transcripts.csv

RecordingDate,Name,Gender,Location,Field,FamiliarWisdom,Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4,Q5,Position,Seniority
3-Jul-20,Menon,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"We are probably going to be more appreciative of people we didn't appreciate enough before. That might be friends and neighbors that have kept each other going through lockdown that might in our country, at least, be health service workers who have been the focus of a lot of sort of attention during this. It might even be immigrants, because the Prime Minister himself came out of this thanking people who weren't from the UK who helped save his life when he went into hospital. That's the first thing. The second thing is that the crisis has helped bring to the fore the issue of economic inequality, the fact that people have precarious work, the fact that people might not have enough to live on, the fact that some key workers don't get paid very much at all. And it might be that we end up with a greater sustained public and political attention paid to that issue that has been certainly in this country in the recent past.","Part of it is the wisdom of memory. It's very easy to think something in a certain moment in time and forget about it down the line. What is very hard to wrap our heads around at the moment is the fact that we're not always going to be locked down, we're going to move back to something closer to normal at some point, particularly if there's a vaccine. And then it's very important not to forget the lessons of this. I think it's quite important to imprint on our minds, the kinds of things we're thinking about now. What we need is a degree of engagement with politics to ensure that political leaders don't forget the lessons, in a way cynically speaking, the recent history of my country is a history of crises that we fail to make the most out of. You go all the way back to 2008 when you had the financial crisis, we missed an opportunity to think through questions of inequality, the excessive role of financial services in the British economy and so on. In 2016, we had the Brexit referendum, which was about many things, but partly about dissatisfaction with the state of the national economy. We've had lots of fine words since 2016, about leveling up, just about managing. Nothing has happened. So I think we also need to hold our politicians to account to deliver on the lessons we will learn from abandoning.",,"We've got 40,000, probably near 60,000 excess deaths in this country. That's pretty negative when you think about it. Being insufficiently prepared for pandemics, is one key reason. And in this country, that challenges the way governments have been thinking since probably the early part of this century, we need to focus a lot more on resilience and less on immediate efficiency. For instance, our NHS has worked at capacity for many years now. Why? Because it's the economically most efficient model. But what isn't built into the system then, is resilience. And there was real fear at the start of this pandemic, that the NHS would get quickly overwhelmed. The wisdom of long term planning and long term government. One argument we have is that because of our very confrontational political system, where one party fights another and opposes everything the other party does, there's a temptation when you come into power to start to reverse what the other side did. It will be nice in this country if we could have more cross party initiatives to help deal with the longer term structural problems we face. What is the future of work when we have the rise of artificial intelligence? How do we deal with social care, which is extremely badly provided for in this country? I think having greater cross party collaboration, which means that you can have policies set for 10, 15, 20 years, rather than simply four or five, will be a wonderful first step.

We need to think more about resilience to future crises, prevention rather than cure and in a sense, the big message of that is for politicians to take a longer term view of what needs doing in this country. And that, again boils down to the nature of our politics. It is inevitable and understandable the politicians think, in terms of the next election. Actually, what this pandemic has shown is that many of the problems we face whether it's pandemics, whether it’s climate, or long term issues, and it takes more than one government to address them, we need to start thinking more long term when it comes to public policy.","The crucial piece of wisdom is that we will get over this, people's struggle with lockdown. It's often for many people a lonely time, there are massive economic consequences to come possibly with enormous number of job losses. All the indications are that eventually we will find a vaccine, that the economy will recover, is just to keep your eyes set on the fact that we will bounce back from this. As individuals we tend to be quite resilient, even though in terms of the infrastructure we build, we may not be as I said before, but I think that's the thing is to keep your eyes fixed forward and know that our countries will bounce back for this, and this isn't necessarily the new normal.",Professor,2
16-Jul-20,Uskul,Female,Non-US,SC,No,"This pandemic has underscored societal inequalities along age, class, ethnic, regional and gender lines. The pandemic has not caused these inequalities, but it's put a spotlight on them. Disease affects certain ethnic and age groups more than others, a woman's contribution to the economy is likely to be hit harder than man's, and those who have entered COVID-19 with ongoing major problems such as poverty, political instability, and corruption, will have a harder time coming out of it in one piece. Alongside of all this, we have also realized one more time, that we all depend on each other in our lives are interconnected in so many different ways. I expect and perhaps more so hope, that this picture will motivate us to work towards understanding why this pandemic hits certain groups harder than others. As a result, it will motivate us to pick up a stronger fight against the unfair distribution of resources and rights not just where we live, but much more globally. ","We will need to master the wisdom to take the perspective of those who have been hit hard by the pandemic, and the ability to see what we can do to avoid contributing towards these inequalities. We also need to have a clearer insight into the meaning of the choices that we make in all domains of life, which have clear consequences for others, and also critically evaluate the privileges that are afforded by our lives that are not shared by everyone else. ","This pandemic caused people to live in lockdowns and following this experience I expect that we will continue to live in a world of reduced mobility for the foreseeable future, even after lockdowns have been lifted completely, most likely, I will continue to avoid crowds and strangers, traveling overseas, participating in large events unless we have to and so on. And this is likely to affect technological developments in every possible domain of life, not just when it comes to how we socialize with friends and family from our homes, but also how we work, how legal and medical advice and services are delivered, how we vote, how we teach our pupils and students and so on. One potential negative outcome would be to think that online virtual interactions can replace face to face and physical ones. Research shows very clearly that in person interactions are qualitatively different when it comes to how they affect our mental wellbeing, our self-concept, our physiology and so on. Coming to the conclusion that life can continue online without physical human contact would be, in my view, one very negative consequence of this pandemic. ","We need to master sensitivity to the very important role played by context in human psychology. The context in which interactions between individuals and between groups that take place determine to a great extent what these interactions mean to us, and what they do to us, and this we cannot ignore and should not ignore when it comes to how we configure life in the future. ","This pandemic, like other disasters we can think of, brings with it a pervasive sense that the world is fundamentally unpredictable. This can trigger the feeling that we lack control over our lives which can be debilitating in many ways. I think finding small ways in which we can hold on to that feeling of having some sort of control would help us get through these difficult times. At the same time though, I think we can try to challenge our need for certainty and try to accept and live with uncertainty which it looks like is gonna be with us for longer than we can imagine.",Professor,2
10-Jul-20,Shariff,Male,Non-US,SC,No,"One of the positive aspects of this might be that it even though it exacerbates poverty and inequality, it might shift our attitudes towards those things in a way that ultimately might have more of a positive effect. Across the world, there's great variation in terms of how people attribute the causes of poverty. How they balance attributions towards dispositional causes, that poverty is due to bad decision making or laziness, something internal to the person or to situational causes, exogenous causes, situations, bad luck, lack of opportunity. Since the pandemic has been such a great, and obvious example of an exogenous shock, something that's out of people's immediate personal control, it looks like it has changed people's general attitude towards the causes of poverty, not just their specific recognition that the pandemic has made the economic hardship of the poor worse, but that, in general, the causes of economic hardship for the poor, tend to be these situational things. There is some data that we have  and it showed that the shift that people have towards recognizing that poverty is more the consequence of the situational rather than dispositional causes, drives more sympathy for the poor. And as a result, more support for redistributive policies. We’ve already seen that in the political sphere with a resurgence of a discussion of a universal basic income, something that's being taken more seriously now than it ever has before. The lasting positive legacy, of the pandemic might be a greater recognition of the unfair challenges that many of the people in our society face. And that's a commitment to a more egalitarian, collective approach to these challenges.","We're already seeing part of it in people's psychological changes here, their openness to these policies, to just recognize that, like we've all seen during this time, many of us are just one bad day away from needing each other's help.","One of the most negative is related to one of the more positive, and that has to do with the plight of the poor. Both in terms of absolute poverty, as well as inequality, this has been bad. We've made tremendous progress over the last decades in terms of reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world, a lot of that progress has been set back by the economic fallout of the pandemic. And that's tragic. In North America, we're likely to see that inequality trends, which have already been going in the wrong direction, are likely to be exacerbated by this. One of the reasons why is because of the unequal educational opportunities. So in the best of times, elementary and high school kids tend to see what we call a summer learning loss, which is that over the summer months, a lot of what they've learned during the school year regresses, both in terms of their mathematical ability and their verbal ability. But unfortunately, that's bad enough, it's not equally distributed among the economic spectrum. The richest kids actually see a boost because they go back to a home environment that's actually quite enriched. School tends to be the equalizer. But when the students go back to their homes, they go back to very different environments, the poorer students go back to the least enriched environments, have the least opportunities for this enrichment, and as a result, they see the steepest declines in their learning. Now, one of the worst things about this is that those inequalities accumulate over the years, which leads ultimately to a substantial achievement gap between the rich and poor, caused predominantly by what happens when they're out of school, rather than differences when they're in school. What this pandemic has brought is that on steroids. First of all, the summer period, when students were out of school was much longer, twice as long and it might continue. Furthermore, there was some expectation that students were supposed to learn remotely or at home, or get school taught, those opportunities were not equally distributed as well, due to unequal access to technology or parents having different abilities to homeschool given their work schedules. As a result, we're likely to see stark inequalities that may last for decades, we've already seen some preliminary data in terms of these abilities sliding and sliding at different pitches. If they accumulate, which they likely will with the rest of the summer learning losses, we might see certain students falling behind for the rest of their lives. ",,"We are living in a world where we have to make compromises, and we have to make compromises about things that matter to us a lot. 20 years ago, Phil Tetlock created this taxonomy of when things which are considered to be sacred, sacred values, things that hold a lot of important meaning that their values are incalculable, are pitted against either other sacred values or against secular values- secular values are something like money. When a sacred value is pitted against a secular, that's called a taboo trade off. I think a lot of the decisions that people are facing now, but then mistake to be taboo trade offs, when they're actually the other category, sacred values versus other sacred values. A lot of the things that we're facing now a lot of the difficult moral decisions are about meaningful things in both categories, trading safety, grandparents lives against things like reopening schools for children's lives, restarting the economy to save the livelihoods of everybody protesting in order to fight for justice. These are all sacred values, not secular values. And so the decisions that we're actually making are difficult ones. I think the simple act of deliberation has become moralized. The fact that people are actually considering these decisions is seen as morally gross and I think that's a level of ungenerousness to the challenges that other people are facing.",Associate Professor,1
16-Jul-20,Fredrickson,Female,US,SC,No,People become more aware of the importance of the expression of positive emotions when they're in ordinary day to day interactions with others.,"The kind of wisdom people will need is to when they're wearing a face mask to compensate for the expression of positive affect, because making eye contact with somebody is very much without a smile, viewed as threatening, but with a face mask eye contact could be viewed as threatening unless we compensate that with more verbal expression of positive affect or other nonverbal signs, maybe holding your hand on your heart while you're looking at somebody or otherwise, making the gesture gentle, so we'll need to find other ways to compensate for the reduced expression of positive emotion.","The negative change that I worry about is that people will slowly begin to ignore unfamiliar people within their social network. As we practice social distancing, we hang back from unfamiliar people. And our day to day interactions with people we don't know are a huge contributor to our own mental health and also to societal health in terms of building our pro social tendencies.","The wisdom to avoid these outcomes is to keep in mind how vital interactions with strangers, acquaintances less familiar coworkers are for our own mental health and for societal health. And just consciously, deliberately put ourselves in those situations even when they're awkward, and communicate warmth and positivity, even masked as much as we can and if we make those a priority, we'll keep our own individual and collective well being guarded.","It's really important not to let social distancing become social isolation or worse. Social indifference. We very much need our day to day ordinary, mild, brief, positive interactions with people, including unfamiliar people to become our best selves.",Professor,2
