A large number of President Donald Trump’s supporters began wearing masks in mid-2020 after their leader urged them to do so — and now, a scientific paper explains the psychology behind why they did so, per PsyPost.
“Political leaders play a potentially important role shaping behaviors and beliefs during crises. In the pandemic, a number of high-status politicians, notably leaders of populist parties, were seen to diminish compliance with institutional recommendations by casting doubt on COVID guidelines,” proclaimed the abstract of a recent study by Bartholomew A. Konechni, a sociologist at Sciences Po Paris, published in the journal American Sociological Review. “But what happens when such leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviors?”
Konechni analyzed data of more than 5,000 patients from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel to study how millions of Trump’s supporters switched from refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic to embracing them, entirely because of Trump saying on July 1, 2020, that he started wearing them because he thought doing so made him look like the Lone Ranger. He learned that when Trump made his announcement that he would wear masks, it closed the gap between Republican and Democratic compliance by roughly 40 percent, particularly among individuals who were more exposed to the early-summer spikes in COVID-19. Yet this did not mean that they necessarily abandoned their original anti-mask views.
“In contrast to expectations from most dominant theoretical models of behavioral change, especially the health belief model, no corresponding shift in beliefs about facemasks can be detected,” Konechni wrote. “These results have important theoretical implications for understanding how pivots can shape behaviors during crises, the validity of existing models in public health, pandemic populism’s causes, and directions of future research.”
PsyPost’s Karina Petrova elaborated on what exactly happened.
“Such a disconnect might seem unusual, but sociologists have documented similar patterns in everyday life,” Petrova wrote. “College students often drink heavily in public to fit in with peers, even if they privately disapprove of binge drinking. Parents sometimes refuse childhood vaccinations based on suspicion, but they will accept a vaccine for themselves under intense workplace pressure. Social expectations frequently push people into actions they do not intellectually endorse.”
Konechni found that Trump’s “Lone Ranger” comment worked because many of Trump’s supporters were “living in states where the outbreak was spiking the hardest. This suggests that the severity of the crisis acted as a catalyst. When people are navigating immediate danger, they may look to their preferred leaders for survival cues. They might follow those cues for group solidarity or out of plain anxiety, bypassing the need to logically validate the underlying science.”
Petrova added, “There are limitations to this analysis that warrant attention. The study used self-reported data. Survey participants might have altered their answers simply to project loyalty to their political camp instead of accurately reporting their habits. The focus on a single political figure during a rare global disaster also restricts how broadly these lessons can be applied.”
Yet the science journalist continued, “Face masks were highly visible and novel, which might separate them from more private medical choices like taking a pill. Trump also commands a decidedly unique relationship with his base. The results from this specific historical moment may not translate seamlessly to a standard politician asking their constituents to eat less sugar or exercise more frequently. Future studies might explore how strong social networks shape these reactions, or how long such unanchored behaviors can be realistically maintained.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2021, Dr. Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, said that “when we’re engaging [in] motivated reasoning, we tend to hold evidence to a lower threshold of quality before we believe it’s true. A person trying to justify a belief they have might ask themselves ‘can I’ believe this to be true, while a person trying to refute a belief they’d rather not have holds evidence to a higher standard, asking themselves ‘must I’ believe this to be true. Both are motivated approaches to evaluating evidence. The first can lead us to accept weak evidence in support of a belief, while the latter can lead us to be overly skeptical of good evidence.”