Soldiers in a Skinner Box
Preface: I’m writing this article for the vaccine hesitant. I’m not going to use the term “anti-vaxxer” to refer to all of you, because I find that term is hurled around as a pejorative. In the interest of a respectful discussion, if you’re opposed to the idea of getting a vaccine you’re a VH in my eyes.
As Ontario bears the full brunt of the Omicron variant, the digital landscape has been non-stop outrage, fear, and finger-pointing. Some of those fingers have pointed at the provincial government, the federal government, but without a doubt, most of the blame has been aimed at people who are not vaccinated.
It started with the introduction of the vaccine passport program and associated mandates. Other provinces all over Canada have their own version of enforcing proof of vaccination for entry into certain businesses/events like restaurants, gyms, or sporting events.
And as many of you have voiced your opposition to these mandates, the response from the media at large has been that of dismissal and mockery.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair.
To be clear, I have a background in the life sciences. I support a mandate to have as many people vaccinated as possible. But, like any good scientist should, I want to understand the bigger picture to offer an explanation for my observations. And I’m here today to express some sympathy for your perspective and explain to you why it’s likely you hold the views you do.
Even if I disagree with them.
I’ll also investigate how you are almost all victims — but not in the way you think.
First, some background.
Opposition to vaccines is not a new thing. People have been voicing their public opposition to vaccinations — mandatory or voluntary — for hundreds of years. In response to the smallpox epidemic that ravaged Europe during the 18th century, a vaccine was developed by British Physician Edward Jenner to combat the disease in 1796. By 1853, vaccination against smallpox was mandatory in the UK. Failure to comply was met with a fine or imprisonment.
While the smallpox vaccine was a medical miracle (Jenner’s work is attributed to saving more lives than any other person in history), the opposition to the mandates is understandable now that we understand the historical context behind them.
Widespread protests to the mandatory vaccination laws were led by a group of primarily working class people. These were the same group of people who led protests some 20 years earlier that railed against the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This act proposed that unemployed people must labour in workhouses for food, often under conditions of exploitation, child labour and family separation.
The first documentation from an anti-vaccination group was traced back to the Anti-Vaccination League (founded in 1866). Smallpox vaccinations were promoted heavily in the USA after outbreaks appeared towards the end of the 19th century. The Anti Vaccination Society of America (1879), the New England Anti Compulsory Vaccination League (1882), and the Anti-vaccination League of New York City (1885) were all founded in response. Anti vaccination protests continued against the smallpox vaccine well into the early 20th century.
1918: A demonstration against mandatory smallpox vaccination in Toronto, Canada.Credit: Ts/Keystone USA/Shutterstock
Anti-vaccination sentiment was largely quiet from the 1920s to the 1970s, despite numerous vaccines being developed for a whole swath of diseases. But in 1982, a documentary called “DPT: Vaccine Roulette” came out and once again brought anti-vaccination concerns to a national audience.
Anti-vaccination hype peaked once again in 1998 when Andrew Wakefield published a now infamous study in the British Medical Journal The Lancet that has since been retracted due to conflict of interest concerns and data quality issues. The study reported a link between the MMR vaccine for measles and autism. The study was retracted 12 years after publication. Consequently, vaccination rates fell following its publication and in 2014, the US experienced its highest incidence rate of measles since the disease was eradicated in 2000.
That brings us to today. Concerns over the COVID-19 vaccination are wildly popular, and mandatory vaccination stances like those of the Canadian Government have been met with fierce opposition.
So despite my pro-vaccine tone, why am I declaring you all victims in this situation?
Let’s look at things through an economic and moral lens first.
As mentioned before, the individuals protesting mandatory vaccinations in the UK were overwhelmingly working class. This makes sense when you think about it: here is a group of individuals who have been historically oppressed and exploited by their government. They have less formal education to grasp the science behind the vaccine, and as a result of their oppression, are (justifiably so) not big fans of the government. Why would they take orders from a government that has shit on them endlessly throughout time?
We also have to look at this from a moral point of view. Specifically, something called the Moral Foundations Theory. Basically, there are 6 Moral Foundations present in society: Care/Harm, Fairness, Purity, Loyalty, Authority, and Liberty. Research shows that vaccine hesitant people rank high in Purity and Liberty, but Care/Harm and Fairness morals are not a factor in their VH beliefs.
What that means is that people like you who are opposed to vaccines largely hold those beliefs because they believe that vaccines are impure/dangerous and that doing so is a violation of their personal freedoms. People like you might also be opposed to things like widespread GMOs in food or mandatory water fluoridation in city water supplies. Politically, you’re likely aligned as more conservative or libertarian.