19-Jun-20,Schwartz,Male,US,SC,Yes,"What the pandemic has done is, it made people appreciate relationships with other people more since that's been so dramatically taken away. At least in affluent Western societies, we seem to be chasing stuff more, and people less, and this may get us to rearrange our priorities. Relatedly, and this comes to the surface, especially in connection with wearing masks in public, it may enhance our concern for the welfare of other people rather than just ourselves. It's been undersold, that wearing masks is mostly to protect other people from you, and less to protect you from other people. If that had been sold more so that you would, in a sense, had this feeling of public responsibility for the welfare of others every time you went outside. I think that would enhance our sense that we're all in this together, I think we have not taken sufficient advantage of the opportunity to emphasize that as a culture. Focusing less on me and more on we is likely to be a positive outcome.","My own take on wisdom is very much inspired by Aristotle. And one of his central ideas is the importance of finding the mean, which he meant as the right amount, not the average, but the right amount. Lots of virtues become liabilities, become vices when they are carried to an extreme. One of the things we have to do is find the mean, between me and we. You can't forsake your responsibilities to yourself. You also have to take seriously the responsibilities for other people. And it takes judgment, especially in this uncertain world to find the right balance between those two. Second, essential for wisdom is perspective taking, being able to see the world as other people see it so that you can be helpful to them. And in these uncertain times, actually being able to be helpful to other people demands that we understand what life is like for them, so that our interventions can be useful. Building up our perspective-taking muscle will make us wiser. And the last is, there is I think, a trade off in general, between freedom on the one hand and security on the other. Here too, we need to find the mean. In Western affluent societies, we have largely taken security for granted. And we have emphasized freedom, freedom, freedom. The pandemic is demanding that we find a way to balance our legitimate concerns about freedom and autonomy with equally legitimate concerns about security and finding the right balance between those two will require us to develop a kind of situation -by-situation judgment. There's no rule, there's no formula that will enable us to  find the sweet spot where we don't take security for granted and we don't forsake all freedom. ","When people are threatened, when people perceive real danger, they kind of pull in, and they focus entirely on themselves. And so it seems to me in a moment of enormous uncertainty and high risk, one way to go is to worry about the welfare of other people. Another way to go is to essentially erase the welfare of other people from your consideration altogether and wake up every day with the idea that it's all about me. I don't think anyone does, it partly depends on how long it lasts, it partly depends on how much more serious it becomes as a health problem. It partly depends on how much more serious it becomes as an economic problem. But I can see people at one another's throats in a few months, rather than looking to provide aid. I think we have to really worry about the anti-social consequences, immoral consequences that could arise if the situation gets desperate enough. I don't know what you can do about it except to have your eyes open and try to find ways to step in and ameliorate if this negative turn starts to appear.","It would help people if they ask themselves, what does it mean to be a good person and what does it mean to live a good life, a life that you would be happy to pass on to your children, a life that you would be happy to endorse and promote for other people. If you ask yourself that question on a regular basis, it may suppress the temptation to be too me focused, when that bad stuff starts to get worse. People will miss their contact with other human beings. People already do. That's a visceral absence that may spur people to pay attention to how important human contact is, and what it requires of us to be able to generate and sustain the kind of human contact that makes life worth living. I also think it would not be a bad idea to have a kind of mantra that we start every day with, that reminds us of what it is that makes for a good satisfying human life. ","The most important piece of wisdom for people to have now is that there are no rules that get us out of this dilemma. That balancing between me and we, balancing between freedom and security, those sorts of balances require judgment. They require judgment, because there's no formula. They require judgment because circumstances change on a daily, maybe even hourly basis. And so each of us has to sort of figure out for ourselves, and the particular circumstances we're living in and the people who depend on us and what they need, how those balances get maintained, how to balance our concern for others with what we need, and how to balance our concern with being able to be free in the world, with our concern about being protected and secure. ",Professor Emeritus/Emerita/Retired,3
18-Jun-20,Sternberg,Male,US,Non-SC,Yes,"The most positive change would be the realization that nationalism, populism and other such ideologies don't solve serious medical problems or other problems for that matter, that we're all in things together. We can't do it as America first or Canada first. That we need to balance long term interests, the long term wellbeing of the world as well as our countries with short term gains, and that we need to act ethically and not just talk about it.","The realization that what matters is the common good and not petty ideologies. That sounds simple, but right now, many countries or many tribes within those countries are focused on petty ideologies, ignorance of facts, ignorance of science, ignorance of ethics. And we need to shift their emphasis to the common good, doing what will help not just ourselves or our tribe, but what's good for all.","It would be the realization that today for many people, their ideology trumps their concerns about human wellbeing and about life. And you can see this certainly in my own country, where the same people who vociferously argue for right to life, now are arguing for the right to behavior. For example, not wearing masks, that will literally kill other people. You can't talk about right to life and then go around, acting in ways that will kill others. That's not right to life. But also, the same people who have argued for the necessity of social distance, have made an exception for demonstrations against police brutality and violence. No matter how good the causes are, you need to have some consistency in what you say is wise. Right now, the negative change is, it seems, that people would rather see others die and maybe themselves die, than give up their ideologies.","The main thing is the realization that to achieve a common good, to do what's best for all, you have to look at long term interests, as well as short term ones. And that's proven hard for people to do. You have to look and say, what effect will this have on not only me when I'm older, but on my children and my grandchildren and other people's kids as well. And you have to balance different interests against each other, and that includes the interests of people who are not like yourself, people who are members of different, so called, tribes. So if you're in our country a Republican, that includes Democrats, and if you're a Democrat, that includes Republicans.","If I were to distill it to one thing, I would distill it to the idea that lives are more important than ideology. That the future is more important than short term gratifications. That we should never lose sight of the effects of what we do, not only on our own lives, but on the lives of others around the world, and of future generations. And that preserving the world for the future is more important than the ideologies that inspire people to behave recklessly.",Professor,2
6-Jul-20,Keltner,Male,US,SC,Yes,"I think it's going to be the value that we attach to meaningful social interactions. And I think that we've lost sight of that. In the past 30 years, we've overemphasized success and material consumption and the like, and what the pandemic is teaching people is how absolutely sacred our best relationships are and the meaningful moments that we can have with people, the value of those social utilities will be much higher coming out of the pandemic. ","What you hear people saying are things like, wow, time is slowing down, I can slow down time, sometimes too much, but that's an option that we have in our fast paced lives. Wow, social interactions, and hugging people are the most important things in my life, and I feel depressed without them, and I'll return to that. Or I don't need to shop and burn carbon fuels so much. I think that collectively as we move through this pandemic, this panic and this trauma, we'll start to arrive at a set of core ethical principles like we tend to, and go forward with those more explicitly recognized.","I think that it is the suspicion of the wrong people. And you know, people have written about this. It's this suspicion that you see in other countries, that people in health care where they're attacked in Mexico and China. It is the suspicion of people who are different color than we are. It is this suspicion of science and the suspicion of data, that we have strong ways of understanding this epidemic that have really been undermined in the United States by, kind of this suspicion that pandemics elicit that's very worrisome, is those three things, but I think that there's a lot of progress that will be made out of that.","I think that the first thing that we're going to really need is, is a return to the faith of our institutions that hold up society and health care institutions being most prominent and then science that really can track and math the virus. The second thing that we really need to be rethinking in terms of wisdom going forward is how we think about who's doing the hard work, the nurses and the doctors and the people, long-term, aging facilities that are right on the front line. There are a lot of these suspicions and biases that are flaring up right now creating impediments for understanding that we're going to have to tackle in a reasoned way.","One of the things that's happened in our understanding of the pandemic is, because it's been in the United States, where we are the worst example of adapting to this health challenge is, there has been a lot of fear and a lot of shying away from truths and a failure to understand this. As we shut down and have this period of solitude, which is hard, that people ask themselves what they're finding really meaningful at this moment, and to develop that as they go forward. So for me, it has returned me to this more local simple life of walking with friends and family and cooking more together and, sharing sort of sources of entertainment, and understanding, and get back to what's most local. And we do that by just asking yourself, what are the moments that really meant something to me where I teared up or I felt uplifted? And then to use those as lessons for more wisdom.",Professor,2
7-Jul-20,Degroot,Male,US,Non-SC,No,"From the perspective of being halfway through this first wave, at least here in the United States, one thing that strikes me as being very positive is that the political fortunes of the populace, and I would say of populism and isolationism more broadly, kind of coming apart. It's weakening. Because a pandemic is international by nature. The institutions that helped to combat it and to prevent a pandemic tend to be multilateral and even within countries, it's very difficult as we've seen here in the United States to confront pandemics amid widespread political polarization and amid broader distrust in government and expertise, which is of course associated with populism. And so partly for those reasons I think we are seeing the political fortunes of, obviously the likes of Donald Trump, but also, populists elsewhere in the world that have been hard hit, Mexico, for example, Brazil, we see the political fortunes of some of these populace decline. Now, it's entirely possible that come the second wave, come the fall from the spring, that could all change and history suggests that in some political and social contexts, the fortunes of those who appeal to our basest instincts they seem to rise when there's a period of profound crisis. So the book is not out on this yet, but right now, that is, I think, a hopeful message. ","Remain politically engaged. And this has been a common problem, whether it concerns issues of climate change, or racial justice, is that there's these punctuation moments. To really act on the potential of this moment, people need to remain politically engaged. Obviously that means voting in elections, but that also means, speaking to one another, that means protesting in many cases. That means getting involved in very local politics, whether that's within corporations, universities, or at the municipal level at the county level. They're the key really to mobilizing action, I think against populism, but more broadly against are really in favor of action. To prevent and to mitigate, pandemics or climate change or what have you, is to remain politically engaged on many different scales. ","What I would flag would be shortcomings and the capabilities and the prestige of democracies. So this is a geopolitical point, but it's also a point related to domestic politics. The example of the United States faltering right now is so profound, and will be so profound for people around the world that I think it is contributing to a change in the balance of power between the United States and China, but also in perception of the competence of democracies and authoritarian states, which actually has nothing to do with how competent democracies have been in the face of this crisis versus authoritarian states. There’s democracies, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, the list goes on that have functioned very well, and there are authoritarian states, arguably China, Russia, for example, Turkey, Iran, that have not, I think this is important because we are spending so much capital and creating so much debt and delaying so many important priority areas, including work, to confront climate change and ecological problems, although that might be part of whatever stimulus comes out of this in many societies. We might be looking at is long term degradation in what we're capable of doing in democratic societies that might not exist to the same extent in authoritarian states and particularly in China, which is, of course, the most important, authoritarian state. ","Staying politically engaged is crucial to capitalize on the positive stuff. I think that's also the case for these more negative elements, for example, turning to higher education, it's unconscionable that we don't have stimulus here in the United States for higher ed. $50 billion, could alleviate a lot of the problems that we currently have. And that’s basically pocket change, considering the amount of money that's flowing through the system right now. So if there was more of a groundswell of outrage, about the fact that we might be losing many of our universities in the coming years, this would be a very different story. Remaining politically engaged voting, obviously, maybe changing political opinions, I think that's going to be crucial. ","Accurate historical knowledge is very important of how these things end, of what to compare the current pandemic to, as we look into the past, there's been a lot of bad history that's been written over the last few months, particularly in major news outlets. But what you want to do is give people a sense that this is a problem that can be overcome and that will be overcome if they act wisely. The less pain they're prepared to accept in the short term the more pain they will incur in the long term. So accurate historical knowledge of how pandemics have ended in the past in ‘68, ‘57, for example, the 1918, 1919 this is important. That's what we kind of need to see more of, I think going forwards. ",Associate Professor,1
28-Jun-20,Dunning,Male,US,SC,No,"I think some people, and a lot of kids, are being exposed to how you think about information? How do you think about data? How do you think about evidence, and more to the point, how do you do it in a scientific way? What does science look like? What does gaining information or knowledge in a completely new situation, where there's tremendous uncertainty, and where the story may change from week to week as we learn more, a lot of people are going to be exposed to that. I imagine much like a lot of my generation went into science because of Sputnik, a lot of people are going to go into health and science because of this situation.","Now, the wisdom they're going to need is the wisdom that a lot of social commentators have said we've already needed as we moved to the internet age. There is just a tremendous amount of information on the internet. A lot of it's incredibly valuable, but a lot of it is incredibly misleading, and a lot of it is just outright fraudulent. And we have to become experts and be able to tell which experts to follow, who has a sound voice and who is giving us information that's going to mislead and maybe harm us. That's been true before the pandemic, but I think the pandemic has really brought this to the fore. And hopefully people become expert at telling who's the expert. I know that there's a difficulty in that because how can you tell who the expert is without expertise yourself? Well that’s a skill we're all going to have to learn.","A negative consequence of the pandemic is all this media we're being shown, that shows us people not on their best behavior. It shows conflict. And remember that conflict is highlighted on the internet, because well, conflict attracts eyeballs. People who do drama have known this since the Greeks. What also attracts eyeballs is incredibly outrageous behavior. I don't know how many videos I've seen of people massively upset because you've been asked to wear masks in the local supermarket. They're outrageous. They can make you angry. But they could also give you a tilted view of what's really going on with people, what people are really doing. You may focus on the person not wearing the mask and being upset, but you may not notice all the other people in the store wearing the mask that they've been asked to wear. So one of the negative things that we have to be cautious of is not letting, or being shown, about what's going on in the world, to mislead us about how people behave, we can become cynics when a lot of people are acting in a very non cynical, very cooperative way. ","The skill we need is to notice everybody. We need to see what other people are doing. We also need to remember the power of norms, what other people are doing really does have an impact on how we behave. It's important to get the norm right. 
