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The resurgence of measles in the United States has brought vaccine hesitancy and refusal back into the global spotlight. Faced with a retreat in vaccination rates, it’s easy to feel resigned: anti-vaccination ideology has become frustratingly robust.

So far, the medical community’s response to this crisis has consisted of statements from professional organizations and mandates and fines imposed by local authorities faced with outbreaks. These responses have had unclear results. The time has come to develop new solutions.

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Behavioural science, a set of disciplines based in psychology and economics, is particularly promising. Behavioural scientists study how people make decisions and perceive risk, and have applied their findings to many real-world problems. Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine ideology should be next.

Perhaps the best known driver of opposition to vaccines is the debunked connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. This false connection persists in part because of a bias called spurious correlation, which leads us to mistake a temporal association between two events for a causal one. Since a diagnosis of autism, typically made in toddlers, follows the memorable event that is MMR vaccination in one-year-olds, it is wrongly perceived as causing autism.