Experts: Many in US will lie about vaccines
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s announcement Thursday that fully vaccinated people largely no longer need to wear a mask has left many Americans wondering: If there are no enforcement measures, won’t people just lie about their vaccination status?
Public health officials admitted that the honor system will play a large role in the new rules.
“I mean, you’re going to be depending on people being honest enough to say whether they were vaccinated or not and responsible enough to be wearing ... a mask,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist, told CNN Thursday.
There has long been talk of a “vaccine passport” model of enforcement in the U.S., where vaccination status grants or limits a person’s ability to travel or enter certain spaces. Such a program is mostly a theory, and multiple businesses announced that they won’t ask customers to prove their vaccine status if they shop unmasked.
Although businesses and politicians said they trust Americans to be honest, experts on human behavior aren’t so sure.
Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, said the new guidance will enable unvaccinated people to flout rules with “impunity.”
“Many will lie. Many are lying, have been lying,” he said. “In some ways, this is a really perfect recipe for lots of people to be dishonest about whether they got vaccinated. They can say, well, everyone who really is worried about it has gone out and done it, and my personal risk is low.”
The head of the CDC on Sunday defended the decision to ease maskwearing guidance for fully vaccinated people, stressing that increasing political pressure had nothing to do with the abrupt shift in guidelines.
“I’m delivering the science as the science is delivered to the medical journals. And it evolved,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Fox News Sunday. “I deliver it as soon as I can when we have that information available.”
Most people lie about once a day, and about 25% of people lie about “consequential things,” according to Michael Cunningham, a psychologist at the University of Louisville who has done 35 years of research on lying, cheating and stealing.
Researchers have long studied lying through a variety of approaches – selfreported surveys, fact checking school and job applications, recruiting participants for recorded interviews and analyzing diary entries.
Many daily lies relate to the “expectation maintenance theory of lying,” Cunningham said – trying to maintain cordial social relations by telling people what they want to hear.
“Most of the time, we don’t lie for malicious reasons,” said Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies honesty and deception. “I don’t like to get you into trouble. We lie sometimes for pro-social reasons. I want to spare your feelings.”
The greater the incentive and the lower the risk, the more likely people are to lie, researchers said.
That’s a major problem in the context of differing rules for vaccinated and unvaccinated people, Lee said. It’s “very, very likely people are going to lie ... because there’s no verification system and no punishment.”
“This is not going to work. When people show up at the grocery store, if you ask them, have you gotten the vaccination, they’ll be more likely to say yes,” Lee said.
If the first few days are any indication, many businesses don’t even plan on asking customers their status, giving customers even less of a moral dilemma.
“There is this universal or global phenomenon that people have a strong desire to see themselves as honest,” said Alain Cohn, a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan. “The big problem is how to activate and make sure people cannot rationalize a bad behavior . ... They can always find a good reason why it’s OK to lie or tell a half-truth.”
That’s the problem with the COVID-19 vaccination honor code, Cohn said.
“I’m just worried that these people will find some self-serving justifications for not getting vaccinated without feeling bad about it,” he said.