One last type of wisdom people are going to need is to remember that the pandemic is a public health crisis. It's fairly obvious it’s a health crisis. But I think what people tend to forget is that it's also public. We are all individuals. But we are also all “we,” we all have to act together and take care of each other in order to get through this thing the best way that we can, we have to remember that, we have to remember that's part of our duty as humans. The human ability to cooperate, to coordinate, to work together, is the one superpower we have as a species. To get through the pandemic, we're going to have to remember that we have to take care of each other. For two reasons. First, it's always been thus. And second, it's going to become important in the very near future because pandemic in many ways is just an overture for the real challenge  we as a species face and we're all going to have to work together in the near future if it isn't here already. And that's dealing with climate change.","Now, one last type of wisdom people are going to need is to remember that the pandemic is a public health crisis. It's fairly obvious it’s a health crisis. But I think what people tend to forget is that it's also public. We are all individuals. But we are also all “we,” we all have to act together and take care of each other in order to get through this thing the best way that we can, we have to remember that, we have to remember that's part of our duty as humans, it's always been thus. The human ability to cooperate, to coordinate, to work together, is the one superpower we have as a species. To get through the pandemic, we're going to have to remember that, that we have to take care of each other. For two reasons. First, it's always been thus. And second, it's going to become important in the very near future because pandemic in many ways is just an overture for the real challenge or we as a species face and we're all going to have to work together in the near future if it isn't here already. And that's dealing with climate change.",Professor,2
25-Jun-20,Machery,Male,US,Non-SC,Yes,"Some people will discover the pleasure, or maybe happiness of being with one another. So we've spent so much time alone, or maybe with a few people, a few relatives, that we are all craving for spending time with a larger group of relatives, with our friends, but also beyond friends and relatives, with people around us, people who happen to share the same community. We’re going to be rediscovering the fact that we are social animals or maybe political animals, as Aristotle once told us.","At least in the United States of America, where I live right now, one of the main threats is the threat of fulfilling your potential of living together, of enjoying each other is really an intense political polarization. And it's partly striking because it bears on the pandemic, and how to react to the pandemic has become a political matter and also in terms of other social issues. I think to address intense political polarization and to reap the benefits of living together, forming a social community, we need at least two components of wisdom. The first one is openness to others, as different as they may be. I think we should learn to open to others, even if they come from the other side, whatever the other side is. And the second one which is related, is what I like to call the sense of “social offset dissociation,” self distancing. Not social distancing, as we've seen, but self distancing, and I think that you must learn that some of the ideals or values that define us, maybe aren't that essential to who we are. And once we've got to self-distancing, we may be better to interact with people on the other side, whatever the other side looks like.","I'm mostly worried about despair at a social and psychological level. Many people have lost friends, more than 100,000 people in the US only have died and much more, of course, all over the world, several lost relatives, and sometimes they've lost those people without being able to see them. Many people are without a job. And many people have had their dreams crushed, because they had to close their job, because they've been fired, and so on. Many people are on the brink of despair. That’s what worries me most for the months to come and maybe even years to come.","It's difficult to be wise when you have excellent reasons to feel despair. Wisdom really requires not simply inherent strengths or inherent virtues but also a proper social network and proper external circumstances. It's hard to be wise when you have good reasons to actually be despaired. But, I think it's people who are going to be luckier, people who haven't lost their job, people who haven't lost relatives, people who haven't lost friends, and what they must do is show compassion and empathy, as it's time for those around us who haven't been as lucky as the luckiest among us.","Patience and resilience. The pandemic, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon, we have not seen the end of the pandemic and history from past pandemics suggests that impatience is one of the main causes of second wave, third wave and so on. Patience and resilience are the two core components of wisdom, which I think we should all try to rely on in the coming months.",Professor,2
19-Jun-20,Reis,Male,US,SC,No,"I think people are realizing much more than they did in the past just how important to face interaction really is. When this pandemic started doing things on zoom was kind of unique and it was kind of interesting. I had a birthday party at the end of March, and we had 20 people on zoom, and that was kind of fun. But over time, what I'm coming to realize, and I think many other people are realizing this as well, is that video interaction and digital interactions, is just no substitute for face-to-face interaction. And what we're missing is our ability to really connect with other people in our social world, in a face- to-face way. Sure, most of us are quarantining in place, perhaps with a spouse, perhaps with a friend, with our children. So you're getting some of that face-to-face contact. But what we're missing is our contact with these other people. And I think we're discovering that those contacts are also important for our lives. Certainly close relationships are important and those of us who studied them, sometimes overemphasize the importance of close relationships. But other connections we have are also important; our connections with our co-workers, our associates, the person in your poker group, or your reading group, people you see it health club, even maybe the person who cuts your hair, and we're missing those kind of connections. And I think that what this pandemic is really teaching us is just how important those connections really are.","The wisdom that people will need is to take what they've realized and really follow through on it. In modern life, we've learned to depend on social media, texting, email, because those are all much more convenient ways of connecting with other people. They're easy. I read some statistics recently that said, the average adolescent interacts for only 40 minutes a day with someone else in a face-to-face way. It's going to be all too easy to fall back into that rut when this pandemic ends, then when we get back to our normal, would want to start to fall back into the same routines and procedures that we've had before. And what we're going to need to learn to do is to recognize just what it was that we were missing so much. And then to go out and really make that happen - to prioritize actually connecting in a face-to-face way with other people, rather than getting lazy and relying on digital communication again.","The most negative change that I've observed during this pandemic is a loss of faith and trust in the institutions and governments and organizations in our lives. When this all started we were all looking to the news media, to the CDC, to our governments to give us guidance about how to get through this safely. And over time, the kind of chaotic reaction that we've had has eroded that trust. So right now, lots of people don't trust the CDC, they certainly don't trust the president. They perhaps don't trust the governor. They don't trust the mayors in their community. And certainly, it's not just the pandemic that has done this. The various other crises that have happened in the last few months have contributed to that as well. But our trust in institutions and even our trust in our neighbors has eroded to the point where people don't know who or what to believe. And to be sure, those institutions are responsible for some of this. The CDC has given very mixed guidance, some of their guidance has not been useful. The president has suggested things that were downright nonsensical and even dangerous. And you look at some other countries, so I'm really struck by New Zealand the government there immediately did a complete and total shutdown. Six weeks after that, there's no Coronavirus in New Zealand, it's gone. It's completely gone and their society is opening up again. Meanwhile, we're three or four months into this having record numbers of new cases. It's so totally natural to not have faith in our institutions when they've been doing such a terrible job of giving us guidance to get through this. And it's going to be difficult and time consuming for us to get out of that.","It's going to take two different skills. The first is patience. These things are not going to reverse overnight. Even if we get government leaders who are more competent and more willing to trust and heed science, they're not going to just magically come in and make everything all right again, it's going to take a lot of time to restore the infrastructure and the base that's necessary for people to have trust in our institutions. We're going to need to see changes in laws, we're going to need to see the procedures changing. We're going to need to see people working in these institutions who are not political, but instead really have human welfare, and the science that's needed to back it up. That's going to take a lot of time to happen, and we're going to need to be patient when it doesn't happen instantly. Second thing is we're going to need to be open minded in dealing with this, and in recognizing these changes as they take time to happen, they're not going to happen overnight. And we're going to have to listen, right now, we're all so imbued with cynicism that it seems like nobody is willing to trust these institutions anymore. Well, this isn't going to magically change, even if we get open hearted in recognizing these changes, and be willing to acknowledge that these changes have happened, and that is going to take careful listening and compassion.","People need to recognize that this too will pass. But one has to be patient. It's not going to pass just because we want it to pass. People are itching to get back into their normal lives, find ourselves the time and the space to enjoy life as much as we can until that time, and just keeping our eye on the fact that it will happen someday.",Professor,2
25-Jun-20,Nusbaum,Male,US,Non-SC,Yes,"The most positive social psychological change that will last after the end of the pandemic, is likely to be the ability to make a real and meaningful social connection at a distance. That is, using the kind of tools we're using now to actually feel connected to somebody. I can see my colleagues doing things like having a toast over zoom now, actually doing this to welcome a new faculty member and beyond, my daughter's playing games with groups online, this way, or with zoom, and so forth. This will be a skill, it's been debatable for a long time, whether people in online settings are really making social contact and feeling social connection. One of the things we're learning is the skill of how to do that in these current circumstances. And that means that long distance friendships and relationships can be bolstered, more easily at the end of the pandemic.","The psychological evidence is mixed about whether online social connection is really functional in the way that face-to-face is. I think there will need to be the development of certain kinds of skills related to wisdom, things like improved perspective taking, understanding what people are seeing in you, how they're thinking about the connection you're making, increased empathic resonance. There's a distinction often made between empathic resonance and empathic cognition. Feeling what other people are feeling in taking perspective, when you're connecting to them socially, I think is going to be critical. I think that reflection is going to be part of that as well. That is, what you take from that social interaction, how you reflect on it, and make use of it, how it affects you in the future is also important.","As people become more socially distanced and isolated, they may lose some of the skills of face-to-face interaction. They may start to become more in their own heads, and less adept at connecting to other people. There’s a risk, at least for some people in society, we're not making use of these tools or not connecting effectively with these tools, to basically withdraw within themselves and lose the sense of that social connection. We've become at risk for greater social isolation and not physical social isolation. This sort of increasing negative construal about our social interactions so that we feel bad and become worse off as a function of those social connections.","It requires this notion of reflection, but reflection that's not as a clinician might refer to it, rumination that is, not cycling through the bad thoughts and focusing on those, but actually reflecting on and taking the perspective of other people and learning to ask other people about what their states are like and learning to learn about other people. It’s that notion of being open to other people's states, open to other people's values and considerations, that becomes important.","Going back to this issue of reflection and thinking about it in terms of self-awareness, that is, becoming more thoughtful and aware of what your values are, and how best to satisfy or address those values, under the current constraints, is critical. What are the things that you can do for yourself that bolster your sense of self, bolster your own human flourishing, and how you can maintain what is important to you about social connections and develop those.",Professor,2
16-Jul-20,Choi,Male,Non-US,SC,No,"Family will become more important than ever. Due to social distancing during this pandemic, our social life has been substantially diminished. However, very ironically, our close relationships, especially family became more crucial in our happiness. ","Work life balance. We need to decrease our work time, increase our family time. Companies should restructure their work culture so that employees can have better work-life balance. I think that's the wisdom we need. ","I'm very concerned about the general trust level. Individuals might distance themselves from other individuals, and especially other group members. Consequently, stereotypes, prejudices against other group members might arise. And that's the area I'm really concerned about. ","Psychology has long been dealing with these prejudice issues. This pandemic taught us that we are all biological beings, we are all vulnerable to the virus. So regardless of our race, gender, ethnicity, we are the same biological beings. I think that's the wisdom we need to have. ","We humans, are very wise and strong. Historically, we have experienced these types of pandemics multiple times, yet we have successfully overcame these pandemics. So I think it's very important to believe in our abilities.",Professor,2
