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Do you have “Obey Authority” Anxiety or “Question Authority” Anxiety?
What psychology and the pandemic taught me about compliance and conspiracy thinking.
In January 2020, COVID-19 was just reaching Singapore. The pharmacies and hospitals were running out of surgical masks, and policy-makers here tried to assure the public that only medical staff needed to mask up.
There were not yet any lockdowns anywhere. There were no masking policies anywhere… yet.
But as someone who had worked with toxic pigments and in bad pollution conditions before, I owned a huge box of surgical and N-95 masks for personal use. The news from my US friends made it obvious to me that masking was a reasonable health precaution when venturing out into public crowds. I was not reassured by my local political leaders, for long-standing reasons all my own.
On a Saturday morning in January or February 2020, I donned a surgical mask for my long-ish train ride to a shared art studio, looking forward to a day of art-making. As anticipated, the trains were crowded. There were other individuals masked up on the train like myself; this was Asia. Masking when feeling sick was not unusual in Asia pre-2020.
