Even before COVID turned the world upside down, the World Health Organisation (WHO) identified reluctance to take vaccines as one of the ten biggest threats to global health.
According to the WHO, vaccines prevent millions of deaths globally each year. They are one of the most cost-effective ways of controlling global disease.
But vaccines could still prevent millions more from dying. Unfortunately, there is a long history of distrust and misinformation concerning vaccines – from the notion that the smallpox vaccine was “unchristian” due to its animal origins to the thoroughly debunked myth of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Public health campaigns seek to make people aware of the safety and efficiency of a vaccine. This, however, is an uphill struggle and can sometimes backfire.
For instance, research carried out with parents in the US found that reading information about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, its benefits and the dangers of the diseases it prevents, did not increase the parents’ likelihood to vaccinate a future child. In fact, the information led to parents who were already hesitant about vaccines becoming even less likely to have their children vaccinated.
In a recent study carried out in France, Germany and the UK, my colleagues and I tried to address this problem by enlisting a possibly surprising ally: knowledge of a foreign language.
These three countries have differing levels of vaccine hesitancy. It’s about twice as high in France as in the UK, with Germany somewhere in the middle.
We found that, for people who have English as a second language, reading vaccine information in English made them more likely to get vaccinated than if they read the same information in their native language.
The foreign language effect
Previous research has shown that people tend to approach hypothetical problems in a more rational and less intuitive fashion when these are presented in a language that is not their native one. And this is particularly the case if their proficiency is comparatively low.
This so-called “foreign language effect” may be caused in part by the additional effort of thinking a problem through in a language other than the mother tongue. This may act as a “brake” on fast, intuitive decision-making processes, and promote a rational uptake of information.
We decided to part-replicate a previous research study which had investigated how public health information affected people’s reluctance to take COVID vaccines. However, we changed the language in which our participants read the information.
We recruited 436 people who were native speakers of either English, French or German, and who had learned one of the other two languages in school. We ended up with 156 English native speakers, 109 of who had learned French and 47 had learned German. We also had 131 French and 143 German native speakers, all of whom had English as their second language.
All of the participants in the study told us that they had not been vaccinated against COVID.
Since vaccines had been widely and freely available in the three countries for many months at the time at which we collected our data in December 2021, this was a good indication of a somewhat sceptical pre-disposition towards vaccines. Our baseline vaccine hesitancy measure – a question on when the participant would be willing to take up the offer of a free, safe vaccine – confirmed this.
We split the people into two groups. Some read information about the COVID vaccine in their native language, while the other group read it in their second language. After this, they responded to two standardised measures of vaccine hesitancy.
An English effect?
We found that participants with initially negative attitudes to the vaccine responded more positively on these two measures if they had read the text in their foreign language – but only if that language was English. For the English native speakers, on the other hand, the negative feelings were higher after reading a text in French or German than for those participants who had read it in English.
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This finding represents an interesting twist to our understanding of the foreign language effect, particularly if we keep in mind that English is vastly overrepresented in research on language and linguistics in general and foreign language learning in particular.
It raises the interesting possibility that the foreign language effect may be more of an English language effect. The prestige English enjoys in science, culture and general communication may lend messages framed in this language more power and credibility, in particular for multilingual speakers.
Monika Schmid receives funding from the ESRC and the Dutch National Science Organisation (NWO). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Academia Europaea.
