What Anti-Maskers Can Teach Nonprofits

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

For the last two years, I’ve been studying the impact of identity on prosocial behavior; it’s the topic of my doctoral dissertation. This idea informs the fundraising copy that I write for our clients at Turnkey.

Last week, I saw an interesting example of how identity influences attitudes in the behavioral petri dish called Facebook. Katrina had responded to a question that was posted: “Will you continue to wear a mask outdoors in public, even if you are not required to?”

This was her response:

Credit: Facebook

Four days later (at the time of this writing), her seemingly innocuous post reply had elicited a whopping 196 replies and 483 responses, including 134 “ha-has.”

Eyeballing the replies, the negative comments outnumbered the positive, supportive ones by about three to one. Here are a handful of examples:

Credit: Facebook

Credit: Facebook

Credit: Facebook

Credit: Facebook

There’s a lesson to be learned here regarding how nonprofits go about raising money for their missions. If the “mission” Katrina described is “consideration of others,” what made so many respond this negatively? Why would they aggressively oppose a simple courtesy?

People came out of the woodwork to respond because of their identity. Specifically, Katrina’s comment triggered their identity as “anti-maskers.” Anti-masking is part of a larger political identity that increasingly defines a significant portion of our country. A 2020 NBC poll regarding mask-wearing in public revealed a more than 30-point split between Republicans and Democrats. A recent Kaiser poll found a similar gap. Anti-masking mirrors “vaccine hesitancy,” which is something that should concern us all.

As we’ve written in a previous blog, political identities spill over into many aspects of our society, and charitable giving is no exception. You can read our how-to guide to approaching liberals and conservatives in the earlier blog. We’re focusing here on the power of identity to influence behavior.

Everyone has many facets to their identity: I’m a husband, father, animal-rights supporter, liberal, University of Virginia Alumni, etc. Some aspects of one’s identity are more important than others at any given time, more “salient,” as psychologists say.

Our identities form the basis for how we divide up others into “in-groups” and “out-groups.” It’s pretty simple — you’re a member of my group or you’re not. Groups can be big and general, like men/women, young/old, White/Black. The characterization of small in-groups is limited only by the identities we carry, like “aging White former ACC basketball players,” a pretty small crowd I’m a member of.

After a few days, we decided we’d write about her post. So we turned it into a little social psychology study. At this point, Katrina responded to one of her “flamers,” emphasizing the consideration of others angle again:

Credit: Facebook

The response? People simply doubled down on their earlier comments:

Credit: Facebook

One pervasive finding in psychology is that people favor those who are part of their in-group(s) and discriminate against those in their out-group(s). That’s why trying to engage someone with reasonable arguments counter to an attitude built on their identity is usually a big loser, as evidenced by this person:

Credit: Facebook

The posts of the anti-maskers reflect an “us versus them” mentality. Many expressed that their personal freedoms were being challenged. We thought that changing the perspective of the anti-maskers with regards to their in-group might cause them to reconsider their position. For example, if they saw the far-ranging consequences of their “personal” decisions.

We decided a better approach than shaming and hectoring would be to broaden their perceived in-group: “I know you’re young, and COVID-19 probably won’t kill you or even make you very sick, but I just worry about my grandma.” Everybody has (or had) a grandma. “Have Grandma” = in-group.

So, Katrina started “in-grouping” (I’m using the term as a verb here) people on Facebook. Here’s how one conversation started:

Credit: Facebook

Credit: Facebook

She used this approach on many who posted angry or insulting comments. She got zero responses from this commenter or any commenter when she responded in this way. Why? It’s hard to treat someone in your in-group badly. While they didn’t come around to her way of thinking, they moved. And that’s what we are after: movement.

So, what’s the takeaway — beyond COVID-19? How do we use this to raise more money? Remember, no one really cared about Katrina’s “mission” of being considerate. They cared about whether she was part of their in-group.

We can use what we know about identity to move people in two ways. First, “prime” people about the parts of their identity that are congruent with your cause. “Priming” is psychologists’ lingo for “reminding and activating.” Prime early and often. It’s particularly important right before you make an ask: “As a health care professional, you know how important children’s…” Or more generally: “As a caring, compassionate member of the [XYZ Foundation] community, you understand…”

Second, expand in-groups to include more supporters and prospects. Raising funds for Sub-Saharan African hunger relief? Forget about just looking for people who care about Sub-Saharan African hunger. Instead, you might try, “As a mother, you understand the pain of not being able to provide for your children.” “Mothers” is a big in-group. When you start to think this way, the possibilities to include people become nearly endless.

That Facebook thread is still up and pulling in comments. Katrina’s next post is going to be the link to this blog. We hope everyone will be cool learning they were subjects in our little experiment.