For those of us in the smug, pro-vaccine camp who think dunking on anti-vaxxers is cool, we likely have a few things going for us:
- We’re probably more educated in the traditional sense (and as a result, probably make more money)
- Our jobs (and lives overall) are probably far less stressful (exception of course to any health-care workers)
- Our social circles and moral beliefs are probably aligned with acceptance of a social contract like vaccinations
Why might this be?
Think about it: our society places a premium on higher education and work that involves knowledge. Someone good at acquiring knowledge generally ranks high in other progressive/liberal facets like openness to new experiences and high social trust/cooperation. We’re open to receiving new information and we’re trusting of those who share it with us. We also have more stable environments that have bred these characteristics within us, so it makes sense that most pro-vaccine, pro-science people have high levels of trust in their government, corporations, and each other.
What about the VHs like you? Well, you’re likely working in jobs that aren’t in government or corporate environments. Instead, you are likely victims of either or both of these large institutions. Most governments today are effectively a large jobs program for university graduates. Ditto for most corporate HQ jobs. Instead, many people in the VH camp are victims of bad government policy and shitty, low paid work that large corporations rely on.
So if you’re a little pissed off about something you don’t fully understand and that you’re psychologically and morally predisposed to, are you really the ones to blame here?
Speaking of psychological factors, let’s explore that a bit more shall we?
I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg realized how much Facebook would fuck up society when he was creating it. But it has mutated into the single most incredible weapon of our time.
As I have explored in great detail before, the internet is a wildly personalized place. My experience online is entirely unique to me; there are as many architectures of the internet as there are users. That is mind-shredding levels of complex. This is the sort of thing that people ignore when they get mad at others online.
“Why doesn’t [group I’m mad at] understand my point of view?!” people decry.
It’s because that group doesn’t even have access to your point of view. Between search engines and social media — in other words, where the internet starts and stops for most people — groups with opposing viewpoints do not cross paths very often. And when they do, such as in the comments on a newspaper article on Facebook, look out.
Why does this happen?
Search engines like Google are designed to optimize the experience for the individual. They learn from your past history to predict what you’ll be most interested in. Google is not interested in serving you the objective truth; they are interested in optimizing their profile of what you like so that they can serve you with the best targeted ads possible. After all, that’s how they make money. Search engines are confirmation bias playing out in real time.
Ditto for social media. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok all make money from your attention by serving you ads. Their key metric is as many eyeballs on screens watching content on their platforms for as long as possible. Maximized attention = maximized revenue. They use their superior technology powered by advanced algorithms to sell your attention in the form of potential ad revenue to companies.
The objective truth is not a business outcome for search engines or social media companies. This is compounded by the fact that, on social media, misinformation/fake news spreads faster than content that’s true.
Why?
Because of the emotions that a fake article will elicit — outrage and surprise — are also correlated with the highest degree of virality. Content that pisses people off will get more likes, shares, retweets, and comments then truthful, boring content will. It’s why modern journalism is mostly dogshit. Even factual articles are twisted to exaggerate headlines or mislead using inflammatory language, suggestive thumbnail images, or by purposefully omitting key details and context in the story. More clicks on the story means more ad revenue. It’s all about attention.
So what do the business models of social media, digital media, and search engines have to do with why VHs are victims?
The above image shows a Skinner Box, named for American psychologist B.F. Skinner. One of the pioneers in the field of Behaviourism, Skinner used these boxes to demonstrate a concept called “operant conditioning”. Basically, the premise was that an animal in the box, like a rat, would alter their behaviour based on external stimuli from their environment (introduced by the experimenter). So if the rat pressed a lever and food came out, it would probably do it again. But if the rat pressed the lever and it got a mild electric shock, it would probably avoid the lever.
The modern internet is basically one big Skinner box, and we’re all rats in our own version of it. Social media companies know this, and we’re all being guided towards certain behaviours as a result of their stimuli as they run experiments on our behaviour. Algorithms serve us with articles, posts, memes, etc. that are all designed to make us pay attention to them. If we skip over certain types of content, the algorithm learns from us and adjusts in real time. This is why AI research at all of these companies is so highly prized. The smartest social media sites garner the most attention, and can thus charge more for ads.
