Yesterday evening I met up at a central london pub with some friends I've not seen for a while. It was obvious that within the group there were quite different feelings about risk and so on. For most of the evening we sat at an outside table but the outside area was closed at some point and we moved inside. I wasn't totally comfortable with this; although I've been going on public transport a fair bit I've still been avoiding sitting indoors in pubs and restaurants. I am gradually changing my approach on a "probably isn't going to get much better than this now" basis so I did move inside, where it wasn't actually very busy (but not windows/doors left open for ventilation). No-one in the pub was wearing a mask; this had been mostly true throughout the evening, and you had to go to the bar to take orders.
Anyway the point of this boring story is that maybe it reminded me how much behaviour is influenced by peers and normalised by what you see around you. Being in a pub with people I know well, some of whom were entirely unbothered by covid risk, and also surrounded by others all of whom seemed quite comfortable with this situation, changed my feeling about what seemed appropriate to the extent that if I'd put on my mask to go to the toilet I would have felt conspicuous and people might have thought I was doing it to make a point, in the way that I see people unmasked in the supermarket and thing they are just doing it to make a point.
Then on the way home I stopped in at a convenience store, put my mask on as usual and then felt a bit weird about it, as if I could now see myself from the outside as looking paranoid.
Over the past months I've seen groups of people on trains etc all unmasked and it's irritated me a bit, for reasons most people reading this will relate to. But yesterday got me wondering, whether when I see those groups of people, several of them actually would prefer to be wearing a mask but they are caught between what they'd do themselves and how they think their peer group would read their decision.
This is all quite obvious really; I just found it notable how rapidly my behaviour was altered by the social context.