Fortunately, resolving the key issue (whether vaccines cause autism or not) does not depend on Offit’s credibility alone. There has been extensive research into the alleged connection between vaccines and autism and, as noted above, the weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly against there being a meaningful connection. Why, then, do people still believe that there is a connection?
First, as mentioned above, there are celebrities, people in the media, lawyers and others who claim that there is a connection. People are often bad at discerning between legitimate authorities on a subject and people speaking on that subject who are famous for something else (like being an actor). When people make this error they are committing a fallacious appeal to authority.
Second, people are generally poor at scientific reasoning and critical thinking. Even college educated people. My own university’s assessment process revealed that most of our students are weak in these areas and similar assessment at other schools have revealed similar results. These results match my own experiences teaching critical thinking. When people are not very good at scientific reasoning and critical thinking, they tend to not know how to assess such research and also tend to be less influenced by logical arguments. Instead, they tend to be more influenced by emotional factors and poor reasoning. This leads to the third reason.
Third, people are more influenced by their emotions than by reason. Many parents are worried that their child will develop autism. Thus, fear and love leads them to be concerned about anything that might cause autism. These emotions can impede their ability to assess the matter rationally and they can come to feel that vaccines are a threat when they hear about the connection. If they are not good at critical thinking, they will not be able to properly investigate the matter and hence will tend to stick with how they feel rather than finding out what would be most rational to think.
Fourth, most people tend to be more influenced by poor reasoning than by good reasoning. As I tell my students, fallacies tend to be far more persuasive than logical arguments. After all, people tend to feel far more strongly than they think. Further, people tend to fall into very predictable patterns of poor reasoning and accept the results as true.
In the case of autism and vaccines, people seem to fall into the post hoc fallacy. This allacy derives its name from the Latin phrase “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.” This has been traditionally interpreted as “After this, therefore because of this.” This fallacy is committed when it is concluded that one event causes another simply because the proposed cause occurred before the proposed effect. In the case at hand, parents might notice their child showing signs of autism after receiving vaccinations and assume that the vaccinations are the cause. However, without adequare evidence linking the two, this would not be a reasonable inference.
Fifth, when people do not know what is causing something harmful, they can start grasping at explanations. People, sensibly enough, do not like being ignorant of what is causing autism. While this does motivate people to search for a cause, it can also lead people to simply pick an explanation so that they now feel more in control. Of course, if someone does not have a good grasp of critical reasoning, they can accept something as a cause that really is not. For example, people have explained illnesses and deaths in terms of witchcraft, curses and vampires. Today, few people would attribute autism to supernatural causes, but taking vaccines as the cause without adequate evidence can be seen as somewhat similar: a cause (or scapegoat) must be found to make people feel better.
Does this mean that vaccines have no possible link to autism and the people who worry about it are foolish? No, clearly not. There could be cases in which a vaccine has triggered autism by interacting with many other factors and it is reasonable to be concerned about such a possibility. However, it is also important to approach the matter rationally and not let fear lead people into making unwise choices.
After all, while there is the possibility that vaccines might have some link to autism, it is well established that vaccines protect children from very real harms. Some parents, afraid of the alleged link, have not vaccinated their children or are not following the recommended schedules. Given the serious consequences of some of these diseases, a failure to vaccinate properly could be very harmful to the children. Naturally, these vaccines should be made as safe as possible.
Where is the mainstream medical community, pharmaceutical companies, and Dr. Paul Offit when it comes to the daily struggles of raising a child with Autism? If they stepped up to the plate and helped these children maybe then the community would not speak out so loudly about the acceptable collateral damage that is being done by vaccines. Children are now being recovered from this injury that is caused without informed consent. We are fast becoming a society of haves and have nots. Some children have a voice. Some do not. I will not rest until every mother of a child who is non-verbal with autism gets a hug and hears “I love you Mama”
http://www.causecast.org/member/tanners-dad
The New York Times recently had an article on the rise in childhood diseases, once believed to be eradicated, due to parents who refuse vaccines for their children.
These unvaccinated children pose a great risk to other children and if this continues, we will be back where we were years ago with children dying of preventable diseases.
I think we have reached a time where many of the parents refusing vaccinces for their children are too young to know what it was like before, so they will learn the hard way.
It’s sentimental pablum like the comment above that obscures the real issues and fails to reach any real solution to the issue of autism and is also what this post is about.
“Sentimental Pablum” Anything overly bland or simplistic… Please call it what is Emotional and physical outrage. Parents are not sitting around to give you baby cereal messages. We are desperate for help.
If one out of every 70 boys were being kidnapped, tortured, brainwashed, and sent back as zombies the world would wake up and do something. I do not want to obscure anything. I do not want to stop giving people shots. I just want the next generation to endure what we have gone through and get some help today. Call it anything… but please if I at any point am mushy cereal that I spit in my mothers face…I need to go back to university and get another degree.
Everyone has their causes they are passionate about.
By the way Tanners Dad, thousands of children are kidnapped, tortured and worse every day. I hardly see the moral outrage or the entire world doing something about it. But yes, we’ll all rally around autism, it’s about to push the breast cancer awareness cult off the radar, the next hot thing. I vote for a purple ribbon.
