Pandemics inspire the most remarkable acts of unity and compassion (Solnit, 2009). They also lead to appalling acts of division […]

It is not surprising that in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, aside from infection fears, gatherings of people on beaches, public transport and in parks were met with concern and even alarm. Crowds are associated with trouble. But crowds can be both destructive and constructive forces.

In an excerpt from Together Apart, three officials with Public Health England argue that he consequences of shared identity, which have been shown to be so important in building an effective community response to the pandemic — the mutual trust, influence and support — are equally important when it comes to community–authority relations.

While the pandemic is different other emergencies, there are important similarities: there is a mortal threat which can create fear; there is not enough protection for everyone under threat; and human action can mitigate (or exacerbate) that threat.

Countries across the world have been turning to behavioral science in the fight against coronavirus. In May, The New Scientist proclaimed that ‘behavioral […]

Given the import of its subject matter, SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space) had agreed to make an e-book o the psychology of COVID-19 freely available.

In The Scopus Diaries and the (Il)Logics of Academic Survival, Abel Polese helps to demystify many of the inner workings of academia for […]

As scholars who research how to counter science misinformation and conspiracy theories, we believe there is also value in exposing the rhetorical techniques used in the viral video Plandemic. There are seven distinctive traits of conspiratorial thinking. Plandemic offers textbook examples of them all.

The big idea The scientific community worldwide has mobilized with unprecedented speed to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, and the emerging […]

Economist Anne Case didn’t believe her eyes when she first identified the trend of what came to be called ‘deaths of despair’: looking at figures from the 1990s to the most recent data available from 2018, mortality among middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans rose, stalled, then rose again.

The “anti-lockdown” and #Reopen protests in the U.S. have powerful and secretive backers, but there are real Americans on the […]

Social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic implies many painful losses. Among them are so-called “third places” – the restaurants, bars, […]