Abstract

Due to the wide spread of COVID-19, wearing masks has become essential in daily lives. Despite increasing rates of vaccination in many Western countries, mask wearing is still considered as one of the most efficient ways of preventing COVID-19. Thus, the investigation of attitudes towards mask wearing could entail numerous implications. Furthermore, although some studies have confirmed people's positive explicit attitudes toward mask wearing after COVID-19, there is still a lack of research investigating their implicit attitudes towards it. Thus, it is academically intriguing to examine and compare the two specific attitudes towards mask wearing. To fulfil this objective, we explored and compared explicit as well as implicit attitudes, measured by IAT (Implicit Association Test), toward mask wearing and lastly examined several psychological factors that could influence the two attitudes. The results revealed that participants explicitly and implicitly perceived mask wearing as safe and that the two attitudes were significantly correlated. Unlike the attitudes towards mask wearing, however, participants still associated faces covered by a rectangular, black object with threat. Interestingly, we found the motive of disease avoidance to be positively related to both explicit and implicit attitudes towards mask wearing. The results implicate that people have indeed internalized social norms of encouraging mask wearing in the face of threatening COVID-19 situations, and the levels of internalization could vary depending on the degree to which they are motivated to avoid diseases.