Covered quite nicely in Jonah Lehrer's "How we decide" which, hang on, lemme find a link... God fucking dammit. Now I need to find a source for this that happens to be true. Piss. Anyway. Lehrer's argument, which may or may not have the vaguest basis in reality, was that anti-vaxxers are the left's equivalent of climate change deniers - and that once your brain gets on a track, it's easier to keep it there than shift out of the rut. Which, now that I type it out, seems kinda hand-wavey.Disgraced pop-journalist Jonah Lehrer's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has just announced that his second book, How We Decide, will be pulled from stores, and customers will be refunded. Michael Moynihan reports on the latest in the Lehrer fiasco.
There was another study I read about once upon a time wherein it was shown that if you remind a judge of his/her own mortality just before issuing a sentence, then the sentence tends to be harsher. I wonder if the same thing is afoot here. The death of oneself may be related to the death of one's beliefs, psychologically speaking, since we tend to think of our beliefs as some of the core things that define us as people.