A Contrarian's Guide To Understanding Contrarians
How and why a heavy-handed response to vaccine hesitancy went awry.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian. In middle school, I was the bane of my teachers’ existence; the resident smart ass that would spend the entire lesson trying to prove the instructor wrong through the use of hypotheticals and technicalities. If you, yourself are an educator, let me apologize to you retroactively; these type of smug students are the worst, indeed.
I carried this streak well into adulthood, perhaps somewhat tempered into a less antisocial form. To this day, I still have a nasty habit of second-guessing experts and instructors; most of the time, I’m quite wrong to do so and only wind up wasting my own time. I’m not certain why I’m compelled to do this, but at this point, it’s probably safe to say that it’s more an immutable personality trait than a habit that I’ll eventually outgrow. No matter the topic, I feel obligated to explore every possible dead-end hallway to make certain that the map I received is accurate — instead of taking the map itself at face value. Obviously, this is a bit offensive to cartographers, and my own teachers often felt similarly. I have a vivid memory of one such frustrated music instructor telling me, “I don’t know why I’m showing you this, since you’re just going to disregard it and try do it your own way.” As a contrarian, I appreciated the refreshingly blunt honesty.
However, the teachers that taught me the most inevitably knew how to handle my skeptical streak most effectively: by appealing to it. When challenged, these teachers never grew indignant or impatient; they simply pointed out the logic, showing me the why it works behind the how to do it. When I proposed an alternative solution to something, they didn’t shut me down outright or ridicule me; they took me seriously, and guided me into seeing why it would not be the best solution and why others might be tempted to mistake it as the correct way forward. The end result: they earned my trust, I got to indulge my skeptical side, and before long, I was spending less time exploring those dead-end hallways and more time studying what actually worked.
Years later, this contrarian streak has imparted upon me a very strong sense of when public messaging is likely to backfire spectacularly among the oppositional minded in our midst. It is a very uncomfortable superpower to have, and one that has spent the past couple of years in overdrive, as I watched the public health response to COVID-19 struggle to connect with the populace. It is true that there have been policy missteps and some glaring hypocrisies along the way, as has been the norm throughout history. The part of me that cringes, however, has nothing to do with what our institutions may have gotten wrong. The part that bothered me was the incredibly alienating way that many of our most influential public figures chose to speak to the public that they serve.
“Trust the Experts” — like so many other popular slogans — has always struck me as a rallying cry that was doomed for failure. It’s not that the content of the message is wrong; trusting experts is generally a much safer bet than trusting non-experts, for instance. The problem is the absolutism built into the messaging. In practice, “Trust the Experts” seems to be invoked solely to shut down conversation by likening our trust in “experts” to our trust in science itself. However, as the great physicist Richard Feynman once pointed out, “science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." This is not simply Richard Feynman’s opinion; it is a truth that has been borne out by history, time and time again. Just as today’s science has proved yesterday’s experts incorrect, tomorrow’s science will prove today’s experts the same. That is not in any way a disparagement of expertise, that is just how science works.
Think of all of the public health messaging around COVID-19 that has changed from the early days — everything from guidance on proper mask use; to which types of outdoor gatherings were safe; to whether breakthrough infections among the vaccinated were aberrations or the norm; to whether we ought to continue obsessively wiping down our groceries. All of this was to be expected, since COVID-19 was a novel virus being studied by the world’s scientific community, all at once, for the very first time. We should expect the early days of research into anything new to be marked by confusion and contradicting reports, and for any clear consensus to take awhile to emerge, if ever. This is in no way an indictment of our public institutions, it’s just how updated research informs policy decisions.
As with any other unfolding current events story, the folks that choose to weigh in early usually get some things wrong. Statements get retracted, corrections get made, and in time, we all know much more than we knew before. The danger is in believing that experts are somehow able to skip this messy process of revision and refinement, simple by virtue of being an expert. Experts get things wrong all the time, and we should be more forgiving of this fact; it’s all part of the larger process of arriving at the truth. Extending a bit of charity works both ways, however, and rather than show a bit of humility and compassion to a scared and confused public, many of the messages the public received instead struck a tone of indignation and arrogance. I believe that this was a big mistake.
These last couple of years have been extraordinary times. For many of us, this was the major public health crisis of our lifetime, and it occurred during a communications revolution: the rise of social media, accompanied by a relative fall of “traditional” media channels. In other words, it was the perfect backdrop for an event of mass confusion. And of course, confusion did ensue. Despite all our technological prowess, there was a clear and present danger that institutional distrust, misinformation, and political polarization would prevent a lifesaving medical intervention — the COVID-19 vaccine —from reaching the people that needed it most.
