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I don’t want to come down with COVID!
So I’ve stayed away from crowds, indoors and out, and I’ve been vigilant about keeping my distance from others, especially indoors, especially when I could not know if those others had been vaccinated. I got my shot the very first day that it was available. And, of course, I began wearing a mask whenever other human beings were in sight.
This past spring, which I think of as the post-vaccine, pre-Delta period, I felt it was time to make a small comeback toward normalcy. My wife and I enjoyed occasional dinners with one other couple—indoors—as long as they were vaccinated. I went to a Red Sox game, outdoors but still pretty high density. And I started to grocery shop without a mask. For me, this was the re-establishment of my “freedom,” the feeling that since I’d been vaccinated, I could finally begin to throw off the Fauci-recommended, but self-imposed restrictions on my behavior. And I told myself that I fully expected that the re-establishment of my old behavior patterns would continue in this direction–assuming there were no surprises or setbacks.
Damn you, Delta.
So now I’m back to my conservative ways, which means that when I go to the store, when I go inside in any public space, I wear my mask. No, I don’t really like wearing a mask, but yes, I understand that they are the greatest protection I can have against infection, and no, it’s hard for me to understand how or why anyone else would act differently.
But a lot of people object. They insist that masks are not necessary. They’re not comfortable. They’re not effective. So, they say, I’m not going to wear one, and you better not tell me that I have to. No mask mandates. You can’t take away my freedom!
Before I begin to bemoan what some have called a new and modern need to resist authority, let me offer two bits of information that put these anti-mask tendencies into historical perspective.
First, in 1911 during the height of the Spanish flu, the Anti-Mask League was formed in San Francisco. The members of this protest movement argued strenuously that masks were ineffective and inconvenient, and asserted that any requirement to wear masks was an assault on their civil liberties. That’s 100 years ago, and apparently it never spread far beyond the City by the Bay. Thank God that Twitter and TikTok were not around then.
Second, in the 1960’s a social psychologist named Jack Brehm proposed a concept that he labeled “reactance.” Arguing that people resist any effort that attempts to rob them of their sense of personal control, Brehm said that the moment you threaten a person’s autonomy, the moment you appear to attack one’s freedom of choice by saying YOU MUST, there is something about the human condition that throws people into action, that motivates them to do everything they can to say, “You can’t tell me what I can and cannot do, damnit.”
You MUST NOT read the rest of this article.
So are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t? If your mask request is of the “Please, pretty please” variety, you probably won’t provide sufficient motivation for those who are resistant to move an inch. But if you go to the opposite extreme and say “You’d better” or “You must,” then won’t we get those old reactance juices start flowing, with the end result a backlash rather than a change.
Might we try to turning the tables on reactance by telling others, “Wearing a mask is your expression of freedom. It says, ‘I can do anything I want, go anywhere I please, without endangering myself or others.’” Maybe the wearing of a mask can be an assertion of one’s autonomy—don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t wear one! (It’s worth a try.)
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Although Kruscontrol is not meant to be a “scholarly” site, I must give credit where credit is due to two interesting reactance-related papers, both of which informed this posting. The first is “A 50 year review of psychological reactance theory: Do not read this article” by Ben Rosenberg and Jason Siegel (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-56961-001). The second is “Negative aspects about facemasks during the COVID-19 pandemic: The dual importance of perceived ineffectiveness and psychological reactance” by Steven Taylor & Gordon Asmundson (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246317).
