Omikron is here, but ten million Germans still have no vaccination protection. In an interview with ntv.de, the renowned sociologist and book author Armin Nassehi explains why a good slogan would help more than good arguments.
The omicron wave is rolling. How do you quickly convince ten million people of the vaccination?
There are several ways we can get people to do the right thing. You just said “convince” that is a means. However, it is the weakest there is. For example: We all know that we should eat less meat because consuming too much meat is harmful to our health and the climate. But I prefer to talk about it over a juicy steak, to put it polemically.
Is there so little persuasion?
In his latest book “Unbehagen”, sociologist Armin Nassehi, professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, explores how sluggish collectives can be motivated to change.
(Photo: imago / Future Image)
We know pretty well from research that human decisions are never made as rationally as our models suggest, they are just models. The ideal solution would be: “Here are three positive and three negative arguments. Now I’ll weigh what I’m doing.” But we don’t do that so explicitly in almost any area of life. And having to do so much persuasion is a double-edged sword for another reason: Because every positive sentence provokes an opposing sentence. That’s why I hope that the Covid vaccination can become an expected normality – which is of course difficult because the topic is highly emotional and is also used for completely different political issues.
Do people behave right just because the right behavior is normal?
Out of habit, yes. This is the second, much more effective, form of creating correct behavior. You have to set up so-called opportunity structures in which the right behavior becomes more likely. For example: Sweden has a strategy to avoid traffic fatalities altogether. Not primarily by informing motorists about the dangers, but by building the streets in such a way that you can no longer drive yourself to death – with facilities in the middle of the street so that cars can no longer get into the oncoming lane.
How do we apply Swedish transport policy to German vaccination?
If we know that we seldom make a decision because we have weighed up the best reasons beforehand, but out of habit, then the vaccination campaign must be guided by this. In Israel, the vaccination teams went to the bars and vaccinated. In Cologne people have started to drive to the quarters to vaccinate. You need such campaigns. When I remember being vaccinated against polio as a child …
…. Me too! “Polio is cruel, oral vaccination is sweet”.
That was the slogan and the vaccination was done automatically at school, habitually, as an oral vaccination during recess. What I’m getting at is: Back then you needed more reflection not to get vaccinated than was necessary to get vaccinated. At the moment it’s the other way around: people need more reflection for vaccination. You have to make an appointment, go somewhere, and the vaccine may be short. But if people find it very easy to get vaccinations, the odds will go up too.
Because we’re all so lazy?
Our whole way of life is calibrated so that we don’t change anything, yes. And of course what I say is a bit humiliating because it contradicts the image of the autonomous and competent person we like to describe ourselves as.
Well, we now have conviction and habit. What are the possibilities?
The third form is model learning. The more people around me do things, the more likely I am to do them. We are actually imitators in almost everything. Right now I am also imitating a certain habitus that is expected of interviewees.
They answer my questions.
I didn’t invent that myself. That is learned and practiced. Then there is a fourth form, that is consumerism. Many of our things seem to us to be aesthetically plausible, which is why we buy so many things that no one needs. My plea is not to consume more, but to use this logic and say: Can we not aestheticize vaccination information more? The campaign by large companies in December, which turned their slogans into vaccination, goes roughly in that direction.
They mean “for the joy of vaccinating”, “vaccinating – yes, yes, yes”, “we love vaccinating”….
Exactly, it was a very good first step to deal with it playfully. We live in a culture in which we find the playful forms, which are aestheticized, far more convincing than any professor who explains to us that, statistically speaking, we can weigh up the fact that the side effects of the vaccination are lower than with many others Forms of risk management is the case.
Conviction, habit, model learning, consumerism – with so many motives for vaccinating, would a possible obligation to vaccinate even make sense from a sociological point of view?
For people who are hesitant to get vaccinated at the moment, the obligation to vaccinate can have a relieving function. Because that’s a duty, and we all know it: if you drive on the autobahn and it suddenly says “100”, you might drive 110, but at the moment you don’t need a more precise, explicit reason for it. If it doesn’t say anything, he’ll go 130 or faster.
Now, of course, a speed limit is a weaker interference with my personal rights than a vaccination.
Yes, but our motivational structures work that way, and a duty helps me to become more independent of my own motives and possibly save face by being able to outsource things to duty. We can also rely a little on the conventional attitude from which people say, “I stick to the rules”. We should get rid of the idea that anyone who hasn’t been vaccinated is a militant out-of-the-box thinker. Insulting or scorning the unvaccinated is likely to be counterproductive. Increasing the pressure on the unvaccinated by making it difficult for them to access certain areas is a more indirect form of intervention that dispenses with moral indictment.
How risky is the protest that Germany is now experiencing in so many places for social cohesion?
First of all, protest is not a danger at all, but a democratic right. It must be emphasized that not every protest is bad. What we are currently experiencing, however, is a protest that fundamentally questions the integrity of state actors. That is the dangerous thing about it, and the fraying at the edges in the direction of violence. If you think of the mob fewer people who besieged the house of the Saxon Minister of Health with torches, these are the extreme forms of such illegitimate forms of protest that we are experiencing.
Will the extremes increase?
The term “Covid-RAF” has already been mentioned in the discussion. We know that violence arises from larger protest movements, and actually only when you realize that the movement itself does not generate a great response in society.
For example, if you have protested against the mask requirement for months, but have to discover that it simply remains in place?
Then violence is a means that can simulate having an effect. Whoever exercises violence has a certain immediate effect and visibility, but at the same time shows that he has lost power. The RAF came into being when the student movement became so integrated into society that extreme supporters were disappointed. Pegida came into being when it was discovered that the usual migration-skeptical protest did not achieve what one had hoped for. We will now see that in the pandemic, and this is where the protection of the Constitution comes in.
Many fear that compulsory vaccination could “tear up” Germany – that’s how Jens Spahn once put it.
We always pretend in publications that we have a polarized society in which two major camps face each other – vaccination and lockdown advocates against freedom fighters, or whatever they describe themselves. In fact, this is not the case: throughout the entire pandemic, the approval rates for the measures were higher than the courage of politicians to implement them. A strange effect of this polarization thesis is, by the way, that it makes a serious discussion about the appropriateness of measures and about alternatives more difficult than possible.
Frauke Niemeyer spoke to Armin Nassehi