The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

/pdf/using-social-and-behavioural-science-to-support-covid-19-25vr5kyvxt.pdf

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response.

Feeling our way to machine minds: People's emotions when perceiving mind in artificial intelligence

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans only communicated in person, but in just the past fifty years they have started also communicating online. Today, people communicate more online than offline. What does this shift mean for human social life? We identify four structural differences between online (versus offline) interaction: (1) fewer nonverbal cues, (2) greater anonymity, (3) more opportunity to form new social ties and bolster weak ties, and (4) wider dissemination of information. Each of these differences underlies systematic psychological and behavioral consequences. Online and offline lives often intersect; we thus further review how online engagement can (1) disrupt or (2) enhance offline interaction. This work provides a useful framework for studying the influence of technology on social life (119/120).

https://escholarship.org/content/qt94n9w8b9/qt94n9w8b9.pdf?t=qdtezb

Two social lives: How differences between online and offline interaction influence social outcomes.

Lab-based interventions have been ineffective in changing individuals' implicit racial attitudes for more than brief durations, and exposure to high-status Black exemplars like Obama has proven ineffective in shifting societal-level racial attitudes. Antiracist social movements, however, offer a potential societal-level alternative for reducing racial bias. Racial attitudes were examined before and during Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its high points of struggle with 1,369,204 participants from 2009 to 2016. After controlling for changes in participant demographics, overall implicit attitudes were less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM, became increasingly less pro-White across BLM, and were less pro-White during most periods of high BLM struggle. Considering changes in implicit attitudes by participant race, Whites became less implicitly pro-White during BLM, whereas Blacks showed little change. Regarding explicit attitudes, Whites became less pro-White and Blacks became less pro-Black during BLM, each moving toward an egalitarian "no preference" position.

/pdf/implicit-and-explicit-racial-attitudes-changed-during-black-1ymbji66s6.pdf

Implicit and Explicit Racial Attitudes Changed During Black Lives Matter

Critical and stressful situations can emerge in many different forms in our daily life. Sometimes the stressful situations can be more serious in national or global level, such as natural disasters and diseases. In such a difficult and demanding situation, we were with the onset of the virus. At a time when the international medical scientific community is trying to deal with the new threat called Coronavirus, emotional intelligence is contributing decidedly to address this pandemic. Awareness, management, empathy, basic components of emotional intelligence, are especially important for people to control difficult situations as the one we are going through. The need for the development and cultivation of emotional intelligence from the very beginning, starting from the field of education, is strongly apparent so that the child and later the adult can cope with stressful situations. Studies have shown that people with high emotional intelligence can better manage and mitigate stress and adopt strategies of resilience and control.

/pdf/the-need-for-emotional-intelligence-training-education-in-1nvxu8su3d.pdf

The Need for Emotional Intelligence Training Education in Critical and Stressful Situations: The Case of Covid-19

A person's speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings. We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person's mind, a person's speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable-and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits-than reading the same content. We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator's own beliefs. Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses. A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities. These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other. The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.

/pdf/the-humanizing-voice-speech-reveals-and-text-conceals-a-more-2syyq5sj7s.pdf

The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement:

Modern technologies such as YouTube afford unprecedented access to the skilled performances of other people. Six experiments ( N = 2,225) reveal that repeatedly watching others can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. The more people merely watch others perform (without actually practicing themselves), the more they nonetheless believe they could perform the skill, too (Experiment 1). However, people's actual abilities-from throwing darts and doing the moonwalk to playing an online game-do not improve after merely watching others, despite predictions to the contrary (Experiments 2-4). What do viewers see that makes them think they are learning? We found that extensive viewing allows people to track what steps to take (Experiment 5) but not how those steps feel when taking them. Accordingly, experiencing a "taste" of performing attenuates the illusion: Watching others juggle but then holding the pins oneself tempers perceived change in one's own ability (Experiment 6). These findings highlight unforeseen problems for self-assessment when watching other people.

Easier Seen Than Done: Merely Watching Others Perform Can Foster an Illusion of Skill Acquisition:

Undersociality: miscalibrated social cognition can inhibit social connection

The concept of change simply entails the totality of ways in which a particular entity has grown better and grown worse. Five studies suggest that this is not how people actually understand it for themselves. Rather, when asked to assess how they have "changed" over time, people bring to mind only how they have improved and neglect other trajectories (e.g., decline) that they have also experienced; global change is specifically translated as directional change for the better. This tendency emerged across many populations, time frames, measures, and methodologies (Studies 1-3), and led to important downstream effects: people who reflected on "change" from their pasts experienced enhanced mood, meaning, and satisfaction in their presents, precisely because they had assumed to only think about personal improvement (Study 4). A final study shed light on mechanisms: people evaluated the word change in a speeded response task as more positive when they were instructed to interpret the word in relation to themselves versus a friend, while no differences emerged between conditions for nonchange control words (Study 5). This suggests that the basic pattern across studies stems (at least partly) from traditional self-enhancement motives-our own change spontaneously brings to mind only the ways in which we have improved, whereas change in someone else is not so immediately and uniformly associated with improvement. Taken together, these findings reveal novel insights into the content and consequences of change perception, and they more broadly highlight unforeseen biases in when and why people might subjectively (mis)interpret otherwise objective constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record

The implicit meaning of (my) change.

People may want deep and meaningful relationships with others, but may also be reluctant to engage in the deep and meaningful conversations with strangers that could create those relationships. We hypothesized that people systematically underestimate how caring and interested distant strangers are in one's own intimate revelations and that these miscalibrated expectations create a psychological barrier to deeper conversations. As predicted, conversations between strangers felt less awkward, and created more connectedness and happiness, than the participants themselves expected (Experiments 1a-5). Participants were especially prone to overestimate how awkward deep conversations would be compared with shallow conversations (Experiments 2-5). Notably, they also felt more connected to deep conversation partners than shallow conversation partners after having both types of conversations (Experiments 6a-b). Systematic differences between expectations and experiences arose because participants expected others to care less about their disclosures in conversation than others actually did (Experiments 1a, 1b, 4a, 4b, 5, and 6a). As a result, participants more accurately predicted the outcomes of their conversations when speaking with close friends, family, or partners whose care and interest is more clearly known (Experiment 5). Miscalibrated expectations about others matter because they guide decisions about which topics to discuss in conversation, such that more calibrated expectations encourage deeper conversation (Experiments 7a-7b). Misunderstanding others can encourage overly shallow interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation.

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