Human Behaviour in Pandemics

Social and Psychological Determinants in a Global Health Crisis

Malgorzata Kossowska, Natalia Letki, Tomasz Zaleskiewicz, Szymon Wichary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032183527
• eBook ISBN: 9781000568707
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

This timely interdisciplinary book brings together a wide spectrum of theoretical concepts and their empirical applications in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, informing our understanding of the social and psychological bases of a global crisis.

Written by an author team of psychologists and sociologists, the volume provides comprehensive coverage of phenomena such as fear, risk, judgement and decision making, threat and uncertainty, group identity and cohesion, social and institutional trust, and communication in the context of an international health emergency.The topics have been grouped into four main chapters, focusing on the individual, group, social, and communication perspectives of the issues affecting or being affected by the pandemic, based on over 740 classic and current references of peer-reviewed research and contextualized with an epidemiological perspective discussed in the introduction. The volume finishes with two special sections, with a chapter on cultural specificity of the social impact of pandemics, focusing specifically on both Islam and Hinduism, and a chapter on the cross-national differences in policy responses to the current health crisis.

Providing not just a reference for academic research, but also short-term and long-term policy solutions based on successful strategies to combat adverse social, cognitive, and emotional consequences, this is the ideal resource for academics and policymakers interested in social and psychological determinants of individual reactions to pandemics, as well as in fields such as economics, management, politics, and medical care.

PART 1 Individuals, groups, and society in times of pandemics

Małgorzata Kossowska, Natalia Letki, Tomasz Zaleskiewicz, and Szymon Wichary

Introduction¹

Małgorzata Kossowska, Natalia Letki, Tomasz Zaleskiewicz and Szymon Wichary

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254133-2

The pandemic we are currently facing is considered to be the gravest crisis of its kind since World War II. It has mustered and intensified a herculean joint effort by scientists representing diverse disciplines to understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects and propagates, to refine diagnostic tests, and find effective drugs. However, how the development of the disease itself, COVID-19, has unfolded is markedly influenced by psychological and social factors. In other words, people’s beliefs and behaviours play a prominent role in how the disease spreads, who becomes infected, how many people succumb to the disease, and what preventive measures are undertaken. The search for more effective vaccines and drugs is ongoing, but in the meantime, and in parallel, successful containment of the disease, in order to safeguard the health and wellbeing of entire societies, largely depends on decisions made by a range of decision makers as well as the willingness of individuals to adhere to the guidelines and recommendations arising from those decisions.

Uncertainty is inherent in people’s decision making and behaviours as they endeavour to cope with this dire predicament. The official decision makers themselves seem to have scant and/or partial knowledge of the disease, and the available information is often of poor quality, fragmented, and/or contradictory (Ioannidis, 2020). In these circumstances, decision making is contingent on the decision makers’ willingness and ability to predict people’s behaviour, on the values and beliefs they rely on when assessing the quality of available evidence and expert opinions, and on their approaches to resolving moral dilemmas (e.g., choosing who receives access to a ventilator) and value conflicts (such as safety versus civil liberties). Whether the populace is willing to comply with any rules and recommendations emerging from this decision-making process, in turn, largely hinges on their level of trust in decision makers: their competence, sincerity, and good intentions.

Both the apparent uncertainty among decision makers and people’s concern about whether their decisions are right feed pandemic-related anxiety, which spreads much like a virus, affecting various aspects of our lives. Worry centres on not only our own health and that of loved ones but also on the number of restrictions imposed on everyday life, the manner in which the labour market is subject to seismic shifts, and how the economy or education will function as the pandemic ensues. Expectations of an economic recession and thoughts of preparing for the worst instill fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, and when experienced over extended periods of time, lead to a deterioration in people’s health, a diminishment in their ability to act effectively, and the potential for developing damaging defensive behaviours. Coping with such negative feelings poses enormous challenges during a pandemic (Taylor, 2019).

The current pandemic should be seen as more than just a health crisis. It has knocked people out of their daily routines, altering both behaviour and the social and economic rules that organize behaviour. It has placed everyone in a situation that is not only threatening (people are actually contracting the disease and dying in worrying numbers) and novel (if forced to undertake remote work or distance learning) but also unpredictable (the prevalence and longevity of the viral threat is unclear). One might even go so far as to say that the pandemic has utterly dismantled the world we knew, or has at least caused a sea-change. We must learn to live anew – change our ways, learn new behaviours, and turn them into habits.