26-Jun-20,Twenge,Female,US,SC,No,"One of the most positive changes is something we're already seeing, which is in political activism. That, maybe, this might be the end of apathy. Maybe we'll get better voter turnout. Assuming we can find a way to do that safely. That we have more people who are going to  volunteer to work for a campaign. We’ve already seen a big protests for racial justice, a lot of movement around reform around police brutality and so on, that there's just more interest in the civic sphere and in getting involved, and changing government and public policies and so on.","This is where it gets challenging, even though this is such a big positive, we're seeing more people who are interested in social and civic issues, there's ways to do that that will have a bigger impact than other ways. Bringing visibility to these issues is going to be the first step. And that's already happening. But the challenge and the wisdom that people are going to have to tap into here is to think about where can we have the most impact? Protests have had big impact already. But then the next steps are often the more challenging, because you have to figure out: what is the next thing after that? Is it grassroots programs for voter turnout, specific candidates going to work on specific policies, things like that, that will probably end up having the biggest impact. The challenge is going to be trying to find those things, as opposed to some things that may not be as effective. And this is where, it remains to be seen what the most effective things are. Generally speaking, things that are not effective are those that divide other people, that attack other people, that increase political polarization, that vilify you people who disagree with you. My hope is that we'll end up seeing a lot of positive change from this, in terms of policy in terms of civic and government involvement, and that we can try to do this together in a way that's not as divisive. I'm not at all trying to say that this is an easy thing. It's a difficult thing in today's political climate. But I'm hopeful that it can happen and that focus is on that concrete action, rather than quite so much on appearances and quite so much on cancel culture and attacking certain people.","The most negative thing that's happening right now is around mental health. And I have a paper out on that, that’s a preprint, and there's several other studies, one I just saw today, from those who administer the General Social Survey, they sample in May, looking at happiness and happiness is at a 50 year low. And we find in our paper, big increases in mental distress. There's census data, US Census Bureau administer data, looking at anxiety and depression that is also increased by quite a bit during the pandemic. I think it's really clear that we have a mental health crisis on our hands. So we have to keep that in mind, that that's real. That yes, you know, sometimes you're gonna have great examples of resilience and there are a lot of positives, but that for a significant number of people looks like it's up to a third of people, there's some pretty serious mental distress, anxiety and depression going on, probably from the social isolation, from the anxiety around possibly catching the illness, and, of course around economic disruptions, which don't look like they're going away anytime soon. ","I think one thing that has already happened is more of a move to telehealth for appointments, for therapy, and that needs to continue and those regulations need to continue to be loosened so insurance will pay for that, so providers can be reimbursed for it and so on. Beyond that, so much of it has to do with just solving the problems the pandemic has created, the thing that everybody's trying to figure out, how to open up the economy without having an increase in cases. A lot of it is also around social isolation. This pandemic has really shown, it's really laid bare a problem that was there to begin with, in a lot of Western democracies, which deal in person, but by videoconference or FaceTime. Basically, if I really wanted to boil down what I'm saying is call your grandma. And just keep in touch with those relationships because there's just a lot of loneliness out there.","There’s been some real trade-offs in social life when it comes to the pandemic, and it has had some benefits, especially for folks spending more time with their kids. But there's also these downsides that we felt isolated from other people around us. The main thing is just to make that effort in trying to stay in touch with friends and family and try to keep up with those relationships, even though we can't always do them in the way that we did in 2019. To try to support each other and still focus on those relationships, and focus on real time communication, as opposed to being so tempted as we all are, to go to social media and to go to texting, and so on, which is not in real time, and it has those performative aspects to it and just doesn't seem to be as good for mental health as actually having a conversation.",Professor,2
7-Jul-20,VanBoven,Male,US,SC,No,"The pandemic is obviously hugely disruptive. One of the things we know is that creates a sense of uncertainty and tentativeness and questioning about the way things work. Many people are asking what is it about the way our society works or the way my life works, that is working or not working. And that's not inherently positive, except that it sets up a frame of mind that makes it easier to change habits because we start to ask ourselves what should be different. Hopefully, we have the wisdom and the insight to recognize things like social relationships are important, and we want more of those. That many pointless meetings are not so valuable, and we want fewer of those. I think that there's an opportunity for positive change that needs to happen with some guidance. And when I say guidance, I really mean the kind of introspection and reflection that people can engage in about what are the important values. Hopefully that happens naturally. I think as psychologists and social behavioral scientists, we can help frame that question, help people think through the answers to those questions.","The issue isn't so much do we have the wisdom, it's do we think about what is wisdom mean for how we approach this situation? What do we know? How could we be better? It's not that we don't know the answer to what are the values we might aspire to, but rather than we're not really aware of them in our day-to-day life, so the wisdom is really more about becoming more persistently aware of those things that we care about and the way we want to structure our lives.","It stems from the same source of tentativeness and uncertainty. We're all asking what comes next? What does this mean for the way our society is structured? Those are difficult questions. And who poses the answers to those questions? Is it the case that autocratic leaders might answer those questions for us, might give us an easy answer where the answer is essentially, it's because of them, it's because of the out group. We know that people can be really easily pulled into these kinds of intergroup conflicts. Given that we're in this moment of uncertainty and tentativeness, will we allow other people provide us with an easy answer that really steers us toward the negative. And it's a very tempting psychological path to go down because it means blaming other people and not really confronting the difficult challenges in our own lives or in our own societies.","It's really reflecting on what we want to influence us. That really sort of asking in a careful way, what is influencing me? And are these the influences I want to shape my worldview? And I think for many of us we’ll realize, no, I don't want my worldview shaped by kind of nasty human tendencies, I want to think better and be better. I think most people have that default response. ","We are far more socially connected than we have appreciated. And that carries tremendous threats. Obviously because we can spread disease, but we can also spread more positive emotions, more positive social connections, and we really haven't fully appreciated how socially connected we are. Coming to that appreciation is itself an important source of wisdom. That it's something both to be valued and guarded and protected in our interactions with other people.",Professor,2
15-Jul-20,FeldmanBarrett,Female,US,Non-SC,No,"I would say that as a scientist, one thing we know is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So, when you look at past epidemics, you can see that in a crisis like this, like the flu epidemic and others, similar, Spanish flu epidemic and at the turn of the century and other epidemics, one aspect of social life that did in some ways get better, was the stratification of society and to some extent, some forms of racism. So one thing that crises do like this is they kind of reveal the cracks in a society. And I think we saw this with just in recent weeks with the reaction to the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives movement, in the United States and in Canada, and in lots of countries around the world, so one possibility is that people will take action, they'll realize that one of our greatest strengths as a species is that we are social animals. And that means that we are necessary to each other's wellbeing. And so hopefully, now that these cracks have been revealed, many of us have known they've been there for a long time. We'll have the opportunity to do something about them.","We have this really interesting dilemma in our species, and that is that we evolved as social animals, which means that we regulate each other's behavior, but it also means we regulate each other's nervous systems. The best thing for a human nervous system is another human. And the worst thing for a human nervous system often is another human. So I think this dilemma that we're in is that we have these socially dependent nervous systems in a culture that prizes and prioritizes individual rights and freedoms. And so I think we have to realize this. And we have to realize that in a culture that prioritizes individual rights and freedoms, we're aware of the fact that we're responsible for ourselves, we're responsible for our own behavior, we're responsible for our own wellbeing. But as a social species, given our socially dependent nervous systems that we've evolved, we also have to realize that we're more responsible for other people, for the wellbeing of other people, than we might know and like. We are responsible for each other's well beings, even for people we don't even know very well, for people who don't look like us, who don't act like us, and who we might consider to be strangers.","It would probably be the same kind of thing in the sense when I said that if you look back to previous epidemics, you can see that there have been efforts that make things a little bit more egalitarian in certain ways where social stratification is reduced in certain ways. But there's also evidence that it goes the other way, that people become more entrenched in their in-group and out-group beliefs. And there's an opportunity, unfortunately, for increased racism in certain cases. In each case, when there’s been a large health crisis it's certain groups that benefit and other groups don't, what I mean by that is certain out-groups benefit and they do better actually, the minority culture broadens to include them more, but there are always out-groups that suffer more too. And I think that's a real danger here.","First of all, history is really instructive. As a species, we cooperate with each other, we copy each other, we learn from each other, we communicate with each other in this really high fidelity way. We're really creative when we work together to solve problems. It’s important to realize that we have this capacity to help each other but also to really harm each other. Unless we're really careful. There are really good reasons to believe that watching out for the wellbeing of other people in the end also makes it easier for you to take care of yourself and the people that you love.","Remember you’re a social animal. Remember that. You need other people to keep yourself healthy. And you need social connection to keep your wellbeing intact. And other people need you. So, random acts of kindness, be kind to other people, treat other people with human dignity. Remember that your biology doesn't only belong to you, you spread it around every time you breathe. If everybody remembers that they can have a good impact on other people or a bad impact on other people they can choose to be the kind of person who has a good impact, they can choose to be their best self.",Professor,2
23-Jun-20,Schaller,Male,Non-US,SC,No,"For a lot of people in many parts of the world, particularly those of us who live in these relatively wealthy, modernized parts of the world, the threat posed by infectious diseases has kind of been off our radar, and this pandemic has changed that and as a result that's offered an opportunity at a massive worldwide scale to have increased awareness of, and education about the challenges that infectious diseases pose to people and pose to a way of life that we take for granted. This is maybe even more important, a means through which these challenges can be met. So it's really been an unprecedented learning opportunity. I think particularly to learn about how this is kind of weird and invisible force of nature can be mitigated through the coordinated combination of sensible thoughtful responses by individuals, by communities, by the folks who are entrusted to govern these communities. And these lessons, if in fact, we do learn them, can serve individuals and societies as we face additional challenges in the future.","Given that this positive change is contingent upon learning, there's a kind of a necessary willingness to learn. In particular, there's necessary willingness to learn from past mistakes. So this pandemic because it's been unprecedented within most people's lifetimes, and the means of mitigating the pandemic have required sudden changes in individual behavior and sudden changes in public policy, it's been hard. So naturally, folks have made mistakes, folks have screwed up. At an individual level, this has happened, people have blithely attended church services or gone to nightclubs, and as a result have passed on their incipient infections to other folks. Government officials and lots of countries around the world have been slow to respond or reluctant to take actions that we now know could have prevented millions of infections and thousands and thousands of deaths. And that's a terrible tragedy. And it'll be even perhaps greater tragedy if these individuals fail to admit their mistakes, fail to learn from those mistakes. This is where this wisdom comes in, that if people and that includes ordinary people like you and me as well as government officials, if we have the wisdom to critically self-reflect on the mistakes that we've made and to learn from them, then ideally we'll be better prepared to respond swiftly and sensibly and thoughtfully to future challenges. ","The real negative consequence is that a hell of a lot of people have died and a hell of a lot of people are bereaved, and a hell of a lot of people are experiencing a lasting hit on their health and wellbeing. And it's a massive tragedy. People may be inclined to be more interpersonally wary of other people, even when the pandemic’s over and there isn't that increased risk of infection. People may still act as though there is. For the past several months, we have erected barriers between ourselves and other people. Some of those barriers are behavioral, there are restrictions, some self-imposed, some imposed by others, on who we interact with and how we interact with them. And some of these barriers are physical barriers, like these plexiglass shields that you see in grocery stores now. And I assume that over time, some of these barriers will dissolve. And, certainly the informal ones are likely to dissolve, I'm certainly looking forward to touching, hugging my friends again. But I'm guessing that some of these barriers are going to stick around for a while, and there'll be these consistent, persistent reminders of the pandemic. And that's perfectly sensible from an epidemiological perspective, but it's kind of a drag for interpersonal interaction. And so my concern is that there's going to be this persistent, lasting wariness of interactions with other people, especially strangers. that represents a low level erosion of interpersonal trust and erosion of social capital. ","I think it's a hard problem to solve, in part because I think we humans tend to think, kind of naturally in a bit of a simple minded way about interpersonal trust in the sense that we tend to, either trust people or we don't, and to kind of overcome that, to think of people as simply not just folks I don't trust, we might need to make some finer distinctions, more nuanced, more compartmentalized approach to thinking about trust and that's going to be effortful. I think kind of the wisdom necessary, maybe is something like this, some sort of effort for cognitive strategy of compartmentalizing the risk of infection. So that even if I'm reminded that a casual social interaction brings with it some potential risk of disease transmission, I resist the tendency to over generalize that appraisal to simply view this person as a non-trustworthy person. So that ideally I'll still trust that person in a variety of other ways. And ideally, that person will still trust me, and will continue to appreciate the goodness of this opportunity for the social interaction and we'll continue to seek out rather than avoid casual social interactions with other people.","So, the first one has to do with perspective taking. For a lot of people, some bit of perspective taking can help. That is, what people have been going through, feels hard and the uncertainty associated with it feels hard and the hits that they've taken to their wellbeing, their way of life, to their jobs, to the health of friends and family, it's hard. And in that context, it can sometimes be helpful to realize that almost certainly somewhere in the world, perhaps even right next door, other folks have it harder. And having that perspective can help, make people feel, less overwhelmed by it, a little bit more compassionate for other folks. The second piece of wisdom is, it ties into this thing that psychologists talk about when they talk about a distinction between threat and challenge and how what is perceived to be a threat can be mentally reconstrued as a challenge. So the idea is something like this, that a lot of what's been happening in people's lives feels pretty overwhelming, the threat of disease, the uncertainty about the future and if those are viewed simply as kind of threats, then it can be overwhelming. But if one can somehow make that mental transition to kind of view these threats instead as challenges, hard challenges, hard problems to solve, but still as problems that can potentially be solved through some sort of sensible step by step approach, then it can feel less overwhelming, less anxiety provoking, and if we have some resources to draw upon as individuals, as families, as communities, then we're likely to be able to figure out how to solve those problems. ",Professor,2