Tanner’s Dad… I think you’re missing the point here… You’re assuming that vaccinations cause autism, and study after study suggests that this is not the case.
If you put all of your resources into determining the cause of Autism, then you’re not putting resources into dealing with the problem. Discovering the cause of autism isn’t necessarily going to help the parent trying to get the hug and I love you that you want them to have. Although I will concede that it might help.
I have a very good friend who has 3 severely autistic children. She’ been featured on the cover of Time magazine. So I have great sympathies with parents dealing with Autism. But to start blaming things like vaccines and such, is really not productive. Like my friend says, it doesn’t matter what caused it, she has to deal with the fallout.
Reading your essay I was reminded of some news I read around 5 years ago about a panel of 9 doctors recommending cholesterol levels be reduced below the then guideline. As a further recommendation, greater amounts of statins were to be taken to achieve the new guideline. The next day, I read a follow-up to that article, noting that 8 of the 9 doctors worked for pharmaceuticals that made statin. I believe I used critical thinking in disregarding the panel’s findings or would you say I was just being a cynic?
But, obviously, you think I should not disregard this fellow Offit’s book which denies a connection between autism and vaccines even though he makes money from the use of such vaccines . As part of the reason I shouldn’t dismiss Offit’s book and findings is because of his personal history and behavior which “seem to indicate that he is more concerned about the well being of children than about money and people do speak highly of him.” I’d say, Mike, you’re not demonstrating much critical thinking here. In fact, you sound very naïve.
Okay, you do say “the weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly against there being a meaningful connection.” and then ask, “Why, then, do people still believe that there is a connection?” Using a bit of critical thinking here, I’d say they might think the way I do, viz. that, the pharmaceuticals, since under attack, order studies, with the not very surprising results that their wares don’t do any harm to people. In your critical thinking on this point did you look into who provided the money for the studies or did you just feel the pharmaceutical people seem to be more concerned about the well being of children than about money, and people do speak highly of them?
You write of the people concerned with autism and vaccines as if they were airheads, being lured by the glamour of the actors amongst them. I happened to have been at a number of get-togethers with these people. I would be willing to bet critical thinking is not anything foreign to them, and the actors are not brought in as show pieces but are themselves parents of autistic children.
It’s funny your making a point about the actors and their use of them to lure people to poor judgment. Isn’t that what pharmaceutical companies are doing in their advertisements?
Thats really poor reasoning there. People may be believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. Just because an idea is popular, doesn’t mean its correct. What you have shown, is that the studies have low credibility, and what that means isn’t that their conclusions are incorrect, but that you want more evidence to overcome the bias of the authors.
But I think that the burden of proof is on the people making the claim that autism is caused by vaccinations. Undermining an opposing study doesn’t show that you are right…. It just raises the bar of evidence for the opposing position in terms.
And this is coming from a critical thinking professor.
I’m very sympathetic to autistic parents and children. I’d like to believe that there is a simple cause to the problem, but in reality, its probably far more complex than mercury in vaccinations. If there was a causal relationship between the two, then there would be much more statistical evidence of it, since vaccinations are so common.
Wayne Yuen,
I believe you missed my point. Mike wrote (and I repeat):
“the weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly against there being a meaningful connection.” and then ask, “Why, then, do people still believe that there is a connection?”
He is saying, with this overwhelming evidence these people should not continue having their beliefs. I’m saying, the evidence might not be evidence at all and as such shouldn’t be used to change their beliefs. I think thats creditable logic.
Are you referring to yourself when you say this is coming from a critical thinking professor, or Mike?
I don’t know how many peopple have noticed that all those studies that claim to have disproved linkages between autism and vaccines have categorically ignored all the data showing the existence of the link. Instead they conveniently ignore the hard evidences and concentrate on those statistics that support their argument. Don’t you think that we have a case of “inconvenient truth”?
Ralph Sabella does raise a reasonable point: if the research that failed to find a link between vaccines and autism is influenced by bias, then there would be excellent grounds to be suspicious of the findings. As I note in the original post, bias is a factor that must be considered when assessing credibility.
Of course, even if the research is biased, this does not provide grounds to believe that there is a link between autism and vaccines. What would be needed would, obviously enough, be evidence of a link.
If there is a link between vaccines and autism, it is clearly a very weak causal link. After all, the vast majority of people who are vaccinated are not autistic and autism predates vaccinations. Of course, even a weak causal link is still a causal link.
I am willing to consider the possibility of bias on the part of the researchers who claim there is no link. But, I am also willing to consider the possibility of bias on the part of those who insist there is a link. But, to assume that because a person is an interested party it follows that his/her claims are false is an error (typically called the circumstantial ad hominem).
I would be very much interested in seeing the sources for the hard evidence for the link. My interest is in the truth and the well being of people so if there is hard evidence that vaccines cause autism, then I want to know about that.
Ralph- No I didn’t miss the point at all. I think I completely agreed with you there. You’re raising the bar for the evidence. You haven’t shown that their logic is flawed…. you’ve undermined their credibility by showing bias. But no where do you show a flaw in the research itself. You haven’t undermined the actual evidence, you’ve undermined the source of the evidence.
