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Although social and behavioral change is a long-term process, the 2020 pandemic spread of COVID-19 has required rapid responses by policy makers, health practitioners and the public on a host of issues. One of the most hotly contested surrounds the emerging social norm of wearing face masks in public. While guidance on mask wearing has fluctuated since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, in April 2020 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that everyone should wear cloth masks in public to reduce the spread of the virus (Hamzelou, 2020; Cleveland Clinic, 2020). This recommendation was confusing and unwelcome for some Americans; mask wearing is not a social norm in Western nations outside specialized contexts like healthcare. Further, in the US, mask wearing has often been associated with sinister activity or foreign cultures. American laws against facial coverings have been used to rein in the racist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and arrest anarchists. Similar laws have been used against Muslim women, whose veils are often viewed as culturally “other” and (mistakenly) symbols of oppression (Ladhani, 2019).
During COVID-19, some Americans have resisted universal mask wearing for practical reasons, questioning the effectiveness in blocking viral particles. However, many others reject the practice on cultural or sociological grounds, characterizing mask wearing as embarrassing or “smug” (Liddle, 2020). This is not too surprising, given that masks not only disrupt viral transmission but communicate identities. Masks are “polysemous – not only are they heavy with meaning, but that meaning itself is slippery, adaptable, able to fit into all sorts of different, even contradictory moral frameworks….both ‘wearing a mask’ and ‘not wearing a mask’ can be held up as a symbol of intellectual superiority or moral rectitude” (Jones, 2020, n.p.). Face coverings are deeply embedded in cultural identities, from the opera-going experience to African rituals (Taylor, 2017). For mask wearing to become a new social norm in the US, it will require a redefinition of what the practice means for society and the individual mask wearer. Norms include “both the perception of how a group behaves and a sense of social approval or censure for violating that conduct” (Denworth, 2020, n.p.). Mackie (2018, p. 141) asserts that to “abandon old social norms, and/or adopt beneficial new ones” that...