20-Jun-20,Bond,Male,Non-US,SC,Yes,"Positive size societal change would be a redirection of social wealth through progressive taxation and that would channel itself into social institutions like employee protection, job retraining, health care and pollution control, welfare services, educational access, technical training for the fourth industrial revolution and guaranteed income, yielding greater freedom from disease, crime and natural disaster. The important psychological outcome for me would be a heightened awareness or common fate, and our ecological vulnerability. We've seen that vulnerability, of course, as we respond to the virus itself. There's a much wider consideration to make when we talk about ecological vulnerability, particularly, the climate crisis and pollution mechanisms that interfere with the basic human functioning, willingness to sacrifice our wealth and freedoms for the welfare of others. So that your risks should not be my risk locally, nationally and internationally. But that would require a willingness on everybody's part to exercise their freedoms within constraint, their wealth within beneficence, you might say, more broadly than presently defined. That should occur of course, psychologically, but would have to be reinforced societally.","The psychological shifts need to be recognized as necessary for the survival and contentment of humanity. Especially by those persons in wealthier societies, in freer societies.  I mentioned David Corden's cry, and many of his articles for the privileged ones on this planet needing to rein in our, and I use our, innocent greed and widen our ambit of compassion. So much of every person's life is determined by the shape of our genetic dice and the place of our birth. So, if that's part of what comes out of COVID for some people, as wisdom, I expect it will have some payoff in enhancing empathy. Or you might even call it Adam Smith's sympathy for the other, and the other not being confined to your local neighborhood, but rather, the planet and people of difference. And indeed, maybe we'll all start to recognize that everybody is in fact different, albeit sailing the same boat.","Again, two parts, and I'll start with societal. My major concern about negative change is a reduced commitment on the part of all nations, particularly the more advantaged nations to international institutions. The other is wars promoted by groups who are exploiting weakened military and legal resistance that internal political systems create, potentiating the possibility for internal political violence,  which we know from the work of Rummel, Richard Rummel is a far greater promoter of homicide, what he calls democide, then are actual wars between nations. The additional feature about wars that can be potentiated is that there's going to be greater third party indifference and preoccupation so that you don't get the mediating roles being played to the same extent as nations who normally might step up for this mediation role, are preoccupied with dealing with the COVID and their own economic collapse. And we haven't seen the worst of it yet. I keep thinking of the quote from Plato, ""only the dead have seen the end of war"". Well, the likelihood of being dead is increasing as a consequence of COVID not only as a consequence of the illness itself, the virus, but also the ancillary destruction of other institutions, locally, including the health delivery system, where many people are denied access to that system have problems other than COVID-19. Psychological negative responses: heightened nationalism, skepticism about the efficacy of science, and the rise in what you would call virulent fundamentalism or authoritarianism. Cynicism and a sense of despair are certainly growing in some quarters. Not all, because some people, of course, are more resilient than others. But a sense of cynicism knows no personality, very few personality loadings and is a consequence of your understanding of how the world works. And if we get cynical about how the world works, it's really going to turn off our willingness as individuals to reengage.","Well, for me, it's, it's basically that humankind must come to understand that we share the earth’s bounty and its vulnerability, both of those aspects of our being born. Secondly, good fortune is not fairly distributed locally, nationally or internationally ever and never has been. A third piece of wisdom is that contentedness is a better personal goal than happiness. Another piece of wisdom is that violence signals a need to reorganize our social systems, that we haven't got a workable solution for humanity, and that a workable solution just for our narrow room is not going to be viable, long term. And finally, emerging out of the Black Lives Matter movement we will always need an accountable policing force to keep one another in check locally, and also internationally. All of those are components of wisdom, as I understand it, that will give us a livable future. A human future, a social future together. ","It's not my own, but it's something that struck me when I first came across it. And that's a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, one of the signatories to the American Declaration of Independence, when they were forming the union among the 13 states at the time. Referring to the States, he said, ""we must all hang together or most assuredly, we will all hang separately"". I want to extend that from states of the union, to interpersonal connectedness and the unions we share with others, the connections, the relationships we share with others. Now, this is a pun in English of course, based on the sense that hang together means cooperate or work in conjunction with one another, to achieve joint outcomes. And the second hang in the expression deals with a form of capital punishment where you are taken out of the game because you didn't master the game. So it implies that there are consequences to not cooperating that we are often blind to see.  ",Professor,2
17-Jun-20,Ross,Male,Non-US,SC,No,"I can certainly say I don't have a clue but I can make some guesses with fairly low confidence. The two areas that I would think about and then I'll focus on one is inequality and care for older people in long term care homes and nursing homes. Both of which have been exposed during the pandemic. If I had to guess in which area we might get movement, I would say not inequality. I think inequality is a tough nut to crack and I'm not sure we're prepared to deal with it. On the other hand, there's a chance that we'll think more seriously about how we care about the frail elderly and that we will force governments to enact legislation and think about putting more funding into these contexts in order to prevent what should have been a totally foreseeable consequence in terms of the effects of COVID-19 and long term care homes. We shouldn't take for granted that of course, older people are going to die from this because the statistics are hard to come by. But if you look at some statistics that the CDC has put out recently, it shows that the incidence of COVID-19 among 60 to 79 year olds is actually quite a bit lower than it is among 40 to 49 year olds and 50 to 60 year olds. To you and me, that's not a surprise because we wrote a paper that says the same thing with respect to scams. And I think it's a similar answer. If you focus on, the human body and just talk about older people being more vulnerable and having more vulnerable immune systems and having other kinds of diseases that make them more vulnerable, of course, you're going to assume older people are going to be more vulnerable. But if you think about lifestyle, and you realize that older people often don't go to nightclubs and do the kinds of things that might expose them to this virus, older people living in non-institutional settings, can actually do reasonably well. So it's not just a function of age, it is a function of setting. And we have to do something about those settings. And I think there's at least a small chance that we'll do something.","You have to assume that it could happen again. We’ve been going along reasonably well, with not investing a lot in long-term care situations. And the public at least believes presumably that their loved ones that are in these homes are being well treated and being well looked after. If we assume that something like this is very unlikely to happen for the next hundred years or so, then we might be willing not to do the kind of investment we need. I think we have to assume that there's a chance at least in the foreseeable future, that something like this could happen again, and we want to ward it off.","One concern I would have is that the effectiveness of government leaders and of so called experts in the area of infectious disease has been mixed. There have been some locations where they've done splendidly and they're well regarded. But there are lots of other locations in which neither the experts nor the government, that perhaps relies on the experts, have done all that well in predicting outcomes. Don't wear a mask, you don't need to a wear mask, masks aren’t gonna prevent anything and then a complete turnaround. And they express gross views with such incredible confidence. They’re one hundred percent sure masks aren’t effective, wash your hands, don't wear masks. So what I'm worried about is a lack of trust, that we’ll come not to trust both experts and government officials in those provinces, states, countries, where they have frankly screwed up. And it's easy to say hindsight is 2020. And, how could they know? Well, some people did know. And in some states and some provinces, and in some countries, they did anticipate, and they did a lot better. So I think they should be held to account. But I'm worried there'll be a lack of trust, and the consequences of that can be very negative. It can lead to walking away from the political process, not leading to experts, it could lead to a lot of things short of violence and that are negative. Not voting, because what's the point? They're all useless. That's one of the things, again, with low confidence because I don't think you can predict worth a damn. ","One of the things they have to think about seeing seriously are, what are the alternatives? We need experts and we need government. But are there things that we can do to promote more effective governments to fund public health better and maybe have people who are more dedicated to looking at these things and no more? Maybe. So I think the realization that really, we don't have a lot of alternatives, and that what we have to do is try and make things better and not walk away from them. ","One of the things you have to do is, have something that you want to get out of bed for, a lot of that has been taken away from us, whether it's work or social life or whatever. You have to have a reason to get up, a reason to look forward to the day and that might require that you indulge in new activities. So for example, one of the things I'm doing is working on French on Duolingo.",Professor Emeritus/Emerita/Retired,3
6-Jul-20,Gelfand,Female,US,SC,No,"I expect that we're going to see an increase in gratitude. When we've been faced with a collective disaster, we really begin to appreciate the small things in life that we've taken for granted. I think we're going to be more grateful for a variety of things, even for things, like eating out going to concerts, being able to hug our friends again, and our loved ones and even for speaking on a crowded subway. In that sense, I think it's going to produce a lot of collective gratitude.","We need to slow down, and just notice; notice things every day, the great gifts that we have in our lives that we really take for granted. I think many of us now are starting to keep gratitude journals to think, what are the small things up to the big things that we really realized that we should be noticing, first and foremost, that are so precious to us even, like I mentioned things that are small things like being able to sit outside with a friend, or hold someone's hand and hug people, we have to slow down, to be able to do that, the better off we'll be able to really kind of foster that positive change.","We’re going to need to find a way to forgive, the massive mistakes that we've made and to build trust, at least in the United States, where I'm located, in how we dealt with the pandemic. In the past, in our country, after 9/11, after World War Two, we really stood united. And we were able to sacrifice liberty for new rules, to overcome adversity. And this makes sense that when we experience a collective threat we need to come together. But during COVID-19, we saw a useless partisan conflict, great resistance in different parts of the country to things like wearing masks and social distancing, and we lost lives that could have been prevented. Have we been a stronger, more united culture and I think that we're going to need to really reckon with those mistakes.","I think about it as requiring a collective learning orientation. We need to really come together, understand and learn from our mistakes, which means that we shouldn't just look past it after we find a vaccine, we hope, when we start getting back to normal, we still need to really come together as communities discuss what happened, across multiple levels, whether its political, economic, cultural, so that we can learn from our mistakes and plan for what we can do better next time we face a collective threat.","What helps me is to think about it as temporary, and to have hope that we're going to be back to normal some day. If we think about it as temporary, and we have hope, that it can give us the patience that we need to do what's right now, and right now, it means basically following rules that will keep us safe. And I just have some sort of sense of solace that one day we'll be able to re-enter our normal ways of living. And having hope, I think really helps.",Professor,2
29-Jun-20,Bloom,Male,US,Non-SC,No,"The most significant change could come from this pandemic, is preparation for the next pandemic. If the next pandemic is a bird flu, that kills over 50% of the people who get it, it could be a species ending event, could be the end of civilization. And if this pandemic leads us to prepare better for the next one. It could be the greatest blessing we can imagine.","Well, several sources of wisdom or several positive traits. We’ll need self-control to constrain our impulse to give it all up and not take precautions. We will need compassion for the people around us. Some who may be more vulnerable than we are, and will need most of all rationality, the ability not to be influenced by our prejudices and our biases, but instead think reasonably and rationally about a crisis that we find ourselves in.","The worst change that could come from this pandemic, which is plausible, and we see it, is xenophobia. We get very caught up in our own small group, and we are dismissive, or worse, cruel and accusatory towards other groups. We see this both in the political spectrum where Republicans and Democrats are responding very differently to pandemic and often in very ugly ways. And we also see that in a national perspective where countries are blaming other countries and not working together enough.","What will rescue people from this is actually a form of moral wisdom, is a recognition that we are all people, we all have equal rights, we all suffer the same, and that as moral decent creatures we do better by working together to combat a common problem, rather than to fight each other.","If I can give one bit of advice it would be to use our heads and not our hearts. I think our gut impulses are often xenophobic. They're often cruel. They're often panicked or not panicked enough. And I think we're going to get through this in the best possible way, if we just reason intelligently we think about others and we don't succumb to either bias or irrationality.",Professor,2
2-Jul-20,Dolan,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"For me, there's no doubt that the biggest benefit of lockdown has been the impact on the environment, the air is cleaner. And that's something that we can carry forward with us I think If we remind ourselves just how good that particular bit of experience has been, then maybe we can start doing something to mitigate climate change.","I think one prediction we can make now is that most of the predictions for a post COVID world will be wrong. What feels really important now, will quickly pass, we have very short memories, when end up by large being the people that we were before. So if you want to really make significant change, for example, in relation to the environment, we need to embed some of those changes right now. ","I think the biggest negative impact of the pandemic will be the policy response to shut schools. Not just the educational attainment and the widening inequalities that will come in that from schools being shut for significantly long periods, but the social interaction, the child development, all of those things that, I think, will show up in largely negative ways for many, many more years to come.",,,Professor,2
