In general, a new behavior that diverges from somebody’s prior opinions/values/preferences arouses cognitive dissonance, which in turn motivates a search for information validating the new behavior in order to reduce the dissonance. People who have just bought a new car, for example, seek out advertisements for the car brand they bought; they avoid ads for the car brand they nearly bought, since those would exacerbate the dissonance they’re trying to resolve.
So dissonance is a powerful tool of persuasion – more powerful in many cases than the educational approach that tries to provide information in the hope that the information will change attitudes and the new attitudes will change behavior.
Both incentives and disincentives can arouse dissonance and thus lead us to seek out new information and build new attitudes supporting our new behavior. So I’m all in favor of incentives and disincentives as tools of COVID vaccination campaigns.
But – and this is a big “but” – the cognitive dissonance process works only if the incentives or disincentives are big enough to motivate the new behavior but small enough to leave us feeling like we need to search out “better” reasons to make sense of the new behavior.
Example: If I offer you a lot of money to give a speech contrary to your prior values, you may well decide it’s enough money that you’re willing to give the damn speech, even though you don’t believe a word of what you’re saying. You know you’re doing it for the money. You don’t feel any dissonance, and don’t go searching for information that the speech is right after all. If I offer you very little money to give that counter-attitudinal speech, you’ll simply turn me down. Somewhere in the middle is an incentive that’s enough to get you to give the speech but not enough to get you to feel comfortable that you did it for the money – and that’s the sweet spot where cognitive dissonance is aroused and the behavioral “foot in the door” is likely to yield long-term results.
Similarly, we’ll all do things we don’t want to do to avoid big punishments – with no cognitive dissonance and no persuasive impact. The persuasive punishment is a small punishment, just barely big enough to get us to comply but not big enough to get us to feel we had no choice – so the cognitive dissonance process is launched.
It seems to me that some COVID vaccination incentives are too small and some are too big. It takes good instincts or good research to find people’s sweet spot for incentives.
What really worries me is the disincentives – especially the threat of losing your job if you refuse the jab. Those most committed to their reasons for refusing to be vaccinated will resist the threat – and the act of doing so will tend to confirm them in their reasons for refusing to be vaccinated. Essentially, deciding to become unemployed rather than get vaccinated is a powerful piece of antivax and anti-authority communication to oneself.
But what about those who decide they cannot afford to lose their jobs, so they reluctantly, resentfully roll up their sleeves? Their compliance will not arouse cognitive dissonance, so it will not lead them to reconsider their vaccine hesitancy. Rather, it will confirm to them that they are the powerless victims of a powerful oppressor, the employer or the government or both.
I think vaccine mandates will work in the short term. Millions of people around the world who don’t want to get vaccinated will bow to the inevitable if they must. But many of those millions will become (even) more fervently antivax and antiauthoritarian than they were. The result will be a more polarized, more angry polity, perhaps even a new phalanx of sullen revolutionaries. On the other hand, they’ll be vaccinated! Maybe it’s worth it, maybe not – I’m truly not sure. But I do think we should think hard about the likely price.
Copyright © 2021 by Peter M. Sandman
