Dr. Lewandowsky talks vaccine messaging

What are some empathetic approaches to vaccine communication with people who are hesitant?

This was the topic of CHIBE’s virtual seminar series talk with Stephan Lewandowsky, PhD, MA, Chair in Cognitive Science and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol, on September 25, 2026.

Dr. Lewandowsky discussed the Empathetic Refutational Interview (ERI) technique that helps health care professionals speak with vaccine-hesitant patients.        

The technique has 4 steps:

• elicit patients’ concerns about vaccination
• affirm their values and beliefs to the extent possible
• refute the misinformed beliefs in a way that is tailored to a person’s underlying psychological motivations
• provide factual information about vaccines

CHIBE spoke with Dr. Lewandowsky about this technique of communicating with patients.

How can you refute misinformed vaccine beliefs in a way that is tailored to the person’s underlying psychological motivations?

The basic idea behind the ERI is that people have different reasons for being vaccine hesitant – some are afraid of side effects, others don’t like to be told what to do by doctors or the government, and yet others do not trust the pharmaceutical industry to produce a safe product.

We tailor each conversation by letting people explain their reasons for being hesitant about being vaccinated, and we then affirm those underlying reasons – without however endorsing their specific false beliefs, if any.

Once we have affirmed their underlying beliefs, thereby making the conversation far less threatening, we can pivot to a refutation of misinformed beliefs – and people are quite receptive to that because the threat to their deeply-held attitudes has been eliminated.

What do you see as the most common mistakes that people make when trying to encourage vaccination?

Most health care professionals are actually very good at talking to their patients: even in our control conditions, where we don’t use the ERI, communication can be successful.

However, if I had to identify anything that might be counterproductive it’s to tell people what to do, or to throw information at them without first listening to them.

Information is valuable, but if it is misdirected or people aren’t prepared to absorb it, then it will have little impact.

The key thing is to meet people where they are, and you can only do that if you listen to them first.

Now that you’ve developed this technique, how do you see it being rolled out more broadly in a clinical setting?

We have trained nearly 300 health professionals in the UK in this technique, and we are able to continue doing this even though the research project has concluded because we have set up a not-for-profit spinout company that is offering training.

The ERI only takes 5-10 minutes to administer, but it takes at least a day to learn how to apply the technique. In principle, there is no reason this couldn’t be scaled up so most professionals at the coal face are skilled in administering the ERI.