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.

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

Lower social class (or socioeconomic status) is associated with fewer resources, greater exposure to threat, and a reduced sense of personal control. Given these life circumstances, one might expect lower class individuals to engage in less prosocial behavior, prioritizing self-interest over the welfare of others. The authors hypothesized, by contrast, that lower class individuals orient to the welfare of others as a means to adapt to their more hostile environments and that this orientation gives rise to greater prosocial behavior. Across 4 studies, lower class individuals proved to be more generous (Study 1), charitable (Study 2), trusting (Study 3), and helpful (Study 4) compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion. Implications for social class, prosocial behavior, and economic inequality are discussed.

Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

Interpersonal relations — a theory of interdependence

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/5039.pdf

The psychology of social dilemmas: A review.

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms - "strong" and "weak" reciprocity - that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free- riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a "narrow" and a "wide" reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in "real-world" situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation "in the wild." In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing.

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Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate

The authors present an interdependence theoretical framework and advance the argument that generosity serves the important purpose of communicating trust, which is assumed to be of utmost importance to coping with incidents of negative noise (i.e., when the other every now and then behaves less cooperatively than intended). Using a new social dilemma task (the parcel delivery paradigm), it was hypothesized that incidents of negative noise would exert detrimental effects on trust and trust-related judgments and experiences, as well as cooperation, and that relative to tit for tat and self-regarding strategies (stingy or unconditionally cooperative strategies), other-regarding strategies (i.e., unconditional cooperation and generosity) would be more effective at reducing such as detrimental effects. Results from 2 studies provided strong support for these hypotheses, suggesting that the power of generosity is underestimated in the extant literature, especially in its ability to maintain or build trust, which is essential for coping with noise.

/pdf/promoting-cooperation-and-trust-in-noisy-situations-the-1rqtqqs8vu.pdf

Promoting cooperation and trust in “noisy” situations: The power of generosity

It has been suggested that the expectation of repeated (versus single) interaction might promote cooperation in social dilemmas. One key question is whether the anticipation of repeated interaction...

How the Shadow of the Future Might Promote Cooperation

One for all: What representing a group may do to us

This paper advances a social interaction analysis of altruism, as a likely result of empathy, and egalitarianism, as a key component of fairness. A social interaction analysis is unique in that it (a) focuses on the persons and the situation, (b) includes proximal and distal influences (such as personality and relational influences, as well as cognitive and emotional processes), (c) yields action-reaction patterns that are largely observable and therefore especially relevant to learning, and (d) helps conceptualize interpersonal orientations that affect behaviour and social interactions. The chapter discusses the ubiquity of altruism and egalitarianism in the context of social dilemmas and related situations, and concludes that these two orientations are important to theorizing and research in various disciplines that seek to understand the motivational underpinnings of social interactions in dyads and groups.

Anthon Klapwijk

Papers

Promoting cooperation and trust in “noisy” situations: The power of generosity

How the Shadow of the Future Might Promote Cooperation

One for all: What representing a group may do to us

A Social Interaction Analysis of Empathy and Fairness

A social interaction analysis of empathy and fairness.