A simple language intervention could help boost vaccination rates, especially when presenting information to people in bilingual populations, according to a new study.

The findings show that between two groups presented with the exact same information about vaccines in two different but familiar languages, the use of one language corresponded to a 7% higher number of people saying “yes” and a 7% lower number of people saying “unsure” when asked about their intent to get vaccinated. The percentage of people saying “no” was about the same in both groups.

“Seven percentage points might not sound like much, but it is actually huge in the context of interventions,” says Boaz Keysar, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “It’s worth doing, because 7% of 10 million people, for example, is a lot of people.”

Bilingual populations exist all over the world, but the contexts in which the different languages they speak are used—and the mental associations people have with those languages—vary greatly from place to place.

According to the researchers, one language might be associated with more public trust than another—and that’s the language that should be used when communicating about things like vaccines.

Keysar’s lab studies the effects of language on decision making and risk assessment. The group studies language as a “frame” that influences how information is perceived, even if it does not change the content of that information.

“It’s impressive that language is so powerful,” says Janet Geipel, psychology postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper, published in Nature: Scientific Reports. “And surprising that simply changing the language in which the vaccine information is presented can influence trust, and subsequently people’s intention to get vaccinated.”

Geipel notes that everything except language was kept constant in the study: the content of the information, the source (a local public health authority), and the approximate sample size of the groups randomly assigned to read the information in each language.

Read the full article about improving trust in COVID vaccines by Max Witynski at Futurity.