When institutions are strong, the messages they deliver reach their targets easily. A trusting public — contrarians included — has no desire to complicate cut-and-dry issues with layers of caveats and hypotheticals. Unfortunately, this was not a time of strong institutions, and it should not have come as a surprise that, given public health’s inconsistencies — as well as the not-always-sterling historical track record of Big Pharma — that there would be some folks that still had questions. Of course, some bad actors and charlatans were all too willing to exploit this opportunity, which complicated the situation further. All eyes fell on Big Tech — which, despite existing as private sector entities, had consolidated more power in controlling the flow of information than our public institutions themselves, and — it could be argued — therefore bore some measure of social responsibility. To address these concerns and prevent misinformation from proliferating online, Big Tech adopted a policy in which any content that was at odds with the official messaging from public health institutions like the CDC and the WHO would be removed from their platforms.
I won’t pretend that this wasn’t an extremely difficult situation for public health officials and Big Tech CEOs alike to navigate. I won’t say that allowing the CDC and WHO to play a large role in guiding social media content moderation during a major health crisis was the wrong decision, either. It is clear that conspiracy theories and attractively-phrased misinformation spread easily on social media, and during a major health crisis, an unchecked firehose of bad information could have deadly results. While I’m viscerally against outright censorship — and it seems to me that there might have been a more sophisticated, “middle ground” approach, where good-faith content that was at odds with the official messaging might simply receive a disclaimer as such, as opposed to being removed — I’m not a medical professional, a constitutional scholar, or a tech ethicist; I’m a ragtime pianist. So, I’ll stay on the sidelines for this one; I’m simply not qualified to opine on what should or should not have been done here.
However, I can say as a member of the public, watching the whole thing unfold: the optics weren’t great. The CDC was already dealing with a credibility crisis resulting from both their early bungling of developing an accurate COVID-19 test, as well as a constant undermining of their authority by a sitting President. Big Tech had recently come under fire for content moderation strategies that seemed to be at least somewhat politically motivated. Where a simple, one-size-fits-all public health message might have been highly effective in the past, it fell flat when viewed against the current backdrop of institutional distrust. And, while some folks were certainly captured by insane conspiracy theories, many others raised very reasonable questions in good faith. How effective is natural immunity from a previous COVID-19 infection at preventing severe disease? Is there a clear benefit to requiring proof of vaccination to enter certain public spaces, if the vaccinated can pass on the virus, as well? Are there effective therapeutic interventions for those that have been newly diagnosed with COVID-19? These are all fair questions that deserve cogent answers, not condescending dismissiveness.
A backdrop of confusion may have been unavoidable, but that is not to say that mass vaccination efforts were doomed to fail. Anyone with a background in sales knows that objections are often opportunities in disguise. If you handle objections calmly and skillfully, the sale often follows. Rather than adroitly handling this challenge, however, our media, celebrities, and politicians decided to pour gasoline on the whole thing instead. Op-eds smeared the vaccine-hesitant as selfish, unintelligent, and — to round things out — probably a bit bigoted, too. A high profile talk show host suggested that hospitals should refuse to treat the unvaccinated, altogether. A cable news anchor called for Americans to start shaming and shunning fellow Americans that remained unvaxxed.
After getting the green light from media figures that were traditionally expected to set a measured tone for the general public, it didn’t take much encouragement for the punitive-minded hall monitors of social media to indulge their inner bullies. Some of the same frontline workers that were the initial heroes of the pandemic, risking early infection to save lives, suddenly found themselves labeled as villains if they were discovered to be unvaccinated. An NYC middle school put on a holiday play that denigrated the unvaccinated and warned children of the social consequences of refusing the jab. Families of COVID-19 victims that were found to be unvaccinated suffered cruel mockery on social media. It was an awful, shameful way to treat our fellow citizens.
The public shaming didn’t end with the unvaccinated, either. Discussion around the consequences — both economic and social — of long-term school closures and business shutdowns were largely treated with the same level of dismissive contempt, perhaps due to a perceived ideological alignment of these concerns with those around vaccination. In truth, they are separate issues altogether, and ones worthy of our consideration. There will likely never be a consensus around many of these policy issues; this pandemic has largely served as a Rorschach test of our own individual values and beliefs about the role government is meant to play in our society. The real test for us, then, is how we navigate our differences and move forward. This can’t be done if we simply refuse to discuss the legitimate concerns of others.
