“Hello Professor, I am writing to you because this morning I read your article in Repubblica. I ask you why, if, as you write, the pandemic has put a magnifying glass on our fragility, people instead of relying on science, which tries to help us, I think the real problem is that you no longer trust anything or anyone. Once upon a time we trusted those who were better prepared than us and didn’t always question them. I don’t know if it’s a good thing that today we all think we know everything, I don’t know if it is a new awareness, but there is a lack of reference figures within us “.
This email from a reader arrived a month ago – long before we could imagine no-vax and / or no-pass anger becoming the sounding board of an anti-institutional movement and, like an echo of Capitol Hill. and gilets jaunes, unleashed violently in the street – and summarizes a concept that we have been dealing with for some time and that today we will try to decline in its various aspects.
We begin to call it generically the problem of trust, crucial in everyone’s life and – in the meaning that scientific literature defines today with the expression “epistemic trust” (ie relative to knowledge) – indispensable for understanding the present moment.
At the base of the mistrust towards medical-scientific information (today aimed at vaccine policy and therefore social security in a pandemic) there is a lack of trust in a broader sense that is intertwined with the path of personality development (for this reason we have italicized, in the e-mail of the reader, the expression “inside us”).
“I was no-vax, but I risked dying from Covid. And now I tell you: get vaccinated”
by Fiammetta Cupellaro
Peter Fonagy, director ofAnna Freud Center of London and a well-known scholar of attachment and childhood relationships, defines epistemic trust as the individual ability to consider the knowledge transmitted by another person worthy of trust, generalizable and relevant to oneself. And therefore to consider the other as a reliable source of knowledge.
This adaptive capacity, fundamental for the phylogenetic development of our species, takes shape in the context of the first relationships and allows small human beings to learn from the other the necessary knowledge to orient themselves in the complex world that surrounds them. Trusting the communicator’s authority also means not having to go back to previous knowledge each time new information is encountered.
But what does all this have to do with science and vaccines? We ask you to put up with a few more lines of theory. When the parent wants to communicate to the child the intention of transmitting useful and relevant knowledge, he does so by means of signals called “ostensive” (for example the sharing of the gaze, the smile, the use of an intimate and personalized language, etc.). In this way the communicator explicitly recognizes the listener as an individual with a mind and intentionality.
Vaccines, Covid: if children set a good example
by Giuseppe Lavenia
In fact, in interpersonal exchanges this modality, which is cognitive and affective, facilitates learning. A parent who says to the child: “Are you angry because you were upset that I turned off the television?” he is communicating to the child that he is aware of his “mind” and that he knows and understands his emotional reactions. In this way it helps him to develop both the ability to understand each other and trust in the other.
Within problematic and unsafe relationships, children may be more inclined to develop a self-protective attitude of closure with respect to interpersonal trust, and therefore of epistemic vigilance.
This activation leads to two negative outcomes: a pervasive and petrifying “mistrust” can develop, in which one tends to completely and invariably reject the information that comes from the other; or, on the contrary, one assumes a disposition of “credulity”, whereby one accepts indiscriminately everything that the other proposes. The problem with both strategies, unfortunately often necessary to survive in some families, is that, in the long term, they can reproduce in the school environment (thanks to poor teaching and a lack of attention to the delicate evolutionary paths of epistemic trust) and then turn to the context enlarged, preventing the subject from enjoying the benefits of social learning.
David Quammen: “Citizen health is a topic of national interest. No to pseudo-experts”
by Maurizio Molinari
Without wishing to force the relationship between family and social contexts, the lens of epistemic trust seems useful to us to reflect (and perhaps pedagogically address) some of the current psychosocial crises. Because it is undeniable that behind every social crisis (in particular when it concerns health and the ghosts that the concept of health brings with it), there is always a psychological crisis, which we must know how to look at both from an individual and a collective point of view.
As Freud taught us in part, who in a famous essay combines “psychology of the masses” and “ego analysis” in a single title.
We thus arrive at the present time, supported by the ancient Heraclitean sentence according to which “one’s inner quality, for the human being, is a demon”, even more so when some personal dispositions intersect with social and cultural tendencies favorable to conspiracy readings. For example, those that mark the present moment, the era of “post-truth”. An era in which the empirical evidence of the facts (more vaccines correspond to fewer hospitalizations; more green passes correspond to fewer infections) is daily challenged with emotional appeals to personal beliefs. A process accelerated by the digital revolution which, together with generalized access to information sources (positive, if one is able to discriminate on the web), has brought with it the possibility of spreading manipulated or distorted information at great speed.
Teens worried about the vaccine, the psychologist’s advice
by Giuseppe Lavenia
A typical manifestation of epistemic distrust is the echo chambers, computer resonance chambers (mailing lists, WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, etc.) where the exchange of information takes place within a self-selected and self-referential group.
We know that the no-vax and / or no-pass is a variegated galaxy, which also includes people who possess the cultural tools to understand and weigh scientific information and know how to philosophically articulate their protest against the “health dictatorship”. What we want to suggest is that, beyond attitudes of unscientific obscurantism (present in every era and in many ideological or political tyrannies), the tortuous paths of epistemic distrust can come to reject the progress of medical and scientific research, with their repercussions on the community, in the name of very personal convictions and feelings.
Science gives certainties but cannot always give certainties. There is no science without a doubt. Like all defensive positions, epistemic distrust is a “choice” of self-protective simplification (based on individualism but easily organized in a collective dimension) in the face of a complexity experienced as too uncertain or dangerous. As he writes Donatella Di Cesare in the interesting essay The conspiracy in power: “conspiracy is the immediate reaction to complexity. It is the shortcut, the simplest and fastest way, to get to the head of a world that is now illegible”.
Covid, 3783: the false news of the dead in Italy
Psychological reading alone is not enough. In addition to the rules, it takes a political and cultural investment that believes in the possibility of transforming the mistrust, hesitation, rejection of millions of Italians towards the vaccine and medical science in general. A vision of the entire political community, allied with the scientific one, which helps people to orient themselves in the social and cultural crisis of the post-pandemic.
Unfortunately, many, even in positions of visibility and political responsibility, are rowing against it. Aware of not being able to “convince” everyone, we need to focus on building and financing a more solid relationship between science, medicine and the citizen, a dialogue that starts from schools and reaches hospitals, a teaching that gives priority to scientific evidence , but listen to the emotions in the bud and know how to deconstruct prejudices. It is the only way to hope that, not immediately, but perhaps in a few decades, the number of disheartened, and the most fearful disheartened-angry, can be reduced.
It will not be the State to repair feelings of mistrust born even in childhood, amplified by poor scientific education and then cultivated on the internet, but we are increasingly convinced that the inauguration of a psychology section at the Ministry of (public) health is urgent. (public) health.
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