sociological understanding of covid 19 pandemic

COVID-

The covid-19 pandemic is an effective frame for understanding persuasion at the societal level. In a pandemic, health officials need to persuade people to adopt certain behaviors, and when they fail to do so, the pandemic becomes impossible to contain. Nations that have been successful at containing the pandemic successfully persuaded their people to adopt specific behaviors – Dr. Fauci recently cited European nations, but the same can be said for Canada, Australia and many Asian states as well. The belief stage is where this appears to be falling apart in the United States – lack of belief leads to a lack of action, and part of the problem is the communicator, being that there are many, each with different and conflicting messages and many parts of American society have been conditioned to mistrust credible communicators.

Group influence plays a significant role in the persuasion stage, and the US populace is splintered into any number of groups, many of which have become isolated from the others. In-group behavioral norms have guided a lot of the response, especially where the belief and action stages are concerned – people tend to undertake actions in line with the actions of others in their in-group.

One interesting thread to examine is the role of prejudice in the definition of in-group. For some Americans, it appears that their own prejudices compel them to form group identities around race, and view other groups as opposites or rivals for power. This can be seen during the recent Black Lives Matter protests. It was no surprise that these were politicized, but the intensity of those protests occurred at the same time as pandemic response appeared to be highly politicized. Politicization of pandemic response made little sense, but the polarization of the American people showed similar groups taking specific sides on both of these issues, as though they were both political. The politicization of the pandemic response brought about in-group responses that inhibited the persuasive messaging from health officials that was required to actually contain the pandemic. In the countries that successfully contained the pandemic, this politicization did not take place, and in many cases the polarization of society and deep-rooted prejudices that underpin that polarization were not in place. The United States had a poor starting position for handling the sociological aspects of pandemic control, and performed poorly from that starting point.