Note to College Administrators: “Everyone else is doing it” is Actually Not the Best Way to Make Health-Related Decisions

“Everyone else is doing it…” may not be the best rationale for health-related decisions. Many colleges and universities are currently planning to re-open in the fall, at least to some degree, and for a variety of reasons. But one of the oddest reasons we have heard (repeatedly) over the past few weeks/months is something like, “all of our peer schools are opening.”

Since when is this how adults make any decisions at all, much less health-related decisions? I can’t help hearing this argument in the voice of a whiny adolescent: “But mom, everyone is doing it…!” — and then hearing my own mom’s likely response, “If all of your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it, too?”

“Everyone else is doing it” does not make it a good idea. In health psychology, we talk a lot about “perceived social norms” — because they can drive behavior. For example, college students who think that most of their peers drink, are more likely to drink. When you correct the perceived social norm (by giving them the actual proportion of their peers who drink, which is typically lower than they think it is), fewer of them will choose to drink.

The power of these norms is evident when (if) you are out-and-about these days. Likely you’ll find yourself in settings where everyone is wearing a mask — and in other settings where no one is. All that is necessary for someone to take off their mask, in many cases, is for them to be surrounded by people not wearing masks. Without even realizing it, we tell ourselves, “Oh, it must be OK…” — and behold, we have given ourselves permission to not comply with the recommendation. Humans tend to be more focused on short-term rewards (comfort), as compared to longer-term ones (health and safety of myself and the people around me).

I understand the drive to re-open. I prefer being in the classroom with my students to sitting in front of a computer all day, and I was the lucky recipient of an in-person, private liberal arts school education, myself. I also understand that when we see that other schools are re-opening and have elaborate plans for trying to mitigate the risks associated with doing so, we may think, hey, it’s possible — they’re solving the problems; we can, too.

And we can — to some degree. Schools have done amazing jobs thinking through plans for how to re-open. So much work, on the part of administrators, staff, and faculty, has gone into solving this complex set of problems. I am grateful to those who have dedicated so much time and energy to this situation, even though I have been advocating all along for remote-only teaching this fall, because that is the safest solution, and human life has more value than whatever incremental benefits there are to being together in person. Despite all of the expensive infrastructure and structural changes that colleges are making, safety relies a whole lot on human behavior. And it is widely known (also in the field of health psychology), that humans do not comply super-well with health recommendations. Asking people to wear masks and stay 6’ from others at all times for an entire semester (remember: many of these people live on campus — it’s where they sleep, eat, socialize, and study) is simply unrealistic — and that’s without considering the age and developmental stage of your average college student (see Larry Steinberg’s excellent opinion piece in the* NYT *on this particular issue).

There is a certain irony in my arguing that looking to others is not the way to go. I am often the one, in meetings, who suggests we look to see how other colleges are doing things, because I believe that, in higher education, we spend entirely too much time re-inventing the wheel, or at least, simultaneously inventing wheels, on separate campuses all across the country. Our silo-ed nature is not efficient. But looking to other schools to learn from them and following their (moral) lead are two different things. For one thing, those other schools may be pretty different from yours: Maybe they have fewer or more commuter students. Maybe they have a school of public health and a medical school to inform and support the decisions being made.

Harvard recently announced that their courses in fall would most likely be conducted remotely. Will others follow? And then will still more follow? I hope so. But if so, I also hope administrators ask themselves, if this is the right thing to do, why were we not doing it all along?