How to nudge one Covid-19 nonbeliever

A lot of Americans aren’t taking Covid-19 seriously. They aren’t wearing masks. They aren’t social distancing. They aren’t staying home.
That’s one reason that the number of cases is spiking in the South and West. The problem is especially serious in Florida, Arizona, South Carolina, North Carolina, California, Tennessee and Texas, which are reporting the highest numbers of hospitalisations since the coronavirus pandemic started spreading across the US in March.
The result is likely to be many thousands of preventable deaths.
Why are so many people refusing to take precautions? A key reason is their sense of their identity — their understanding of what kind of person they are, and of the groups with whom they are affiliated. It follows that appeals to adopt responsible practices are unlikely to work unless they take group identity into
account. An alarming example: In Alabama, college students have been holding “Covid-19 parties,” including people who are infected and intentionally designed to see who else can catch the virus first.
In the last decades, behavioural science has drawn attention to the immense importance of personal identity in motivating behaviour. A central idea, pressed by Dan Kahan, a law and psychology professor at Yale University, is that people’s beliefs and understandings are often “identity-protective.”
With respect to some risks — such as those posed by climate change, nuclear power and gun violence — people’s judgments about whether a danger is high or low are deeply influenced by their understanding of the group, or tribe, to which they belong.
Tragically, that’s become true of Covid-19. If you think of yourself as someone who rejects elite prescriptions about how you should live your life, and if you consider yourself part of a group that defies national nannies, you might be proud to go about your business, just as you did six months ago.
What can be done? We can find terrific lessons from the great state of Texas and an ingenious environmental campaign that started there in 1985.
In that year, Texas faced a problem. It was dealing with a great deal of littering on the highways, roads and elsewhere. A public relations campaign to reduce littering did not seem promising. In some states, officials were drawn to an old jingle: “Litterbug, litterbug/Shame on you/Look at the terrible things you do.” To say the least, that was unlikely to work in Texas.
The challenge was to do something that would make the anti-littering campaign fit with Texans’ identity, rather than seem antithetical to it, a high-handed imposition from people with foreign accents.
The solution began with a slogan: “Don’t Mess With Texas.” The slogan suggested that littering was an insult to the state and those who cherish it. It turned Texan identity, and a sense of local pride, into a reason not to litter — and a reason to dislike and deter those who do.

—Bloomberg