Winning is understanding

Conversations about vaccines are dominated by a loud minority. While most people have opinions, many don't share them. Especially when the topic feels charged or socially risky. You can sense it in group chats, at family dinners, in workplaces. The volume comes from a small slice of people. The rest are listening, watching, and deciding whether it's safe to speak. When you only hear from the most vocal, you end up designing for them, missing the chance to actually understand everyone else. When you only measure what people will say in public or select in a survey, you miss what people are actually uncertain about, what they're skeptical of, and what they're reluctant to repeat. We built Goodbit to listen to the quieter majority. In January, we used Goodbit to explore how 365 Canadians think and talk about measles vaccines.

Most responses to vaccine skepticism default to debate mode. More facts, more citations, more rebuttals. That approach has a place, but it often misses what makes misinformation effective in the first place. Much of it doesn't win by being "more correct." It wins by being more emotionally convincing. It plays on identity, mistrust, and social risk. So our goal wasn't to pick fights over facts. Instead, we focused on something more practical: helping people recognize manipulation tactics — the moves that prioritize winning an argument over understanding the person you're talking to. Think of it as teaching warning signs, not just teaching answers.

In January, 365 Canadians used Goodbit to talk about measles. It opens with a fast, gamified experience that grounds people with verified information through play. Then it goes deeper: a one-on-one conversation picks up where the game leaves off, exploring what landed, what didn't, and why. Before we started, people already knew about three-quarters of the manipulation tactics we'd cover. After the game, that climbed above 80%. But knowing isn't the same as doing. On questions like "would you pause before sharing a post?", 5 to 8 percent more people said yes. By standard intervention metrics, you'd call it a success and move on. But the follow-up told a more complicated story. Rural participants started slightly behind but learned more — scores jumped 12 points after the game vs. only 6 for urban. And yet only 27% of rural participants said they'd share correct information, compared to 40% of urban. The game did its job — information landed. But for the people who learned the most, trust didn't follow.

About a quarter of participants brought up COVID unprompted. Not because we asked — we were talking about measles — but because that's what the word "vaccine" now triggers for a lot of people. And what they described wasn't skepticism about biology. It was skepticism about institutions. Some participants described the game as feeling like being "talked at." The conversation landed differently: it felt like thinking through a problem with someone, not being instructed. Several said it actually changed how they felt about the whole experience. The most unexpected finding was about the people who already supported vaccines. Many said the conversation made them more sympathetic to vaccine-hesitant people. Not because their views changed, but because they heard the reasoning behind hesitancy in a way they hadn't before. This is what Goodbit is built for: the format works on the whole system — not just skeptics, but how skeptics and non-skeptics see each other.

Traditional public health interventions often measure effectiveness by whether people learned the right answers. That's necessary but insufficient. Someone can know that measles is dangerous and still not trust the people telling them so. The gap between learning and trust is where most interventions stop working. And in our work with Canadians, that gap was widest exactly where the learning gains were largest — among rural participants who absorbed more information but remained more skeptical about what to do with it. Conversation doesn't close that gap automatically. But it makes the gap visible, which is the first step to actually addressing it. If you're trying to get people to talk with each other about hard things, that difference is the whole game.