Dominican Psychologist Studies Reactions to Public Health Messages

When Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, visited Dominican University of California this summer to speak as part of the university’s Leadership Lecture Series, he was met with both praise and protest. 

Inside Angelico Concert Hall, the sold-out audience gave him a standing ovation. Outside, a crowd of demonstrators gathered to protest Dr. Fauci’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines. The protest did not surprise Dominican psychology professor Dr. Ben Rosenberg, whose research examines people's responses to their perception that their freedom is being threatened.

Dr. Fauci was visiting Dominican to discuss his new book, "On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service". The event was co-sponsored by Dominican and Book Passage.

In his Health and Motivation Lab at Dominican, Dr. Rosenberg and his undergraduate students apply ideas from social psychology to health-related issues, examining the way emotional and motivational states affect people’s reactions to persuasive health messages, and why people engage in seemingly irrational unhealthy behaviors.

During the pandemic, Dr. Rosenberg started examining why, despite evidence about vaccine effectiveness, people fought back against mandates or getting vaccinated or wearing a mask.

“These reactions served to underscore a fundamental human truth — people generally do not like being told what to do,” Dr. Rosenberg says. “This observation aligns with a classic idea from social psychology, called psychological reactance. When people perceive that they have the freedom to do something, like breathe unmasked air, having someone restrict it causes swift and strong rebellion.”

Consulting social psychologists, he says, would have enhanced the effectiveness of pandemic-era messaging. In recent years, Dr. Rosenberg has shared his expertise with a number of media outlets, including The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, MSN.com, Marin Independent Journal, and ABC News. 

“One primary reason I think mandates generally don't work is that many (not all) people perceive them as threats to their freedom to choose how they behave,” he says. “People value having this freedom tremendously, as it likely has some adaptive value, and when something (like a mandate) threatens it or takes it away, several responses can follow.”

Responses done to reassert freedom include not masking, protesting vaccines, and derogating the person seen as the source of the threat.

“People may also engage in some attitudinal gymnastics to help them cope with the freedom threat, where they come to value the freedom way more than they did previously. So, people who once were far from being antivaxxers became online evangelists.” 

Rosenberg maintains that much of today’s negative attention toward Dr. Fauci could have been avoided if social scientists had been involved with the public outreach early in the pandemic.

“Consulting more social scientists like psychologists, sociologists, and economists could have changed the trajectory of the pandemic by crafting more effective or targeted messages and turning down the volume on some of the unhelpful political rhetoric.”

What would social scientists have done differently? For one, they may have realized that the lack of scientific literacy in the public coupled with lack of clarity/transparency by communicators would be a losing formula.

“The vast majority of people do not have a clear understanding of how science works: that it is iterative and can change rapidly, especially in times like early COVID. Scientists come up with ideas, test them, and then revise their ideas to test again; those subsequent tests sometimes align with pre-existing ideas of how things work and other times they don't,” Dr. Rosenberg says.

“When knowledge changes rapidly, this lack of scientific understanding can hamstring how recommendations are communicated to the public because instead of being perceived as "how science works", people see changes/updates as "waffling" or "inconsistent" – both of which are sort of bad words among politicians.”

Early in the pandemic, the research was rapidly evolving, which put public health officers, and particularly including Dr. Fauci, in a tough spot.

“I think many communications assumed people understood that the science was evolving and that the recommendations were based on what we know now, but that this could change quickly,” Dr. Rosenberg says.

“To me, that last part of transparency would have been key to heading off at least some of the issues that arose. Instead of people saying, 'wear a mask? No chance – last week you told me it was a bad idea,' we might have been able to lean into the ever-evolving nature of the guidance.”

In 2023, Dr. Rosenberg collaborated with faculty from Dominican’s Global Public Health Department on a paper titled “They'll take a gun to me before I get that shot,” which sought to complement the large-scale survey and clinical studies delineating people's justifications for remaining unvaccinated.

Other pandemic-focused research by Dominican’s faculty includes:  

• Global public health faculty (Dr. Brett Bayles, Dr. Michaela George and Dr. Patti Culross) collaborated with the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services on a paper examining the impact of the first Covid-19 shelter-in-place order on emergency departments in Marin County. The study concluded that “The first SIP order to be issued in the United States in response to COVID-19 was associated with a significant reduction in ED utilization in Marin County.”
• In 2020, global public health professor Dr. Patti Culross developed a contact tracing and investigation course for public health and nursing students at the request of the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services to support their Covid-19 pandemic community response.
• In 2020, global public health professors Dr. Patti Culross and Dr. Brett Bayles taught a course about the pandemic's connections to planetary health and showed students how to recognize and counter some of the misinformation about the origins of COVID-19.