"According to a recent Qualtrics study, a majority of surveyed Americans now say they won’t return to the office unless their company makes wearing face masks mandatory."

"Mask-Wearing Needs to Be Easy, Understood and Expected/Persuasion works better than compulsion" by Angela Duckworth, Lyle Ungar and Ezekiel J. Emanuel (NYT).

Didn't anyone notice the flaw in that statement?!

It assumes that everyone works in an office!

The survey question was actually "Before returning to work, I want my company to require... a mask all of the time." It was the NYT that changed "work" to "office." What blindness!

Notice that in the question, each respondent would be thinking about his own workplace, with whatever conditions of indoorsiness and crowding that existed there. They were not saying what they thought the rules should be in other workplaces.

I used to work in a law school, and within that workplace, I had my own office, and also a classroom. I wouldn't call the whole building "the office," only my own room. And if I were working alone in my office and had the door closed and was subject to a university-wide rule that I had to keep a mask on, I'd think that was crazy — or just an example of bureaucratic rule that's written in a bluntly simple form so everyone would get the message that it's mandatory — rules are rules, no exceptions.

During office hours, during class time — that would be different. But how awful it would be to need to wear a mask when your role is speaking to other people and communicating! But the #1 message to be communicated now is: I am trying as hard as I can not to spread a sometimes-deadly disease. And we're all saying it constantly, forced to say it. Fortunately, I am retired, so this scenario is merely imaginary for me.

But I should be clear. I've been harping on the use of the word "office" — an unwitting mistake that no one corrected — and the cultural bias it betrays. There's a lot more to this op-ed, and the key point is that that compulsion is the wrong way to proceed:

It is human nature to adhere to social norms. When uncertain about what to do, people tend to look around and copy what other people are doing.... How do we create a social norm of mask-wearing when, in fact, so many Americans are doing exactly the opposite? One common mistake is drawing attention to the lack of compliance. For instance, highlighting littering as a commonplace problem can inadvertently lead to more littering because it strengthens the perception that littering is the norm. Instead, in press releases and public service announcements, officials should emphasize that the clear trend in this country is toward universal mask-wearing.... 

I agree that compulsion isn't going to work. Something they don't say is that if you force people to do something, they get rebellious. It's much better to get them to feel that they have a choice and that they're choosing this thing you'd like to make them do. I'm sure the op-ed writers thought of that point, but to say it is to encourage rebellion, and they're inside the project of manipulating opinion, and that project is not furthered by getting people to see the manipulation.