Even two years after our initial lockdown, sharing any opinions on the pandemic response is still bound to ruffle some feathers, so I feel a bit obliged to let you know where I’m coming from, personally. My own views on COVID-19 are not particularly contrarian, in truth. I pulled my own concert tour off of the road even before the initial “flatten the curve” period in early March of 2020, before the NBA canceled their season and before the lights went out on Broadway. I did my best to avoid crowds and risky indoor situations during the early days of the pandemic, and advised my older friends and family to take extra precautions and perhaps a bit more Vitamin D. I received the vaccine around the time that it was made widely available, and helped friends and family get it, too. I wore a mask when it was asked of me, and — out of politeness — whenever I perceived that it would make others more comfortable. When I finally caught COVID-19 over Christmas in 2021 — not unexpected, because the aim of the vaccine — as it should have been communicated to us — was to dramatically lessen the severity of the illness and not necessarily to prevent infection altogether — I quarantined, to avoid passing it on to anyone else. After looking at the available research and doing the cost / benefit analysis, all of this simply seemed to be the best approach to me. Contrary (no pun intended) to popular belief, being a contrarian does not mean going against conventional wisdom at all times or at any cost. In fact, I would argue that — if anything — taking the contrarian position every single time actually runs counter to the very idea of being a contrarian, in the same way that trying to be “punk rock” all the time is not a very punk rock thing to do. What can I say; it’s all very complicated.
What isn’t complicated is our need for sound messaging strategies that actually work — and publicly shaming the hesitant isn’t just cruel; it’s also wildly ineffective. If your aim is to change someone’s behavior, shaming them is completely counterproductive; if anything, it will provoke a defensive response and a hardening of resolve. Experiencing public humiliation won’t cause anyone to change their beliefs, either; it will only cause them to withdraw from society, accompanied by depression, anger and a myriad of other negative emotions. If our goal is to build a strong, inclusive society and get everyone on the same page so that we can better navigate future crises, casting others out of society with a near-religious fervor is the absolute wrong way to go about it. Shaming the vaccine-hesitant isn’t a heroic or virtuous act. It’s petty, callous and extremely reckless.
So, how does one sell a contrarian on anything — vaccines or otherwise? Well, it’s not by selling, for starters, since the very idea of being sold something is anathema to a contrarian. A contrarian needs to come to their own conclusions, and that requires an approach based on honestly, patience, and compassion. In practice, that means addressing the good-faith questions that are being asked, and offering transparency when an answer isn’t yet known. Appeal not to a contrarian’s desire to be like everyone else, but to their desire to think for themselves and see what others before them have missed. Even then, there is a chance that such an intervention will fail, and that outcome must be taken in stride, just the same. Having individual autonomy means being responsible for one’s own decisions, and respecting the decisions of others, in turn. Indeed, the only way to make “Trust the Experts” a more cringeworthy rallying cry is to unilaterally declare ourselves the experts and spend our days policing the choices of others.
COVID-19 will eventually fade, and with it, the memories of our very unfortunate response to a very unfortunate time. Still, we owe it to ourselves to reflect on all the things we got wrong, along the way. We must consider the long-term health of our society, and not allow our emotional reactions to an emergency to send us careening back into the Dark Ages. We need skeptics — no matter how frustrating they may be at times — because every now and again, they will be the ones to sound the alarm when the orthodoxy fails us. Similarly, we need strong public institutions and influential voices that seek to unite us in trust, rather than divide us in tribalism. The past couple of years should serve as a wake up call, because it is far easier and safer to reinvigorate our existing institutions with their core principles than to build new ones from the ashes of distrust and irrelevancy.
I’ll probably always have a contrarian streak, but that is not to say I can’t be swayed by reason or a compelling argument. I think a lot of folks are the same way, and our leaders could benefit from this understanding. When expertise is challenged, indignation is rarely the most effective response. What is effective is acknowledging legitimate concerns, showing one’s work, handling objections, and — most importantly — doing it all in a calm, compassionate manner. The “because I said so!” approach has been tried and it failed, just as it always has. Let’s try something new for the future.
-SB
4/17/22 - Last week’s Open Mic with Scott Bradlee experiment was a big success from my perspective, and one that certainly helped inform my own thinking about the ways we can improve our Comment Culture. Those of you that responded to my discussion prompt (“What can be done to encourage better conversations online?”) made so many good points and helped to elucidate the subject matter in a way that I, alone, certainly could not. In particular, one subscriber that has worked as an engineer since the dial-up ‘80s gave an incredible synopsis of all the variables that contribute to an online community’s success and failure — if you are that engineer, please email me so that I have your email address!
Anyway, I really enjoyed the discussion forum we had, and will likely find a way to implement some version of it, in the future. My big takeaway is that Internet Comment Culture doesn’t have to be a universally negative thing. To paraphrase the engineer mentioned above: A well-run online community full of decent people can be an amazing place, and is certainly something worth aiming for.
As always, feel free to write me directly by replying to this email. Word-of-mouth is the only marketing I do for this newsletter, so please feel free to spread the word by forwarding this piece to anyone that you think might enjoy it!
Enjoy your week,
Scott