Inoculation effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article.
Please improve it or discuss changes on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.

In communication theory, the inoculation effect refers to a strategy of prejudicing one's audience against an opposing argument they may hear in the future.

For example, a Catholic priest may warn his audience that 'the devil' will tell them that the use of condoms is acceptable, with the expectation that his audience will be so advised by a government speaker. If a government representative later raises the issue with a member of the priest's audience, the representative is likely to find that audience member has pre-judged the speaker's argument, as the audience member associates such an argument with diabolic influences.

Another example is acknowledging the validity of an opposing argument before the evidence supporting it becomes available, reducing the resulting controversy when the evidence becomes widely known. For example, when the British government realised a report on Iraq was going to be published, the government officials publicly admitted that Iraq likely never had weapons of mass destruction. This dented the outcry that the published report would have originally generated.

Inoculation effect can also be used in medicine to refer to the body's response to an introduction of a vaccine through a process called inoculation. It is also used in psychology, for example, to sensitise and prime people to being able to handle stress (see stress inoculation).