The evidence is that people don’t like to change beliefs even when confronted with correct information.
Vox has a nice interview with Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan about vaccine skeptics. What can be done to convince them? Brendan does research on political beliefs and has shown that in experimental settings, people don’t like to change beliefs even when confronted with correct information. His experiments show that this is true not only for political beliefs, but also controversial health beliefs like believing in the vaccine-autism link.
But there was an additional section in the interview that I found extremely interesting. Nyhan notes that it is easier to be a vaccine skeptic when you don’t actually see a lot of disease: “… many of the diseases that vaccines prevent today are essentially invisible in the US. Vaccines are a victim of their own success here.” This reminded me of a 2002 paper I wrote on STD/HIV transmission. In a model worked out by Kirby Schroeder and myself about people proposing to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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