It would be Immoral to Stop Giving out Herman Cain Awards
The Awards are one of the first truly effective means of vaccine advocacy
The Herman Cain Awards (HCA) are literally saving lives. It would be a legitimate blow to public health to shut them down or otherwise hamper their distribution. I think criticism of the HCAs might only make them more effective, and so I might go so far as to welcome more of it, even as I insist that nothing be done to the subreddit itself. Allow me to explain.
A few weeks ago The Washington Post — quite rightly! — profiled a Facebook moms’ group that was combating vaccine misinformation. This group touted 70,000 members at the time of the article’s writing, and it presented one of the few positive or successful stories about vaccine advocacy during these interminable grinding final months of the pandemic. The HCAs boasts 340,000 members at the time of this article’s writing. For someone familiar with the bloody quagmire that is the usual discussion about vaccines in America, the success the subreddit has had in convincing people to get vaccinated is nothing short of stunning. Filtering the subreddit’s posts by the “IPA (Immunized to Prevent Award)” tag, one sees that over the past two weeks — since the first official IPA post — there has been something like 50 verified pictures of filled-out vaccine cards posted. A post from 4 days ago (at the time of writing) puts the count at 47, and there has been a handful posted since then. The HCAs should be inspiring discussions of their success, not of their tastefulness, with an eye toward understanding what makes them so effective where so many other methods — informed by the best of social psychology and communications science — have flagged, frankly.
In addition to providing a prima facie defense of the HCAs, I would like to posit an explanation for their success. I think it comes down to this simple, almost equation-like statement:
When the imagined embarrassment of being made fun of postmortem outweighs the imagined embarrassment of admitting to themselves that they were misinformed about vaccines, a certain type of person will get vaccinated
That is the simple secret of it, I believe. This is because of another theorem of mine important enough to also be block quoted:
Vaccine misinformation does not work by convincing its audience that it is legitimate or supported by evidence; it works in this same way, but instilling in its audience a fear of embarrassment.
Of course plenty of vaccine misinformation does strive to appear to be scientific and anti-vaxxers themselves are very much serious about their belief that the science is on their side. But I think the overall effect of the tides of vaccine misinformation to which some people are subject comes from threatening people with embarrassment. It’s going to come out in a few years that the vaccine causes cancer/infertility/neurological issues, and you’re going to feel so stupid for following all the sheeple to get it. The endless memes of Fauci, of clueless liberals with diapers photoshopped across their faces; the hysterics-induced Facebook screeds about the child abuse that is cloth face coverings; dire warnings on TikTok that the vaccines will turn everyone into I am Legend style nightwalkers — — these things don’t work on some Bayesian analysis being unknowingly run by the individual viewers of the media. Rather they work on a much more gut, more visceral worry that one will be made out to be a mark, a rube.
This threat is made endlessly by sources and consumers of vaccine misinformation. These people are not simply emitting waves of unconvincing scientific info (why might they be so successful, then, on those terms alone?) but are in a more important sense sending signal after threatening signal to their audience: don’t be the sucker — you’re not a sucker are you? — maybe I was wrong, maybe you are a sucker. (All of the researchers explaining the Elaboration Likelihood Model to worried audiences were right: they were just wrong about what the peripheral route of persuasion was. It wasn’t getting pro-vaccine info from within your social network: it was getting pro-vaccine messages that worked on this threat of embarrassment.)
The HCAs are one of the most effective methods by which pro-vaccine messages can be delivered along this route of persuasion. I believe that the awards will continue to change behavior and save lives. If it seems tasteless and crude, I would say the theory outlined in this short note suggests that this is to be expected: the HCAs work along the same pathways as the memes and canards that carry vaccine misinformation; just as these must seem cruel and tasteless to their out-group, so too must the HCAs. It’s a bitter medicine. But I think an effective one.
