The illusion of causality: Please do not forward the following article to your anti-vaccine friends unless you are prepared for an infinite email argument. While the piece is not exclusively about cognitive biases surrounding vaccines, the resulting disagreement will likely be fruitless and bitter. You have been adequately warned.

“Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise.”

Further complicating matters, efforts to educate people on how to avoid this cognitive bias, dubbed ‘causality illusion’ by psychologists, have hit a very significant snag, according to political scientist Brendan Nyhan: “The lesson of controversial political, health and science issues is that people don’t apply their critical-thinking skills in the same way when they have a preference for who’s right.” (Read Your brain is primed to reach false conclusions)