26-Jun-20,Niedenthal,Female,US,SC,No,"I'm noticing that during this time, people are sitting with the details of their life, their families, their actual environment, their actual landscape, much more than they have done in the past, on average, and spending less time planning and constructing and anticipating an experience often somewhere else that they could possibly have to gain fulfillment or pleasure. For example, rather than planning a trip abroad that's filled with mishaps and standing in the rain and getting sick and potentially not having a lot of pleasure, but then deriving a lot of pleasure later when people give you social credit for doing that trip or where you can make it seem incredibly interesting. Instead of doing that people are walking to the store or making bread or discovering that the landscape around their home, whether it's urban or rural, is very beautiful. I think a benefit of that is that people continue to recognize the bottom up influences on their psychological wellbeing and their happiness as much as they recognize that happiness can be derived from social credit and from telling stories later about things that might elicit envy or just other kinds of social credit.","Daniel Kahneman has referred to this kind of distinction by using the terms the experiencing self versus the remembering self. The experiencing self, is that person who is deriving pleasure or fulfillment from the moment and from the details of one's life, whereas the remembering self is the person who is deriving pleasure from the recounting essentially, which is an interior or later or socially constructed form of pleasure. If people could learn about this distinction, and harness those two ways of deriving pleasure or wellbeing as two different kinds of resources, then they can later, when they're facing challenges to one or the other, focus or abilities or places to derive pleasure and wellbeing and meaning they could use those two different kinds of resources rather than, I would say, getting off kilter and only putting more time, resources or money into one rather than the other.","Because of my particular interests and research interests, people have noted a lot to me, what wearing masks over their faces does to them psychologically, and similarly, what working at home alone does to them and what they're referring to is deindividuation. So if you have a mask on your face, you don't really make eye contact with other people because you don't feel visible to them in the first place. Because much of your identity is gone. I pass people on bikes who I don't recognize to be my own neighbors. Our concern would be that these feelings of deindividuation also persist beyond this pandemic, where people are able to navigate in the social world with the feeling that nobody is really identifying them. And the costs that come with deindividuation are things like not feeling responsible for one's particular behavior or being unusually susceptible to social norms. So my concern is that this persists.","Recognizing and understanding the consequences of deindividuation. And that's part of the wisdom. The other part is to counteract it. So I recently was in a grocery store in a small town in the state that I live in, of Wisconsin. I noticed repeatedly now that the management there has told the workers who are wearing masks to make eye contact with other people wearing masks, which is most other people, and say hello and how's your day, while making eye contact. I feel like the manager of those grocery stores has the wisdom to counteract people's tendency to avoid eye contact and otherwise feel deindividuated. So the wisdom to be derived is the knowledge of the susceptibilities and negative consequences of deindividuation and the wisdom to counteract it by systematic social changes involving moments of individuation for other people.","I think that one piece of wisdom is to let go of righteous indignation. A big concern that I have is that the data about the pandemic and about its consequences and especially about its causes change daily and are extraordinarily difficult to interpret. Nevertheless, people are very quick to be righteously indignant towards friends and families and neighbors and other countries about the right behavior versus the wrong behavior. The consequence of that would be to lose really important relationships both within individuals and intergroup relationships. A piece of wisdom is to let go of that righteous indignation and recognize everybody's difficulty in interpreting the data and adopting the right social and health behaviors right now.",Professor,2
18-Jun-20,Nisbett,Male,US,SC,Yes,"The only one that I feel qualified to speculate about is the academic impact, tele-academics that we're going to be having as an option. And there are positive and negative aspects, but the positive aspects. If you've got a class 75 people, the same two people raise their hand all the time. If you have got, everybody lined up and they say they can raise their hand without actually moving their hand, they just push a button and he can decide who to call on. So mix it up a bit, it isn't just the same two people with the shortest latency. Some higher education people are going to see advantages to that. And we’ll be inclined to use it I’m sure for lots of circumstances. Then at the elementary level, and probably also at secondary level as well, but certainly the elementary level, some children are saying now, I like this zoom education so much better than being in class, there’s not the chaos that you have in class, there’s not the jerks. At least for some kids, for some kinds of education, it's going to be a plus.","The wise thing to do is to get very serious about finding out what kinds of courses are taught to what kinds of people to the best effect. And it's a huge amount of research that needs to be done. Rather than people automatically doing internet communication or automatically doing classroom education, let's have some idea what kind of subjects and what kind of people it would make sense for. ","It’s internet education. There is something that goes on in a real classroom, that's superior, to what you can get, it's an immediacy, a clear reading of body language and facial expressions and so on, that gets lost. I worry that people will be using the internet education automatically without seriously thinking about it, which would be a big problem. The thing I most fear is that people will, if they have the option to get, their higher degree of BA be online for a very low price that many people will take it, who should not? Certainly if there's no way for you to get a really super college education, except through online means that's one thing. But if you are the sort of person who could afford to pay for college education or who could expect to get a scholarship for college education, then it's a huge loss not to do that. Your fellow students are as important as education, at any rate, who are extremely important. They're doing things. They can tell you what you said that’s stupid, and you can think then why is that stupid, and generalize from there. They can model intelligent thinking in all kinds of domains. So, a 1200 dollar online Stanford education is not going to give you anything like what the real thing can get.","You just need to do the research and find out what kinds of teachers, what kinds of topics, what kinds of students are best done online.","The most important thing is, what can I do that's safe. And, unfortunately, our public health people have been all over the map. Public health officials have said things that when they said them, I knew they were wrong in most cases, they come back and say, “oh, I'm so sorry about that, actually masks are a good thing, so sorry.” Six weeks of public health telling us masks can do no good.",Professor Emeritus/Emerita/Retired,3
18-Jun-20,CohenSilver,Female,US,SC,No,"A few things that I expect will be different or at least, will have changed more quickly than we might have expected. First, I think that many people, certainly people who are, let's say, middle aged and older are embracing technology in ways that they might not have realized that they would be able to do, and do so quickly. Universities have switched very quickly to remote instruction, and individuals are communicating with their families and friends, across the country and across the world in ways that they might not have done so before the pandemic. I also think that individuals will newly embrace flexibility and understanding how to cope with loss of control, how to cope with isolation, to see the value of compliance factors that I think many people who encounter stressful life events learn, as they cope with crisis. And now, as we have a worldwide crisis in which we are embracing, many people will learn those skills and the value of those factors sooner than they might have otherwise done.","I think that people will need to recognize the value of flexibility and the value of compassion and the value of giving themselves a break, as they cope with these unprecedented times. I think that many people who've encountered tragedy before have learned the value of flexibility and compassion. But I think that now, many more people will be embracing and need to learn those values and embrace those values sooner than they might have expected to have to do so.","I'm most concerned about isolation, both isolation from one's loved ones and isolation amongst countries or within countries, not embracing the value of working with other people across the world. The necessity for isolation and lockdown across the world to prevent the spread of the coronavirus has led many people to lose touch with others, and again, it requires them an enormous amount of energy to reach out to others, the technology that we have available to us, but I am concerned about isolation and the psychological consequences of isolation and the societal consequences of isolation.","People are going to need to embrace flexibility and comfort with loss of control, comfort with ambiguity, and we'll need also to engage in reaching out to others when they feel distraught or when they feel particularly distressed, and people may need to reach out to their loved ones to ensure that they too are coping well.","I think the number one piece of wisdom is that we're all in it together. And that has been bandied around but I think that it is really the case that it is important for us to protect our loved ones, protect our friends, protect their neighbors, and in doing so we will protect ourselves.",Professor,2
18-Jun-20,Baumeister,Male,Non-US,SC,No,"One thing that people might hope for is that there will be a greater sense of social solidarity, that we're all working together. In our thinking about cultural change, there are changes that split and divide people and there are changes that bring people together. External threat certainly falls in the category of events that can bring a society together. So it would be in principle possible that coping with, this plague, this external threat, would be something that would increase members of the society's sense of finding something together. We might fantasize that it even would work at a global level, that we all around the world would realize, that as common humanity and with our common vulnerability to illness, we're all coping with the same problem. That's probably a bit much to hope for. But it could certainly work in countries that get through this by cooperating and working together.",I think stressing the common humanity would help us enjoy this unifying effect. We have to resist the temptation to blame each other or to expect the government to solve it or to look to divisive forces in our society.,"Clearly the economic damage is a serious concern, which could compromise our society for a long period of time and potentially stunt the careers in life courses of countless young people who are at critical stages in their careers and in their life development. Another related thing is that lots of politicians look at a crisis as something they can use to advance their own agenda. And the phrase “don't let a good crisis go to waste” means oh, there's a problem, now we have a pandemic and people are getting sick. But, this is a chance to advance our other goals that we may have had before the pandemic was even an idea or concern in anyone's mind, let alone a reality. So, what happens in many of these cases will be an expansion of government power, more structures, more bureaucracy, and people when they are worried they are more willing to give up some of their freedom, see to an authority, which will take care of them. Now, it's an illusion, in this case, it's not clear if the government can really take care of us, the pandemic is a disease, but that would be the natural human impulse. One of the big ideas in there is demosclerosis, that as a state goes on, decade after decade, that it accumulates a stronger bureaucracy, more getting tied into special interests, who use the government for their own benefit, and prevent the government from doing its job to produce the general welfare. ","I think one thing that psychological research shows is that the formula for self-destructive behavior is to pursue short term gain at long term cost. If we create an economic depression that lasts for years, that will cost lives too. Also do enormous damage to the quantity and quality of life that many people enjoy. Understand that your careers have critical stages. So if you reach the critical stage during an economic downturn or depression, you don't have the opportunities to move up that you would have if when times were good. Society recovers, and the job opportunities open up again at some point, but then they go to the younger people. And so if you were at that critical point at that time, even though the effect of the depression is temporary for society, it's permanent for you. We also have, we have the idea that by staying home, we can save people's lives and well it does certainly reduce transmission of the pandemic. But, it's easy to not notice, there are other costs too. If people are not going out for thier routine medical care, there'll be less cancer screening, there'll be less all sorts of minor things that can help people live better and longer lives. And so deaths may increase. I've seen some people estimated the long term costs and death from other causes, from things that are neglected during the pandemic could outweigh the death toll of the pandemic itself, especially if you make adjustment for the people dying from it are mostly people who are old and sick and so the number of months of life lost might be smaller for them. Be aware of the tendency of the mind to focus on short term problems and neglect long term future ones which are vaguer and less palpable, but down the road may end up being more costly. ","Back in the 90s, when my research was settling into the two major programs that have guided it ever since I did a project on the side to review an article called Bad is Stronger Than Good. I'm convinced this is one of the basic patterns of the human mind. That it focuses more on negative things than on positive things. And so, in terms of understanding the pandemic and the problems we're having with it, yes, it's a real problem. I'm not saying it's not. People are getting sick, some people are dying. But, almost certainly, we are overestimating how bad it is. That's just how the mind works. And my fear is when its a collective thing, it probably escalates even more than when it's a private, one person sort of thing. Because people will see the alarm in each other and a lot of people who are overreacting will fuel each other's fears and produce a spiral of ever greater overreaction. So, again, I'm not trying to say it's not a serious problem. Yes, people are getting sick, and some are dying. But understand that it's a property of the human mind to overestimate the problems and the danger and the downside.",Professor,2
22-Jun-20,Kitayama,Male,US,SC,No,"Recently I was looking into what happened in 1918 influenza pandemic. And people were really impacted by that pandemic back then. But there was no significant psychological, societal change afterward. So I'm not sure if there's any significant changes happening automatically. But this doesn't mean that no change is needed. The world has changed quite a bit since then. And most likely, this kind of pandemic infectious diseases will be more frequent, if anything, so unless the humanity prepares itself for future pandemic like this, even greater disaster can happen easily. And therefore, I really think that humans need to change, societies need to change, and the cultural norms must change. And those changes may not happen automatically. If you leave it to people without doing any active intervention, people will restore their life in a few years, hopefully, and they forget. So in all likelihood, nothing happens. Proactive efforts towards societal change may be called upon. And now what kind of change is required and that could be is the next question. And I think there are two critical things. One, the idea of globalization as inherently virtuous, must be evaluated. This requires major reassessment. Second, there must be really active effort to preserve ecological diversity and the preservation of habitats for non-human animals and the plants, which need to be separated from the human habitat. And, to realize those, I think our motivational system needs to change. Right now over the last several hundred years, especially in the western half of the hemisphere, virtue was based on achievement and social comparison. Now this needs to be changed. To the one that is based on more holistic value, and holistic virtue of coexistence of all elements on the earth, and beyond. ","Globalization need to be reassessed. The globalization that has been practiced over the last several decades, is essentially amounting to, privileging of the wealthy, while ignoring the poor. This disparity in wealth becomes larger and larger. Globalization essentially left behind many people. Its simply because the wealth was concentrated on the people who capitalize on information, technology and that's benefited from globalization. Globalization or move towards globalization change, and if globalization is to continue, which I hope it will, all globalization must proceed by incorporating the poor and underdeveloped countries. Globalization must be detached from international business competition.","If neither of the two changes I consider to be necessary that is reassessment of globalization in the reduction of the wealth disparity happens and then there'll be greater likelihood of even greater disasters, to humanity in some near future. Now why is that? Well, story is very simple. Globalization, essentially makes it possible for virus to travel easily. And two, disparity. Why disparity matters? Because once you segregate the poor, and put them in some segregated area, that place is most likely to be hit and attacked by the virus. It’s very clear in the United States, for example, that simply mortality is much higher for African Americans. For example, essentially prejudice, segregation, poverty, all those systemic factors really fuels the movement and activity of the virus and once this happens, the entire society cannot stay free from this. And therefore, one globalization and two racial segregation, wealth disparity needs to be addressed very systematically and aggressively to reduce the likelihood of future pandemic.","One wisdom that may be needed is to find a way to reduce physical social contact and a physical social distance without diminishing psychological or symbolic or psychological social contract. We are capable of connecting with others symbolically, or by using this kind of online means and might be possible to change the society in such a way that we can be connected to a greater number of people without doing anything dangerous, especially when the buyers become a real danger and threat. That's something that anyone and everyone can do and probably should do right away. But at the same time, in the long term, It’s very important to try to reduce wealth disparity and racial discrimination. Since, it's a really the weak spot of society, which is being attacked by the virus. And I think something like this, that is combination of globalization and racial discrimination or wealth disparity. That might be part of the reason why some countries including the United States, has been hit especially hard by the current pandemic. So that's the second issue, which is much more difficult to address. But that's something we need in the long term.","Social distancing, physical distancing, realizing some physical distancing, without compromising, psychological social distance, psychological social proximity.",Professor,2