There is no doubt the pandemic has led to a crisis experienced on multiple levels. A crisis, however, does not necessarily lead to calamity. Used properly, it may even facilitate positive change. Wise-headed decisions and the behaviours that support them are a key to success. It is therefore essential to understand the mechanisms underlying the behaviours of individuals, groups, and societies, both during the pandemic and when it finally ends. These mechanisms, in turn, may be described in terms of individual factors (cognitive, emotional, and behavioural), social factors (group and intergroup), and institutional factors (those referring to state–citizen relations and to the laws that regulate them). These factors are not isolated from each other. On the contrary, they are closely linked and dynamically interrelated. Therefore, our review makes an attempt at including all three levels of analysis and, whenever possible, reveals their interconnections.

We focus on the role of psychological and social factors, since these two categories, though typically ignored by decision makers (who prefer to rely on their intuitions), play a key role in effective crisis management. During the current pandemic, we have all observed tremendous efforts and resources being expended in the provision of medical help for COVID-19 patients, while the needs of entire social groups that have been affected by the pandemic in other ways have been neglected (e.g., groups suffering from mental health problems, such as anxiety and depressive disorders, panic attacks, or stress; groups displaying behavioral problems, such as non-compliance with COVID-19 restrictions and medical guidelines, risky behaviour, and stigmatization; and those experiencing domestic violence). The neglect also extends to those who have lost their livelihoods or have no access to healthcare services (the underprivileged, those experiencing homelessness, and immigrants). Serious consequences may follow as a result in the near and longer-term future.

We realize this monograph does not exhaust the subject of psychological and social behaviours during the current pandemic. In fact, we set out to answer just two questions: (1) How ought we prepare people for the social and economic crises related to the pandemic? (2) What constitutes the major risks that may contribute to the crisis persisting unduly? Since one of the most serious risks, in our view, is the uncontrolled spread of the disease, we devote a great deal of attention to preventive measures aimed at reducing the spread of the coronavirus disease (such as hygiene practices, obeying government-imposed rules, etc.), and how these could be communicated effectively to the public. These two questions turn out to be very broad, so each section of this book may serve as a starting point for separate in-depth analyses. We focus on those aspects of the problem that (1) we consider essential for gaining a holistic understanding of people’s behaviour during a pandemic, (2) have a sufficient body of reliable evidence relevant to the issues, and (3) can be used as the basis for developing recommendations for decision makers. Aiming as we do to offer a comprehensive account of this complex problem, we have inspected it from different behavioural and social science perspectives: cognitive and social psychology, behavioural economics, sociology, and political science. In this way, we are in line with the best practices recommended to researchers during a pandemic (see Hahn et al., 2020), fully aware that no social problem can be accurately described from the perspective of just one discipline. This approach, however, requires the marrying of different research and methodological perspectives and a certain unification of the language of description. Integrating advances in various scientific disciplines is far from being an easy task. What exacerbates the difficulty is the fact that the behavioural and social sciences are often contextual, that is, the effects they describe depend on the place, a particular moment in history, public moods, and the contemporary social and political discourse. Hence, the task of distinguishing between the universal and the specific is not always easily accomplished from existing data.

This book’s inception dates from May 2020, at a time when the pandemic appeared to be more under control and social life was slowly returning to normal. The initial shock sparked by the large number of cases was subsiding, the unprecedented restrictions were being loosened, and lockdown was gradually being lifted. By July 2020, once the book was ready, people’s minds in Poland were occupied with the presidential election, summer holidays, and some rumblings about another possible wave of the pandemic in the fall. There were also reports that a vaccine for COVID-19 was ready. At the same time, on July 18, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported the biggest daily increase in the number of new COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic (260,000; BBC, 2020). A couple of weeks earlier, economists at the World Bank forecast that the economic recession caused by the pandemic would be the deepest since 1970 (World Bank, 2020). Given all this, it is hard to believe the health crisis is over. What we know with certainty, though, is that a social and economic crisis is yet to come. Therefore, regardless of the further dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, the analyses presented in this book will remain valid for the foreseeable future. Most of the effects and mechanisms discussed here, especially those related to anxiety and uncertainty, are universal. We encounter them in any situation perceived as a crisis; that is, in any emergency situation that threatens human life, health, resources, and the environment, that prevents normal functioning, and that requires extraordinary measures to be overcome. In this book, we emphasize, as much as possible, both the mechanisms specific to a pandemic (such as the fear of becoming infected and its consequences) and those that are universal, typical of any crisis (e.g., helplessness and low perceived control of one’s environment).

Finally, bearing in mind the weaknesses of social and behavioural sciences (or, more generally, basic sciences) as an instrument for policy making (IJzerman et al., 2020), we must concede that our analyses can only demonstrate what we know, or what we think, is probable. At the same time, we are clear about what we lack evidence for when it comes to people’s behaviour in a crisis situation. What sets this review in line with other publications that have been developed in response to the challenges related to the epidemic crisis is its commitment to collecting high-quality scientific evidence and translating it into the language of practice (s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Part 1 Individuals, groups, and society in times of pandemics
• PART 2 Culture and policy in times of pandemics: case studies
• Index