We hope to contribute to ongoing and future work with health and inoculation theory by proposing new applied and theoretical areas for this important scholarship—work that pushes forward our understanding of persuasion and has applied value as a health messaging strategy to help combat serious threats to healthy living.
Josh Compton, Ben Jackson, & James Dimmock
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00122/full
Inoculation theory, a theory of conferring resistance to persuasive influence, has established efficacy as a messaging strategy in the health domain. In fact, the earliest research on the theory in the 1960s involved health issues to build empirical support for tenets in the inoculation framework. Over the ensuing decades, scholars have further examined the effectiveness of inoculation-based messages at creating robust positive health attitudes. We overview these efforts, highlight the structure of typical inoculation-based health messages, and describe the similarities and differences between this method of counter-persuasion and other preparatory techniques commonly employed by health researchers and practitioners. Finally, we consider contexts in which inoculation-oriented health messages could be most useful, and describe how the health domain could offer a useful scaffold to study conceptual issues of the theory.
Compton, J., Jackson, B., & Dimmock, J. A. (2016). Persuading others to avoid persuasion: Inoculation theory and resistant health attitudes. Frontiers in Psychology 7 (122). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00122
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