6-Jul-20,Stich,Male,US,Non-SC,Yes,"One of the most positive societal changes that we've witnessed in the last few months is the growing awareness both intellectually and emotionally, of the serious racial injustice that exists in the United States. A major reason for that quantum jump in awareness certainly was the killing of George Floyd, and the excruciating video of that horrible event. I'm inclined to think that the pandemic actually contributed to the positive impact of the video. The economy's locked down, many people were working from home, there was more opportunity to see the video than there might have been prior to the pandemic. And since so many of us were suffering, we were perhaps primed to see and emphasize with the suffering that was portrayed on the video, and to begin to understand the impact that widespread racism of the sort that was so obvious in that video has had on the lives of millions of our fellow Americans. And, in addition, of course, large numbers of people joined the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Here again, I think the pandemic may have facilitated that response. Schools and universities were closed, many people who were out of work, and the responsible news media made it clear that people of color were much more seriously impacted by the pandemic. I think it was sort of the perfect storm that forced many of us to see more clearly and to emphasize more vividly with the impact of racism and inequality.","When the pandemic’s over, people will be anxious to get on with their lives and to make up for lost time. And it'll be all too easy for privileged white people like me, to let our newfound understanding and empathy with the plight of people of color to drift into the background. It'll be easy for George Floyd's death and the many other deaths that we've learned about to become, as they say ""yesterday's news"", and to prevent that from happening, or maybe it's impossible to completely prevent it, but at least it diminished the tendency to forget and move on. People need to take steps now. Join an organization, become involved volunteers, put yourself in a place where it's going to be hard not to see the inequality and harder not to emphasize with the suffering that racism engenders. It’s the wisdom to get involved.","The negative impacts I personally worry about most are the ones that, not surprisingly, are closest to me. The devastating effect it's going to have on the careers of so many of the students that I work with. Graduate students are going to find it vastly more difficult to launch their academic careers. Many graduate students devoting three or four or five or six years to graduate training, are going to find that it's impossible to get a job at a college or university. Undergraduates are going to find it much more difficult to launch the careers they've been trained for and had been hoping for. So inevitably years are going to be lost. Life plans need to be put on hold. And I think in many cases, the income loss will never be recovered. The current generation of students is going to be worse off than their parents, almost certainly for the next decade and possibly for their entire lives. That may not be the most devastating impact of the pandemic. Afterall, hundreds of thousands by the time we're done, perhaps millions of lives will be lost. But it's the one that looms largest to someone like me, whose career is involved in teaching and mentoring undergraduates and graduate students.","Flexibility. A willingness to walk away from what the economist calls “sunk costs.” Yes, it really sucks to invest years in preparation for a career you'll probably never have. But I think the people who do best in dealing with the situation are going to be those who assess the situation accurately, and refocus their goals, those flexible. There’ll be the people who ask what's possible now and how can I achieve the most attractive and fulfilling future in the world as it now is, rather than continuing to pursue or trying to pursue a goal that just may no longer be possible?","Believe the experts. They won't always have the right answer. No one person is infallible, no group is infallible. But science and the institutions that sustain science are self-correcting in a way that no other sources of information and advice are. So take the science and the scientists seriously.",Professor,2
2-Jul-20,Tiberius,Female,US,Non-SC,Yes,"If I had to predict something positive that would happen, it would be an increased awareness of our vulnerability and mutual dependence. We see a little bit of this already with people banging pots and clapping hands to support healthcare workers and other essential workers. My hope in practice is that this would mean increased support for universal health care in the US and for a more secure social safety net, which would have made a big difference in the US to how the pandemic played out and I think that could be a long lasting change that people understand the ways in which we're connected and the ways in which it's essential to support each other. ","It’s probably a kind of theoretical or intellectual wisdom, the wisdom of seeing things from a broader or systematic perspective. That’s a very hard thing for human beings to do. We tend to focus on individual stories, stories of heroes and people, individuals fighting against the odds and making changes, which is great. Stories are great, but it does, I think, prevent us from seeing the structural roots of problems. The kind of wisdom that we need is this ability to shift in our perspective, see the way that systems are shaped outside of any individual control. We need to get us on the path to seeing people's mutual interdependence and our vulnerability that would allow us to shift our perspectives to see larger forces and patterns rather than focusing on individual narratives and stories. ","Politically, I think there's a reason to worry that some leaders will take this as an opportunity to curtail individual liberty and increase social control beyond the point that's necessary to respond to the pandemic. I think we see that happening in some countries already. That’s a real concern. I know that there are parents who are worried about the long term consequences for this very fearful period on their children. Parents that I know are worried that their children will grow up with an increasing, greater sense of mistrust and fear of other people. They're also worried about the repercussions for children's education, and especially, I think as a society, we should be worried about the repercussions for the education of poor children who are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. ","What we need is wise leadership, which, at least in the US, we don't have a lot of recently. We need wise leaders who can balance the values of liberty and privacy against the values of saved lives. We need wise leadership to enact education policies that treat all children as equal future citizens whose education matters to us all. ","The pandemic is having very different consequences for people in different groups. Some people are dying. Some people are afraid of getting sick because they have to care for other people. Some people are losing their jobs and their economic stability and injustice in the United States especially, but surely elsewhere, means that some of us are merely inconvenienced, while some of us are in truly dismal circumstances. So given that, for those of us who are not in dire states, I think what we need is perspective. Realizing that our problems are relatively small compared to what others are enduring might be a first step to motivating us help to change the conditions that has made this pandemic so bad for some reason. It could also be that having some perspective where we realize that for those of us for whom this is true that our problems are small compared to people in other groups. It might also make us feel a little better, make us feel less sorry for ourselves. And again, my hope is that it would motivate us to work to change things.",Professor,2
13-Jul-20,BenetMartinez,Female,Non-US,SC,No,"I believe that one of the positive changes for sure has been the strengthening of relationships. The confinement, combined with fear, have really made people feel much more picky about which relationships to maintain and cultivate, namely family, close ones. But also has allowed opportunities for meeting new people that maybe have joined your classes or your zoom parties and you have had an opportunity to kind of get to know them in a non-interrupted way. During the zoom party or zoom meeting, it's been a sort of a much more kind of focused microscopic way of looking at this relationship. I'm sure some new emergent friendships neighbors have emerged that I will say the main positive change will be the strengthening of relationships we deem important. The second gain, I would say, is the savoring of experiences. I think that this uncertainty we have hovering over our heads all the time, has made us really savor whatever positive experiences we have, some of them social, some of them individual, and realize that they're special, that they're wonderful and we have taken them for granted. ","Besides the risk assessment in decision making about how people have to be quick and more practiced and smart about assessing risk and deciding whether to engage in interaction with certain others and certain activities in consideration with their needs, the fear as well as the age and the life perspective. Some people may think, well, no, I'm willing to take the risk and if I get sick, I think I am healthy and I rather take the risk now then not being able to take it in 10 years, as I mentioned before. I think wisdom about priorities, what's important in life. And I think that we definitely now value much less. There's a need to engage in novelty and activities that involve arousal and sort of a lot of things that  sometimes for you are driven by fear of missing out, and I think now we are going to be more interested in meaning and connection and experiences that we can truly savor. ","I think, ones that come to mind very easily, I'm sure to many others also, is fear of socializing and being out, that many people probably have some sort of existential despair about the fate of society and humanity, helplessness, about loss of loss of life, loss of significant others, jobs opportunities, being unable to use one’s skillset. I know people who basically will have to completely change their profession, because they have jobs that are basically going to disappear. So a frustration to see your professional identity, go out of the window like that, because of a pandemic where certain things and certain activities cease to exist. And I think all of this is going to be magnified for individuals who struggle with mental health issues and who have lack of social support and professional resources and stability. ","I think that one that is very important is to never lose hope and optimism, as the humankind has been able to overcome all kinds of challenges, historical, the macro level, that now, we learn about in history books. We have to remain hopeful and optimistic about our future generations and hopefully our even current generations. Those of us who are alive now in our ability to seek this come to an end. I think that meaning making is a very important ability, skill, form of wisdom that we need to have to be able to write a story about what's been happening, integrate this in the story of our lives, and who we are, and share those stories with others. And also very important to maintain social connections and social support. In the past, we were busy with our very varied and dynamic and highly mobile lives we were not perhaps cultivating as much as we are now.",,Professor,2
26-Jun-20,Mendes,Female,US,SC,No,"It’s interesting to think about some of the positive aspects of the pandemic because what we know about human behavior and how we respond to stress is that there aren't always negative effects associated with stress, and that’s where the idea of resilience comes from, that people have the ability to adapt to new circumstances. And even in research where of maternal caregivers is the mothers with sick children, about 25 to 40% of women with sick children end up looking healthier because they find meaning in life and resilience. The idea that the pandemic could potentially create more resilient profiles and understanding of meaning in life of what matters. And what matters is our loved ones, the people around us, our society or communities. When we consider the positive changes of the pandemic, the fact that people are connecting with old friends with remembering the values of the family because now they can't see them in some cases, helps remind us of the important things in life and so I think that is one of the positive changes that we could see.","People are going to have to figure out a new normal of communication. Now, we're lucky in a weird way that the pandemic hit when the ability to FaceTime or have zoom conference calls, hit this new peak, we used to have these audio conference calls where you didn't have the luxury of seeing people's faces and knowing the natural pauses and always the funny examples of people talking over each other. So I think this ability to be able to connect with people virtually, will help this positive change, help us connect, remind us that we can reach out and no you can't, touch your loved one, but you can find sort of solace in being able to communicate with them directly over video.",,"When we're thinking about negative changes, it's important to think of the history of us as social beings and for millennia we have been used to and we've evolved to communicate with people face- to-face, in fact, it's only in our very recent evolutionary past, have we had the ability to communicate over video or telephones. So we have evolved to see each other and not just see each other, but also all of our senses smell, hear, directly touch. And so one of our critical sensorial features of communication is something like touch. Now, touch is powerful, especially when we think of it, in our smaller, close family circles. We're used to touching people we love, our family. We know from work, for example, by Jim Cohen, who shows that stress centers and fear centers in the brain down regulate with human touch, and it doesn't even have to be a loved one. It could be a stranger, so touch is powerful. And I think we're going to have to get used to not touching people. Even the idea of a handshake, extending and touching somebody who you're just meeting is useful. It's a way to sort of break down this barrier of being strangers and something like that right now would be ill advised. So we have to come up with ways to communicate, social connection and more, that doesn't require touch, and that I think will be very tricky for people, especially more in a Western culture. People are going to have to think about why something like face-to-face communication and touch, why that makes them feel better and trying to find a proxy that fits. Something that my friends and I have been doing, because we tend to be fairly touchy and we hug each other every time we see each other, is that we've been hugging ourselves. If we get together and socially distance in an open environment, and when we see each other, we come up to each other, we hug ourselves. It felt really silly the first time we did it, and now it's become more natural. And it feels when we do it and we see each other simultaneously. That synchronized process has created that same feeling. Now, I'm not suggesting that's what will fit for everybody. But I think we have to start coming up with these new ways to alter what feels natural into a new natural. And we know individuals have this ability to adapt to new naturals, they just take a few times and getting used to it and then try it and see if that is a good substitution for you.","What this pandemic has done is created unprecedented amounts of uncertainty. So how do we start regulating uncertainty given that is our new normal? Here's a couple things that I that I suggest. One, there are elements that you do have control over, there is certainty in your own small circle. So instead of a certainty about a vacation, which may or may not happen in three months, or what Christmas this year looks like or whatever the December holidays are, what that looks like for you, those plans may change. But what can you predict? What do you have certainty over? You can start creating small little traditions within your closest family circle and say, next month, we're going to have game night for three nights, or next month, I'm going to start the outline of the book that I'm going to write. Things that you do have control over, that's where you're going to have to start thinking about that's where my certainty comes from. And there are elements of my life and the world that are going to be a bit more uncertain right now. And that ability to get used to uncertainty is very difficult to have, to give yourself a little bit of self-compassion and your family members and your friends who are all struggling with this same problem. There are some people who really value certainty and some people who are more comfortable with uncertainty and we have to also recognize that individual difference among the people we love.",Associate Professor,1
