The United States has seen an internal battle these past months about wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Despite nearly 700,000 COVID-related deaths in the country, only 55% of Americans are fully vaccinated.
Beyond politics, many people who refuse to wear a mask cite an infringement upon their civil liberties and personal freedom, among other reasons, according to an aptly titled article, “Why are Americans so angry about masks?” from the BBC.
Similarly, the people who refuse to get vaccinated often have a lack of trust in vaccines, believe in a conspiracy theory and/or don’t believe COVID-19 is a real threat.
All of these reasons are emotional reasons, and as irrational as they may be, these reasons aren’t necessarily wrong for the people who believe in them. And right now, too many of the counter messages are based on logic. For example:
- World Health Organization: “Getting vaccinated may also protect people around you, because if you are protected from getting infected and from disease, you are less likely to infect someone else.”
- CDC: “COVID-19 vaccines were developed using science that has been around for decades” and “COVID-19 vaccines are not experimental.”
Plus, we’ve seen people use analogies, such as riding on airplanes (“putting trust in a metal tube”), wearing seatbelts (“they don’t protect you in all crashes”) and doing your own research. Unfortunately, these analogies, which are based on logic, won’t change the minds of people who have drawn a line in the sand emotionally. It’s the equivalent of trying to reason with a toddler–in other words, impossible.
As we know in the world of marketing, emotion sells better than logic. It’s why Apple shows a grandparent seeing his grandchild for the first time using FaceTime on an iPhone instead of going over the technical specs.
Thus, the messages about wearing masks and getting vaccinated need to target people’s hearts, not their heads. In fact, an article about the psychology of the non-mask wearers and non-vaccinated says to try “an empathetic approach that seeks to understand the varying motivations of different groups of people, including whether there is psychological reactance at play, and then tailor messages to individuals accordingly.”