COVID safety precautions are as important as ever. Here's how to persuade resisters.

As COVID rates continue to climb in the U.S. and health experts disagree on the best way forward, we face a critical question: How can we promote compliance with established safety measures such as social distancing and wearing masks?

This is a particularly relevant question as President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office, as chronic polarization has turned a public health matter into a deeply political one, with a fast-widening gap between liberals and conservatives on everything from causes of the pandemic to the merits of compliance with safety measures. It is also important as a more contagious variant of coronavirus spreads, and vaccinations tempt people to abandon precautions before it's safe.

In this context, the stakes of promoting compliance with safety measures are especially high, as recent research suggests that consumers, more than policymakers or organizations, are expected to shoulder much of the burden of protecting collective health in this stage of the pandemic. Closing the gap between conservatives and liberals when it comes to masks, social distancing, and other measures is critical.

A COVID ideology gap from the start

My forthcoming research with Jiaqian Wang illuminates how early in the pandemic the gap began, and points to ways of reducing it by customizing messaging around safety precautions to different audiences.

The divide between conservatives and liberals around coronavirus perceptions and precautions started early. We found that in mid-March, still the early days of the U.S. COVID crisis, conservatives lagged liberals in terms of their perceptions of vulnerability to the coronavirus and willingness to comply with safety measures. Nine days later, conservatives’ perceived vulnerability had caught up with that of liberals, but their interest in compliance still lagged.

Fast forward to fall of 2020, where my ongoing research suggests not much has changed, with a gap between liberals and conservatives on both perceived vulnerability to the COVID threat and willingness to comply with public-health-preserving tactics. President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to wear a mask in social situations and downplaying of COVID’s health effects — even after he was infected — is a case in point.

Indeed, my ongoing research shows a strong link between belief in the president and lower compliance with safety measures. We asked participants, “Is Donald Trump doing a good job dealing with COVID-19?” Those who said “yes” were less likely to comply in general; moreover, within that group, people who responded more quickly were even less compliant, a trend that intensified from April to September of this year.

Conservatives are more likely to advocate personal responsibility, and thus see preventative actions — like social distancing — as having less impact on the health of others, as separate research shows. That’s from one of the studies my co-editor Kelly Goldsmith and I recently accepted for the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Starting this month, we will feature 20 articles in two special issues to provide insights on pandemic-related consumer behavior, including those presented below.

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Research done by me and others suggests strategies for closing the ideology-based compliance gap. For example, my work with Jiaqian Wang sheds light on what kinds of messaging around compliance might appeal to different groups. Specifically, we found that matching message to identity type — individually oriented (more typical of conservatives, as suggested above) versus collectively oriented (more common in liberals) — promoted compliance. “Help yourself stay healthy” motivated those with individual orientations to consider mask-wearing and social distancing, while “Keep America safe from the coronavirus” appealed to people focused on broader community welfare.

Shape messages to fit audience

This fits with other findings that show conservatives are more likely to respond to messaging about how compliance will benefit them personally, and with separate results showing that messages that aligned health goals with political identity — emphasizing economic benefits for conservatives and public health for liberals — yielded greater compliance with safety measures. Another study found that conservatives are more likely to comply with safety measures when they see the coronavirus as having greater agency, or ability to make choices and control its own actions. Together, these findings can help shape health-related messaging by state and local governments, based on the predominant audience identity type.

But on other dimensions we are more similar than we are different. For example, presenting COVID-related statistics — such as number of cases or deaths — captured by AI-based means (such as web-scraping) tends to be less motivating than figures generated by humans, as people see the AI-generated numbers as less reflective of human lives. So, downplaying the role of AI in data collection and emphasizing manual collection elements and human input into in the design of relevant algorithms seems warranted.

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Similarly, separate research showed that “anthropomorphizing” COVID-19, or describing it as having human-like qualities (such as being a “killer” or “burglar”), motivated people in general to take safety precautions. Finally, research on persuasion highlighted whom we should target with compliance-related messaging: Rather than aiming for people who disagree with your viewpoint (about wearing masks, for example), targeting those already leaning toward your position will be a much more efficient use of resources, as they are more likely to change behavior.

The pandemic won’t end soon, nor will the compliance gap between those on opposite sides of the ideological fence. The ideas and advice here can help close that gap and move us toward a safer public health environment for all.

Angela Y. Lee is a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Follow her on Twitter: @angelay33

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID vaccine: Liberal or conservative, masks, distancing still needed