Social Science Space

David Canter considers how disasters and tragedies can bring out the best in what it means to be human, and sometimes the worst.

“COVID has put a magnifying glass on existing inequalities,” says Jolanda Jetten, a professor of social psychology at the University of Queensland, “and it’s clear that the degree of suffering is unfairly on the shoulders of the poorer groups in societies, and also the poorest countries in this world.”

One of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, argues social psychologist S. Alex Haslam, are many traditional views of leadership. […]

In this 44-minute video, Stephen Reicher addresses what he sees as the two psychologies of COVID, working through the lens of social identity theory.

What might be one of the most severe effects of the pandemic. According to two psychologists who contributed to the […]

Our work in recent years has focused on how to prevent people from falling for misinformation in the first place, building on a framework from social psychology known as inoculation theory.

With this pandemic, argues Robert Dingwall, fear amplification has been policy, based on the advice of a particular group of behavioral scientists advising the United Kingdom’s government.

The reports from Britain’s hospitals in the last few days have been truly worrying. No one should doubt the reality […]

David Canter considers the tragic implications of people not understanding what they are told by politicians and experts.

It is possible that we could abolish death by COVID, argues Robert Dingwall, by continuing the restrictions of 2020 indefinitely – the problem, of course, is that we would simply die from something else.

The saga of the UK’s contact tracing app(s) should be an object lesson in how not to approach the use of technology in public policy – and why politicians in particular need to step back and rethink their approach to technology, and in particular to privacy.

Understanding how to create the conditions for a thriving civil society — that works in partnership with local governments and […]