Leveraging impression management motives to increase the use of face masks

ABSTRACT

Three pilot studies (N_total = 832) revealed that people held more positive attitudes toward targets wearing protective face masks. Therefore, we examined whether knowledge of this self-presentational benefit would increase people’s intentions to wear face masks. Participants (N = 997) were randomly assigned to read a passage about the COVID-19 pandemic, the safety benefit of mask-wearing, the self-presentational benefit of mask-wearing, or a combination of the latter two. Although this manipulation failed, findings revealed that preexisting beliefs about masked targets being more likable were positively associated with mask-wearing intentions, particularly among participants less concerned with disease or more politically conservative.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• face masks
• impression management
• public health behaviors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2216880

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/pgz2c.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/pgz2c.

Notes

1. $Z=\beta 1-\beta 2/\surd \left(\left(SE\beta 1\right)2+\left(SE\beta 2\right)2\right)$.

2. We used flexmix (Grün & Leisch, 2008) in R version 4.2.2 to calculate Bayesian information criterion (BIC) for model comparison to justify the exclusion of nonsignificant interaction terms in Model 3. The BIC for Model 2 is 2486.50; the BIC for Model 3 is 2473.13.

3. Referred to as Wu et al., (2021) in relevant manipulation paragraphs.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Charlene Zhao

Charlene Zhao is a doctoral student in social psychology at Florida State University. Her research focuses on social cognition applied to romantic relationship formation and maintenance.

Qiushan Liu

Qiushan Liu is a doctoral student in developmental psychology at Florida State University. Her work focuses on the cognitive and affective factors of math performance.

David S. March

David S. March is an assistant professor of social psychology at Florida State University. His research focuses on the overlap between physical threat processes and implicit social cognition.

Lindsey L. Hicks

Lindsey L. Hicks is an assistant professor of social psychology at Christopher Newport University. Her research focuses on automatic processing in interpersonal relationships.

James K. McNulty

James K. McNulty is a professor of social psychology at Florida State University. His research focuses on the stability of cognition over time applied to romantic relationship maintenance.