[Music] in 1918 sailors returning from Dakar on the west coast of Africa stopped off their boat in the port of Recife in Brazil they were sick and within two weeks new cases were being reported in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian centers authorities skeptical of reports coming from Portugal and the rest of Europe did little to make provision for the arrival of the Spanish flu the outbreak was fast and ferocious one witness of the events in Rio de Janeiro wrote that the number of sick individuals wasn't as astounding as the fact that every single person was sick and there wasn't a way to help to treat the sick to transport food to sell goods to fill prescriptions that is to carry out the most essential tasks of collective life health and medical services failed along with basic essentials like food supply public order broke down the streets were chaotic with looting and panic scenes of social breakdown whilst a common trope of disaster films aren't as common as one might believe in crises so what do we know about our behavior in crises and what hosts coronavirus revealed about our social psychology professor Sir Simon Wesley consults governments on how to respond to the public when a crisis arrives he suggests three basic principles don't give premature reassurance don't tell people not to panic and get doctors and scientists on television as soon as possible when people advice to those who have to communicate with the public we always tell them whatever you do do not tell people not to panic that's one of the three golden rules of risk communication because those who are panicking are listening to you those who aren't start to worry that they shouldn't be and anyway most of the time most of the people don't panic so we say never use key word in your public communications as we know from those who survived the horrors of war crises generally inspire people to work together provided they receive clear messaging from experts and leaders and the sense that the government is acting with in their best interest people are generally motivated toward action in a crisis such as an epidemic historically we live in an anti collective culture where on the whole we have been told that groups are bad people the story we've nearly always had is you know the individual is rational when alone put them in a group they become they panic they become a mindless mob and so on and so forth and a lot of our work has been showing well no people don't become irrational they don't become mindless what they tend to do is they shift their sense of self from the individual to the social self and they shift the norms and values which guide their behavior from one's own idiosyncratic norms and values to those of the group as social animals altruism is a powerful motivator because instinctively we understand that our chances for survival improve with the greater well-being of our communities but on an individual level what psychological mechanisms are at play disease outbreaks present us with a classical dilemma for social response the tussle between looking after the needs or self-interest of the individual that I all that of the greater collective the them and us and the choice is driven by one of the two basic instinctual responses fight-or-flight versus tendon befriend at the moment so many of us are anxious and we feel that the anxiety is a desire to run away escape hide or combat the problem fight-or-flight is a primal response to threat and has a physiological base preparing one to take action to ensure individual survival cortisol floods our brains and causes us to hyper focus making it harder to look away from a potential threat but it's not particularly helpful in the context of coronavirus because it reduces our capacity for empathy for calm rationalization a mix is more vulnerable to extremism and other hyper tribal thinking one of the things that happens in pandemics over the whole of whom this has been the repercussions of stigma prejudice violence and fracture against the group thought or caused it the groups who somehow escaped it who've been treated know the groups have don't feel they being treated fairly we aren't all together and then you have long term Russians and sometimes in history extremely violent alternatively with tend and befriend we respond to danger by tending to ourselves and our families and befriending others so as to build social networks of mutual assistance it's a far more pro-social response to threat and emphasizes our interdependence with one another in any disaster and especially a large-scale disaster quite frankly the state is not big enough to look after us there aren't enough police officers fire officers care workers and so on we need to look after each other and therefore the formation of mutual aid communities and groups is critical and that again is facilitated by sense of shared identity according to the collective psychology project there are three particular factors that will inform these responses the degree to which we feel agency or the power to shape our lives our sense of belonging or connectedness to others and our conscious self-awareness or our ability to choose and analyze our own responses to things happening in our lives rather than instinctual responses from the amygdala or the part of the brain that deals with threats and pumps cortisol the problem with the amygdala is that it doesn't make a distinction between what we imagine and what is which is a problem so we feel distressed if it might be that something's going to happen just as much as if something is happening however if it is happening in the breast of the brain recognizes that then the amygdala is quiet no anxiety so the one thing I can say to people who are anxious to start off and I always do is that your anxiety is about what might be right now you're okay otherwise you wouldn't be feeling it wouldn't waste your energy to fill many of the positive actions we've witnessed during coronavirus are built on tend and befriend Platon for our carers Italians play music on their balconies hundreds of thousands of volunteers signing up to help the NHS captain Tom Moore's 100 garden laps and the daily work of health care professionals on the front line all of these acts make us feel like we belong and give us a sense of agency but what about some of the negative behaviours in the early stages of the outbreak many floated social distancing advice from spring break to Bondi Beach to revelers in parks and bars one possible explanation is our poor ability to assess risk which is driven by many factors but includes our tendency towards optimism bias humans are naturally optimistic thinkers most newlyweds believe they're invulnerable to divorce most smokers think that they're less vulnerable to cancer a Research poll completed in late February of around 4,300 people in Western Europe found half of them believe they were less likely to get coronavirus than others additionally people were poor at framing the virus in terms that could be understood early cometary frequently featured comparisons with seasonal influenza on the 9th of March President Trump made a tweet comparing the annual mortality of influenza to the number of confirmed coronavirus deaths in the u. s. experts including dr.