Social media is awash with all sorts of content producers vying for their attention. If VHs like you are already predisposed to liking certain types of content that demonstrate a vaccine-skeptical point-of-view, social media algorithms will serve them more of the same content, or content that’s closely related — like articles questioning the government, the dangers of water fluoridation, or news about the QAnon conspiracy.
I believe that VHs are not completely at fault for their beliefs. We are predisposed to certain moral leanings from birth, and they are only reinforced within our environment. Acting on those beliefs is another thing entirely, but depending on where you sit on the whole free will spectrum, there could be an argument made for that as well.
So who’s really at fault here?
Any sort of counterculture movement needs leadership to be effective. Just ask the Occupy Movement. Anti-vaccination groups are no different. William Tebb was a prominent leader of smallpox anti-vaccination efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Andrew Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy, and Jenny McCarthy are all prominent advocates of the stance that vaccines cause autism. There are a whole swath of others, including the Disinformation Dozen as discussed in this report, who produce the majority of anti-vaccination content on social media.
These people all have one thing in common: they are profiting from your attention. They run websites that make money from ad traffic, product purchases, and affiliate marketing sales. They produce false/misleading information and prey upon the common psychological traps that many VHs fall into. They are grifters, claiming that big corporations are the enemy while simultaneously benefiting from the situation. Many of the disinformation dozen have become millionaires off the backs of their working class followers.
In my view, it is individuals like these, not the masses, that should have harsher penalties applied to them. While it may satisfy the martyr complex that these individuals have built up (e.g. if they’re shut down or silenced, that only proves their point), but by coming down harshly on these individuals for endangering public health, we limit the spread of their harmful misinformation on social media.
Similar to these individuals is the role of foreign interference through internet troll farms. Something that you might not be aware of is the role that countries like Russia play in manipulating public opinion on topics like COVID-19. According to an internal report by Facebook that has been published by MIT Technology Review, troll farms reached over 140 million people during the 2020 American Election.
What is a troll farm? It’s a cyber warfare operation deployed by countries like Russia whose sole purpose is to disrupt democratic societies by fanning the flames of hot button topics like COVID-19 or race relations. Basically, they function like Bart Simpson in this classic scene from S6E21 that lampoons the bank scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
A troll farm will run something like a Facebook page and spread memes with a particular political slant. They might not state the obvious, but the political bias that these pages have is quite clear. What’s alarming about the Facebook report is that the majority of the most popular Facebook pages that target Christians, African-Americans, and Native Americans, were all run by troll farms!
Imagine setting Bart Simpson loose in a bank full of 140 million people. That’s the damage these troll farms cause. So again, it’s not the fault of the VHs that they’re being manipulated. They are being directly targeted by foreign propaganda networks and are merely pawns in a game of geopolitical chess.
The other players at fault here are the social media companies themselves. They have played a key role in the distribution and rapid spread of misinformation since these platforms gained massive popularity. By not banning all of these individuals and the associated misinformation content from their platforms, social media companies are complicit in the damage that this false information has caused in our society.
Two things that I believe all VHs should do:
- Understand the architecture of the internet and tactics of social media companies. Learn about how you are being manipulated and are merely a rat in a Skinner Box being steered towards a particular set of beliefs with others who are similar to you.
- Read Dune. Seriously. The entire book is about the dangers of charismatic leaders and the choices people must make for the betterment (or destruction) of all humanity. Understanding one of the core messages of this book is critical to understanding the dangers of following seemingly rebellious leaders who are nothing more than attention grifters that are after your time and money as they use you and other followers as disposable pawns in their quest for power.
My advice for everyone who is pro-vaccination, pro-science in this discussion: for fuck’s sake be patient and civil. Dunking on VHs isn’t cool or edgy, it’s cruel and boring. I get it: it’s frustrating as hell to watch this shitshow from the sidelines as we wait for the world to get back to normal (whatever the hell that’s going to mean a year from now). However, you need to understand that aiming your frustrations at VH people simply distracts from the bigger issue: corporate and government responsibility.
I hope that after reading this you understand that VHs are largely not at fault and all you’re doing is playing into the game that social media companies profit from. It’s hard to do — I’m guilty of it myself — but try your best to understand how you are a but minor character within this large system called the internet.
So please, don’t be some smug asshole who thinks they’re better than the VHs. If you’re as smart as you think you are, then this essay should have presented compelling evidence that you simply lucked out by being born into the right environment. If you were born into an environment typical of a VH person, you too would be lining up to buy merch from Chris Sky and sharing bullshit videos on Instagram. Let’s stop pretending that we’re better than others and aim our frustrations at the institutions with all of the power and influence.