In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the world, and especially the United States. Although it is home to only about 4% of the world population, the U.S. had a much greater percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths.
The pandemic also triggered dramatic economic upheaval and highlighted long existing societal fissures. Following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, we saw the most widespread civil rights movement in decades.
2020 was dynamic - societally and personally. This study seeks to better understand the psychological and experiential factors that influenced how Americans responded to these stresses. What accounted for differences in compliance with public health guidelines? How did events impact attitudes and psychological traits?
Emotions and beliefs are major factors in decision making. We hope that this study can provide a better understanding of the emotional factors that influenced people's decision-making as the pandemic swept through the US and other events rippled through society,
Caltech
Ralph Adolphs
Although face-to-face testing at Caltech has temporarily ceased, our research never stops. The COVID-Dynamic study provides a unique opportunity to gain insights about social behavior and decision making in response to a real-world event.
How do we make sense of ourselves and others during a collective crisis? How do our prior experiences of stress inform how we understand the upheaval that 2020 has wrought? I'm really excited by what we'll learn about the interplay between prior adversity, resilience, and risk in the lives of COVID-DYNAMIC participants.
How will the events of 2020 impact our biases and implicit attitudes? These are not stable constructs, rather they continuously evolve with experience and are deployed in a context-dependent manner. We are using model-based approaches to characterize how implicit attitudes change during this dynamic period in our society.
One thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed are norms like social distancing and mask wearing. To what degree have these norms been internalized explicitly and implicitly? We are investigating the effects of these and other COVID-19-induced biases on decision making and behavior.