Falchi soon corrected the comparison coronavirus has a mortality rate 10 times that of influenza and presents a much greater threat covered 19 is a novel pathogen with its own unique characteristics and outcomes our normal mechanisms for making predictions didn't work because nothing before in our lives has happened like this and that's why we make comparisons with diseases like influenza despite discrepancies early reports also emphasized the greater threat to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions we now know that whilst this is true coronavirus can affect both the young and old the healthy and the ill in addition the practice of social distancing is just as much about protecting others and the broader community as it is about protecting oneself understanding all these factors hampered people's ability to process the risk panic buying was another behavior that drew criticism stories of empty toilet paper and pasta shelves in supermarkets contributed to our collective anxiety as people had been informed there would be lockdown measures or worse the chance of self isolation for up to two weeks if you were sitting at home you were getting information telling you here's a scarce resource is about to be locked down blue roll is kind of useful to have in such a situation and you're told that other people are irrationally buying it up now in that situation it is entirely rational for you then to go out and say well I need to get some before it's all gone so what people are doing is responding entirely sensibly and reasonably to information about behavior of others if there's anything dysfunctional here it's not the psychology it's the dysfunctional information the problem arises when people feel they're sacrificing whilst others are benefiting it increases anxiety motivating a person to become more selfish or overestimate what they need that's part of the fight-or-flight response and is also driven by another mechanism the law of scarcity frequently used in marketing and advertising when we believe a product sold out or the inventories low humans interpret that to mean the product must be of greater significance or quality the reason why an increase of 10 to 20 percent in sales leads to empty shelves nothing to do with psychology everything to do with the just-in-time supply systems which mean that nowadays are like 10 or 20 years ago the stocking is very fragile if it goes up a bit then you begin to have empty shelves once it was clear that supply chains were still in place the buying Carlmont [Music] another example of near panic was the rapid crash of the markets humans are highly receptive to other people's emotional and mental states and the trading of stocks is highly speculative movements on the market are deeply influenced by collective uncertainty and once the selling commenced it was like a charge through our collective central nervous system our behavior is as much determined by what we think other people think as what we think ourselves we're not talking about irrationality we casually use terms like family we're talking about inferences about the behavior of others and of course in the market then the behavior of others is precisely the phenomenon that is critical in and of itself which makes it even more sensitive later as the government stepped in with measures to reassure confidence market panic alleviated when a global crisis arrives our border master narrative about the world around us collapses our outlook and understanding of the things happening in our lives is turned on its head this is why public presentations with leaders and scientists doctors and experts are so important they provide reassurance and help us craft a new narrative to navigate the change in world and the threat around us alternatively the vacuum and narrative can be exploited by conspiracy theories which proliferate in crises those virtue theory are nothing new as they were far more common before the years we guarantee so they're invented by social media but that's blaming leading the message if you look at the tracks and pamphlets around the great play or even before printing you will see that Mis misunderstandings conspiracy theories accompanied the Black Death and its multiple appearances but the thing about groups is they are the best of wolves and they're the worst of worlds if we create an intergroup division and we have a sense that we are being attacked by an other group then the group can become truly pernicious and again in pandemics there is a history whereby out groups have been blamed for what's happening and that has led to great violence and so for instance I mean the huge numbers of historical studies say about the rise of anti-semitism during the plague during that the Black Death on one day I think it was Valentine's Day thirteen forty nine two thousand Jewish people were burnt in one day in Strasbourg and that was part of a the ethnic cleansing of a genocide that killed more than five hundred Jewish communities in Europe because viral outbreaks are an existential threat conspiracy theories can offer a source of a blame and a place in which to direct action usually the theories we gravitate towards tell us a lot about ourselves and our confirmation bias but rather than decreasing anxiety research shows it actually increases it along with an even greater sense of disillusion and powerlessness there are some and all who are absolutely certain that they have discovered the theory of everything they often have high degrees but they're usually loners they're usually very distant from other people they don't have a way to verify what it is they think they know conspiracy theories offer a physical threat to from spikes in xenophobia and violence to potentially harmful medical advice during the h1n1 swine flu pandemic conspiracy theories in the u. s. suggested that undocumented migrants were being exploited by terrorists to spread the virus whilst outside of America some theories argued that the virus was purposefully being spread by American authorities to benefit pharmaceutical companies from the perspective of our social psychology conspiracy theories foster distrust in experts the government science and the science community people turn to sources of information that polarized few points or proliferate fake news the greatest struggle against a viral outbreak is undermined once segments in society's silo fragment and distrust the information they're receiving which has an impact on the drive to tend and befriend or to work together it's not a sense of helplessness which makes you vulnerable but rather a sense of agency that makes you invulnerable so far coronavirus has offered a wealth of its own theories from early suggestions that it was an overblown invention by media groups to sway political interests or that pharmaceutical companies have introduced the virus to manipulate the market and make gargantuan vaccine profits or the claim that 5g is a technology built to transmit the virus the twin problem of conspiracy theories is number one they helped turn the positives of the group into the negatives of the group they lead from the inclusive way to a divisive we and they and secondly they avoid our own responsibility and our own complicity of these problems and project them onto that demonic other so they are they are truly corrosive of the the things we need to get through the pandemic effectively as lockdowns to battle the viral outbreak are extended globally concerns regarding mental health and ongoing isolation amounting studies have been done on the psychological outcomes of people who were quarantined during outbreaks of SARS h1n1 flu Ebola and other infectious diseases many individuals experienced both short and long term mental health problems including stress insomnia emotional exhaustion and substance abuse the thing that all mental health issues have in common via them depression or anxiety or schizophrenia you know from all them one extreme to another is that they lie to you and they tell you that you're a freak and they tell you that you're alone and they take that no one understands what you're going through I think it is um I think it's absolutely you know normal you know more than ever to be feeling weird right now a meta-analysis of 70 studies that followed 3.
