I love the paper The Cognitive Science of COVID-19: Acceptance, Denial, Belief Change, written by Paul Thagard.
Although a simplified view of this paper is it’s an amplified restatement of Hume’s “reason is a slave to the passions” to me the idea of emotional coherence developed in it is crucial to understanding how difficult it will be to change not just ideas and behaviors surrounding CoVid19, but other challenges in healthcare, including such as things as obesity stigma.
For example, people who holds views like wearing a mask is the equivalent of “wearing a diaper on your face” or someone is obese “because they are lazy” aren’t going to change their opinions (and more importantly, their behaviors) based on any set of evidence-based research.
Why not?
Because these folks don’t just have a single belief about masks or body weight, rather they have a large emotionally coherent set of beliefs about about freedom, free will, distrust of authority, elitism etc. Changing their view about masks is akin to having them change their view about dozens of their other beliefs, a task unlikely to be successful.
So what can we do?
The paper mentions an intriguing possibility: Create a “wedge of ambivalence”.
We don’t necessarily need to challenge them directly on their views. Rather we highlight how one of their other strongly held beliefs contradicts their own belief system.
For example, perhaps instead of focusing on the science of mask-wearing, and focus on the ideas such patriotism, duty and self-sacrifice? Or perhaps we need to bring up the personal disconnect of thinking obesity is related to laziness with the likelihood that the person saying this probably is overweight or obese (keeping in mind that 2/3rd of the United States is overweight or obese) implying that they are effectively saying they themselves are lazy—not something people are prone to do?
Anyway, I suspect that the strength of emotional coherence can only be challenged by factual information after a wedge of ambivalence has been created. Until then, we should consider the behaviors we want to change are actually part of an emotionally coherent system, one which needs to be approached cautiously.