By now, you have probably seen the videos of numerous public health professionals and other government leaders telling people to not to touch their face to avoid spreading the Coronavirus. Ironically, even as they are telling us not to do that, they are touching their faces.
Clearly, there are problems with this advice:
First, it misses one of the most basic rules of changing behaviors—Don’t emphasize what the person should not do. Instead, emphasize what the person should do. In this example, they could have advised us to keep your hands in your pockets, wear gloves, or keep your hands folded. While I think it’s fine to include “don’t do something” as part of a behavior plan, it’s essential to state precisely what the student/client should do instead.
Second, it is not specific enough to follow. They don’t literally mean “never touch your face.” I’m confident they think it is OK to wash your face, put on your glasses, shave, or apply makeup. The advice really means something more nuanced—maybe like this:
When you are in a public gathering and you have an itch on your face, you should wash your hands both before and after you scratch it.
Not sure if that’s what was meant, but you get the idea.
Third, of course, no one is forcing you to touch your face. But this advice fails to appreciate that people cannot easily change behaviors that they do unconsciously. You don’t think to yourself “Hmm, I have an itch on my nose. Let’s decide if it is worth addressing. I know I want to avoid touching my face, but this itch is annoying!” No, you were already scratching it before you were aware you were doing it. Now, behavior analysis has an extensive literature on changing this type of behavior called Habit Reversal or Self-Management. But that’s a big project. Anyone familiar with that literature will realize that 98% of people are going to fail at this behavior change unless they put in a major effort to change it.
Most people will fail at their attempts to “don’t touch your face.” It makes for great video. We should know better, but often we don’t. If you sit in on meetings for parents of children with autism (even with BCBAs), you hear similar recommendations made all the time— “Don’t give in if he has a tantrum” or “Insist that he at least tastes the vegetables at dinner.” Those recommendations are about as effective as saying “Don’t touch your face.”