I offhandedly remarked to a friend this afternoon that people wear surgical masks instead of proper effective respirators because they are caught in a 'reasonableness' fallacy that makes them pick whichever option appears to be the 'middle' option (neither an under-response nor an over-response), which is obviously subject to whatever is arbitrarily being presented to them rather than a meaningful relationship to facts or efficacy. I based this on a 2022 essay about cognitive fallacies by a social psychologist who blogs infrequently at Essays You Didn't Want To Read.
seven hours later, she updated her blog with a new post making this EXACT ARGUMENT.
