The Just World Fallacy and a sense of control

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/vitamin-a-and-measles-what-the-data

This post, by Your Local Epidemiologist, makes a good point about people gravitating to nutrition and other solutions to infectious disease, rather than vaccination, because they want to feel a sense of control over their environment. It’s very difficult and scary for humans to accept the randomness inherent in the natural world; we’d rather have a way to say “I am controlling what happens to me,” and controlling what food goes into your body is a natural extension of that.

Vaccines are abstract (and still a numbers game; even 99% efficacy is still not 100% efficacy), and they don’t provide the soothing effect that “actively choosing your food every day” would provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy

The Just World Hypothesis is comforting for that same reason of control. We want to feel like good things happen to us because we made good decisions; bad things happen to others because they made bad decisions; and bad things happen to us for reasons we could not control. Nobody wants to confront the harsh reality that sometimes, bad things can happen even to people who made all the right decisions.

Anyway, go read the YLE essay. It’s very good.