The pandemic has entered a murky stage, and social norms are quickly shifting, something I’ve thought a lot about lately. Many people are testing at home, or not at all. Here in Vermont, where I live, you can pick up a type of PCR test that can be taken at home. But state officials both here and elsewhere are no longer carefully monitoring the results of these tests, which means that the actual spread of coronavirus in the U.States. For a few weeks, rumors of a stealth COVID-19 wave have been circulating both in the media and on my Twitter feed. Now cases and hospitalizations are rising, as are the levels of coronavirus in wastewater. That suggests that more cases, and ultimately deaths. Even with rising caseloads and a vaccination rate that has flat lined at about 66 percent of the eligible population, the American public has largely begun to move on from the COVID-19 crisis. People are shedding their masks, eating out, attending concerts, traveling to far-flung locations, having large, indoor weddings and doing all the social things that people tend to do when left to their own devices.
The 2,600-person White House Correspondents’ Association dinner late last month is a case in point. Just as host Trevor Noah prophesied, many of those in attendance have since tested positive for COVID-19, including U.States. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and reporters from NBC, ABC, the Washington Post, Politico and other media outlets. And those who almost certainly knew better — cue White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jha — nonetheless made an appearance.
Myriad quirks related to human behavior undoubtedly underpin these arguably poor choices. The Decision Lab website has a list of the biases and mental shortcuts people use to make decisions. The one that caught my eye is social norms. This particular quirk outlines what behaviors people deem appropriate in a given situation.
I started thinking about social norms while writing a feature on how to get people in the United States to eat less meat when the practice is so, well. Social norms, my research informed me, vary with the group one is hanging out with and one’s environs. “We rapidly switch our perspective depending on the context of the situation we find ourselves in,” writes marketing expert John Laurence on the Decision Lab site.
I might have found this idea of rapid switching suspect had I not recently experienced the phenomenon. My husband’s Disney-pile brother and his wife had been planning a family reunion in Disney World in Florida since the start of the pandemic. And I, a curmudgeonly 'sort' not prone to feeling the magic, long ago agreed to go on the condition that other people do all the planning. And so it was, after multiple COVID-related postponements, that my kids, my husband and I landed in Orlando on a blisteringly hot April day.
Disney normal, I soon learned, bore little resemblance to Vermont normal. This was obvious immediately from people’s attire. All around me, parents and kids dressed in coordinated outfits and matching Mickey Mouse ears.
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