Life in the age of COVID-19Ways to Address Life Under COVID-19

An international team of researchers has outlined ways to manage different facets of life under the spread of the COVID-19 virus, ranging from how we can combat racially driven bias and fake news to how we can increase cooperation and better manage stress.

Its work, which appears in the journal Nature Human Behavior, considers research stretching over the past half century to offer insights about how to address current circumstances.

“The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive, global health crisis,” observes Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology, who led the project with Stanford’s Robb Willer. “Because the crisis requires large-scale behavior change and poses significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioral sciences are likely going to be very helpful for optimizing pandemic response.”

“This interdisciplinary review points to several ways in which research can be immediately applied to optimize response to this pandemic, but also points to several important gaps that researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months,” adds Willer, a sociologist.

NYU says that the analysis, drawn from the expertise of over 40 researchers at more than 20 colleges and universities, focuses on phenomena linked to COVID-19, connecting existing scholarship to potential courses of action in several areas, including the following: “Group Threat,” “Fake News and Misinformation,” “Social Norms,” and “Stress and Coping.”

Group Threat
The authors, referring to recent attacks on ethnic Asians in predominantly white countries, note that “Europe’s most deadly disease, the bubonic plague of the 14th century, unleashed massive violence, including the murder of Catalans in Sicily, clerics and beggars in some locations, and pogroms against Jews, with over a thousand communities eradicated.”

However, they point to research that indicates pandemics may, in fact, present opportunities to reduce religious and ethnic prejudice: “coordinated efforts across individuals, communities, and governments to fight the spread of disease send strong signals of cooperation and shared values, which allow people to re-cast others who were previously considered out-group members as in-group members.”

The authors recount cooperative acts currently unfolding: More than 20 countries donated medical supplies to China in February, and China has reciprocated. “Government officials can highlight events like these to improve out-group attitudes,” they write, adding that other studies have shown that making people feel safer can reduce prejudice.