If the same exact study came from someone more credible, your argument wouldn’t work against it. Like Mike says, Circumstantial ad hominem.
I was referring to myself as the critical thinking professor.
Mike- I agree… I’d like to see the evidence, but as far as I understand there isn’t any, just a deep desire to blame something for their children’s condition.
Tree, Because you complained that someone was being “passive aggressive” toward you on the other thread, this really leaps out at me. What is it when you dismiss the worries of a parent of an autistic child, like Tanner’s Dad? Is that aggressive aggressive?
A friend’s child developed autism after vaccines. She then had to decide whether to vaccinate her next child. She and her husband are smart people–engineers, in fact. I very much doubt they’d do badly in a critical thinking class. Still, this was understandably a very difficult decision for them.
Jean, I have no problem with being labeled aggresive but my intention was not to dismiss the worries of parents of autistic children.
I found it amusing that the first comment to this piece is exactly what the author was pointing out, yet Tanners Dad didn’t seem to see that at all.
My comment speaks more to the way people with their sheep like mentality jump from one cause to another, all puffed up on sentimentality and a false idea of compassion. And of course the ubiquitous ribbon.
I was very serious about one thing. Tanners Dad resorted to the most nauseating form of hyperbole, something I’ve been wrongly accused of, yet the fact is there are many children who are abused, tortured, kidnapped, raped, murdered, and not enough people are doing anything about it.
So, to distill my comments, autism is a tragedy but Tanners Dad needs to get a grip.
Tree, Tanner’s Dad has an autistic child. He gave a link where he talks about it. Sheep? Jumping from cause to cause? His kid has autism, so that’s his cause. Sentimentality? Wouldn’t you be emotional if you had an autistic child? It’s very understandable that parents wonder about the link to vaccines when their kids develop autism right after a vaccination. They could be wrong, but why bash them and dismiss their frustration?
Wayne,
In your first post you quoted me and then said
“Thats really poor reasoning there.”
Now referring to the same quote you say “I think I completely agreed with you there.”
I’m confused. Was there some other passage you found my reasoning incorrect? Looking again at what I submitted, unless someone reads meanings into it, I don’t see much one could argue with.
Also in your first post you wrote “People may be believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. Just because an idea is popular, doesn’t mean its correct.”
I never said the people involved were correct on the issue of autism - vaccine. Also, where did you get this thought that the idea is popular?
Jean, the government has certainly covered up all kinds of scientific evidence in the past. As a so-called DES Daughter, I’m well aware of the consequences of that, but one of the points of this post is how reason goes out the window and is replaced with the kind of thinking perfectly exhibited by Tanners Dad, which doesn’t help anyone.
I’ve already pointed out the serious consequences of what happens when children are not given their shots and I’ve explained what I meant in my first comment, so there’s nothing else to say.
If you want to find something there that isn’t there, go right ahead. I certainly don’t dismiss the struggles parents of autistic children face and I didn’t call Tanners Dad a sheep, I was making a point about human nature in general.
By the way, having had to work with “the sytem” with issues that were emotional to me, I can assure you emotional reacting gets you nowhere. It’s the clear, reasoned argument that has the best effect, although despite that, there are no guarantees it will change anything. Overblown comments like turning kids into zombies are not only ridiculous and offensive but serve no purpose to further the cause.
Tree, I’m not finding something there that isn’t there. Do you every reread your comments? Are you aware of your frequently hostile, dismissive tone?
I’m blunt, rarely if ever hostile, often intolerant of what I see as poor thinking and not worried about disagreeing with others.
I also have my own sense of humor that some here don’t get but I see no reason to modify myself to make others happy.
If I’ve offended anyone, then too bad. If I’ve hurt anyone’s feelings, then I’m sorry. I’ve done my best to stay true to the spirit of the posts while also trying to learn about the people who post here.
What Tree said. That was the same speech Sarah Pallin gave just before getting on the plane back to Alaska.
rtk,
Your above post is disappointing. I don’t really know what S. P. said going back to Alaska, and even if I did, I don’t know your politics, so I don’t really know what you’re trying to say about Tree’s revelation about herself. If it was meant as a zinger, besides going over my head, I think it out of place.
And Tree,
I’m a new kid on the block and would like to continue seeing posts by you. I like your bluntness but don’t like your intolerance to bad thinking. If I could be sure my thinking perfect, I doubt if I’d bother subscribing to these pages.
Ralph: Sarah Pallin is being hounded mercilessly. She was used and misused and is now being abused. She apologized if she offended anyone and she seemed sincere and hurt by all the accusations. She is easy fodder and the press is making the most of it. My politics: I’m appalled that she would be selected, that she could have been considered the alternative to Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, I don’t enjoy seeing anyone bashed like that.
rtk,
Thanks for the clarification.
As to S. P., she’s a politician who doesn’t seem to have any trouble dishing out a lot of her own unpleasant fodder. I doubt if she earned the sobriquet “the pit bull with lipstick” for being cuddly. I wouldn’t worry about her feelings too much.
Thanks, Ralph.