14-Jul-20,Kashima,Male,Non-US,SC,No,"A change is the belief in change. People are going to think that there will be change and that belief of future changes are going to create changes themselves, in many ways, because they think that it's possible to change and they'll begin to act on it. So  the best thing that happened is that people are now beginning to think that there will be a change.","We have to have a will to keep imagining what may be a better way of living. So keep thinking, what may be a place where we can improve and just keep imagining, and participate in the kind of conversation that we keep talking to each other about, what that might be. And not necessarily imposing that utopian vision, or a better way of living. But to have a discourse about it, and to keep on talking, and try to act on those sorts of ideas. Check on the veracity of it, and the acceptability of it. To keep on talking and acting.","There will be a change and not all changes are going to be good for everybody. So there'll be something bad happening and the good changes as well. The power of a state, nation state that is going to increase in some parts of the world, but say in other parts of the world that might fail. And what that means is that the kind of institutional support for civil society and everyday life may be weakened especially in some failing states, but it can be strengthened for better or worse in some other parts and that could be a major problem in some areas. So, it could be positive in that the state power might enter say a domestic living and that could reduce for instance the problem of domestic violence at the same time, that means that the some of the sanctity of family life could be eroded, and the state power can come into that sort of private living. ","We have to have a will to keep imagining what may be a better way of living and participate in the discourse and acting on that. You just have to collectively, but locally, improving the way we do things.","We have to have a will to believe. Believe in and trust humanity. At this point in time, I think it's really important for me, personally, to believe in humanity, hope that they keep on hoping I guess, have a will to hope, that there’s a better way of living into the future. ",Professor,2
6-Jul-20,Uchida,Female,Non-US,SC,No,"My own research on the Great East Japan earthquake nine years ago in Japan suggested that people re-evaluate their ordinary lives and the strengths and their feelings of the gratitude towards family members or social networks. This coronavirus pandemic is also affecting their social bonds and we can re-evaluate how the pressures that each social bond we have. Then, in Japan, the most positive changes that people are able to see, the balance between work and private life. In general the Japanese business people stay in their office, longer time than other countries. Before the pandemic Japanese businessman, feel pressured by collectivistic organizational culture to work together and monitor each other. So the evaluation system is based on long working hours, the long working order signal for the high motivation and the commitment to the workplace in Japan. So, in addition due to the centralization in the Tokyo area, many business persons should commute by crowded trains and the average length of the commuting is around an hour. One way, I mean this will total two hours per day. So now after coronavirus pandemic working at home is more likely to be prevailed in Japanese context too. Then we can extend our family time and maybe this is the kind of moment to re-evaluate how precious our  significant other social relationships closer to each other. And the impact is far greater than other countries I think, maybe because of the gap between before the coronavirus pandemic and after coronavirus pandemic. So after teleworking, they found that it is not necessary at least some types of help, to go to the office while their sacrificing time for a long commute. Their now working style in the cultural norm should be changed. And in terms of the universal perspective, we can be more flexible to connect internationally with each other via SMS and an online communication. Before it was very common to visit some people by flying long distance to have a meeting. Holding an online meeting was optional at that time, but now it is becoming a standard that even small children can communicate with their family and relatives online. This is a new way of feeling connected each other so this is the kind of the positive impact to seek our new social life. So online and seeking work life balance.","We need to improve our skill of the imagination in communication to supplement the missing information via online. So online conversation is easy, it has a lack of contextual information. So sometimes many people say for example, the Japanese use high context information during a conversation, like in a small signal of the emotion or some behavior as well. So it is usually easier for communicating online when the target person is already known. Because we can supplement the missing information with our knowledge of him or her, but it is difficult to communicate with the strangers online because we cannot have a background information. In that case, to avoid such kind of a risky perception, we need to be tolerant. And we should be explicitly aware of what kind of cognitive heuristic we have when interacting with other people online. We have to ask ourselves: Do I have any stereotype, or do I have a cognitive bias? And having such an alert toward ourselves should be quite important to have a nice positive change in this pandemic time.","In a Japanese context, they still feel that we have to monitor the work of colleagues or subordinates, even when the employees work at home. So, it is due to the system of evaluation, which depend heavily on an effort rather than the outcome. Maybe some types of the cultural context they pay attention to the time to make effort rather than outcome. So the under such cultural context we need to have some changes and without such changes this might have some negative impact because some people just try not to have evaluation by outcome of the work. This is kind of big challenge for us to shift from the effort base evaluation system to outcome evaluation system. It's kind of stressful for us. And we have another impersonal small chat, type of the conversation. So, for some people who do not want to be disturbed by others, reducing the possibility to have a chat with others could have a positive impact, but others, however, maybe they miss such kind of refreshment or brainstorming or information sharing we usually obtained from the small chat in social interactions. But if they have no such kind of relationship and they feel lonely, then this kind of change also worsen their feeling of the loneliness. So that maybe should be overcome from the some societal wisdom to protect the people from the feeling of loneliness.","We have to re-evaluate the social network seeking strategy. And then security network, I mean, not only focus attention to the positive social network, but rather, maybe we have to think about the secure network of the social life as a social security system, so the infrastructure will be of the social bonding is necessary to be built up. So nowadays and that SMS is based on the automatic or more likely to be promotion focus seeking behavior to seek some partner, communication partner. Well, maybe not only that kind of the part, but also maybe we have to stretch out our security network. For those who are not so extraverted, for those who are not seeking new opportunity to have a friendship, rather, maybe we have to think about the person who are more likely to be introverted, more likely to feel loneliness, or more likely to feel sadness or hesitation towards the social network. So I think we have to build up some secure network for such kind of people.","It is important to stop and rethink about what we have defined as normal life as very normal or not. Was it normal to commute more than one hour a day? Or was it normal not to talk to your family members because you were so busy, or was it normal to fly frequently to other areas in busy schedule? Or was it normal to make a lot of consumption in a daily basis? I think this situation we have to think about, what is our individual happiness and what is our societal happiness. Recently, I think before coronavirus pandemic, we defined some normal life as lots of consumption, lots of mobility and busy life we defined as normal. But maybe, it's kind of too much for us and also we have to think about the good balance between individual level happiness and also societal happiness which can construct each other. But sometimes, of course, they're controversial or conflict each other. The pursuit of individual happiness and selfish behavior makes society uncomfortable sometimes, or sometimes the individual happiness is sacrificed for gross profit of society. Now we have time to think about what is very valued. Because of the very strong pressure by pandemic, we have time to stop and think about what is very normal and what we are seeking for future happiness.",Professor,2
21-Jul-20,Kenrick,Male,US,SC,No,"You're probably going to see an increase in relationships between kin because those are the people now that we're spending more time with. We're concentrating on a smaller number, instead of hanging out at bars with 50 people, we're now hanging out with smaller groups with people and the easiest people to hang out with are your kin because we feel most comfortable around them, we see them most frequently. Tighter family relationships would be the most positive outcome of this.","In North America, there's this tendency to think you've got to stand on your own, you've got to be separate, people move out of their home, even when they don't need to, when not getting married, they'll move out of a perfectly large house with five bedrooms, and they're the only person living there because they need to be separate. And so I think there's a force in our society that says you need to separate yourself, but I think that's sort of the one obstacle is that look, it's okay to be friends with your kin. You can trust your kin and it keeps the network of potential infections smaller. So again, I think people will do it naturally. And the only wisdom would be, don't pay attention to your cultural value that you should separate yourself from your family.","There’s going to be more aversion towards outsiders. When people are concerned about disease, they're especially likely to want to distance themselves from people, from foreign places, and that's particularly true of foreign places that they're not familiar with. Americans and Canadians will probably get over the border between us. But people from strange exotic places are going to experience more prejudice by people from other places. And so I think there's going to be more ethnocentrism, not necessarily ethnic, but kind of, geocentric, there's going to be more geocentrism. We're going to like the people around us and be averse to hanging out with people from faraway foreign places.","I think that you're going to have to be considerate about who are the people that you're interacting with. It is going to be automatic wisdom: once you become familiar with somebody, they're no longer a foreigner. You know, they're sort of a member of our ancestors. You had people come in occasionally from other villages, most typically, a guy would marry a woman from another village. At first, she'd probably get excluded, but then eventually she became a familiar face, she became part of the group. And I think that, if you're an outsider and you want to be accepted, don't necessarily push too quickly, just become familiar, say hi from a distance. Let people get to be familiar with your face, and who you are and recognize you as a part of the neighborhood and then eventually you will be a part of the neighborhood.","My advice is that, not to be too panicked about it. We've been through this before, and just stay relaxed, enjoy the time to contemplate, not being so overwhelmed by crowds of people. I guess what I would be thinking about is to what extent can I get into things like media outreach, there's going to be a lot more online learning, there should be opportunities that open up in terms of technological communication between people. And if I were young and had a job as a waiter or waitress, I'd be trying to learn some of that stuff. So that I can be ready for the for the future, we're never probably going to stop interacting online the way we are now because it's so convenient. Learn about these things, learn about this technology, because there's going to be some money in it. ",Professor,2
22-Jul-20,Osin,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"The most important positive change is concerning the ways we communicate and cooperate when we strive towards common goals. During this lockdown, we have learned to be more flexible and more efficient, and many work events and activities that were thought of as quite indispensable, are now appearing less necessary and they can be more easily organized online. We have also learned to be more tolerant of one another to accept the unavoidable limitations in ourselves, in our colleagues, in our significant others, and being reminded that our powers are limited. That life itself is limited, can help us to become more mindful of our priorities, and to be more aware of where we choose to invest our time.","We need to remember that life is about changing and growing as we deal with adversity. And we cannot really step twice in the same river, this pandemic is bringing about some lasting changes. And once it's over, life will not be the same as we had before. The best we can do is not to struggle with this fact but to embrace it and learn how we can make best use of this change. ","This pandemic is a real threat, which reminds us of our mortality. And this is something many people might not be quite prepared for. Research shows that when we are faced with a threat of death, or with some greater uncertainty, we might stop thinking critically and we might start behaving in more irrational ways. This pandemic might encourage further growth of black and white thinking, conspiracy theories, prejudice and social antagonism. ","What we need now is mindfulness to help us cope with our anxieties and to start taking our threats and problems for what they are instead of explaining them away. Instead of feeling upset, or sorry for ourselves, because we are not living in an ideal world, we can accept the complexity of life and of other people. Life can be ugly, terrifying and awful. But it can also be beautiful and amazing. And by acknowledging the bad stuff, we can start truly appreciating the great many positive things that are also happening each day. As the Dalai Lama says ""if in the morning you wake up and you’re alive, this is already so much to be grateful for"". And this pandemic reminds us of this simple wisdom. ","Let's treasure and let's appreciate the things that really nourish us, our relationships, our friends, our families, our enthusiasm at work and our sweet moments of idleness. There's time for great deeds and there's time for Netflix and chill. So being friendly, open and compassionate to ourselves can help us become more open and compassionate to others and in the end, to get through this challenging times.",Associate Professor,1
30-Jul-20,Chao,Female,Non-US,SC,Yes,"What we observe is that people have started reaching out to family and friends that they have not been in touch with for a long time. And so people might feel a stronger sense of connectedness. This observation is also consistent with some recent research findings showing that compared with before the pandemic, people during this pandemic actually feel more connected with the community. They also found that a stronger sense of community is associated with the ability to buffer them against experience of the stress. During the early stage of the pandemic, there were concerned that people might feel more isolated, they feel lonelier as a result of social distancing and social isolation. What some study have shown is that people actually acquire resilience during this pandemic, psychologically, and there were no drastic change in terms of people's experience of loneliness. If anything, people have a stronger sense of community connectedness with other people. That would be the potential positive change in terms of interpersonal domain. In terms of work domain, one observation is that in the past, usually we relied a lot on routine. And routines are something that are often unquestioned and unquestionable. People are just doing what they're doing, because that's how things have been; that's how things are like. We don't really ask questions about that. But with a pandemic, and with the change in work mode, people started asking questions like, is this essential? Is this necessary? Is this really a must? Is this travel a requirement? Do we have to travel to get this work done? People started asking questions that they might not have even considered asking before. And it helps to streamline some work processes. And some people actually found that to be more efficient in helping them to finish to get the work done. ","We need to accept the possibility that there is and will be a lot of uncertainty, we need to be able to adjust and adapt very quickly. Early on, there was still the feeling among people, that we're waiting for things to get back to normal. But what a lot of people started thinking and come to realize is that things might not get back to how it used to be. And people start to think about the possibility that there might be what some call a “new normal,” that we need to adapt and adjust to. At this time, with so much uncertainty about how things will unfold, what will happen, being able to be open to the possibility that there are uncertainties that we need to deal with is something important. Naturally, people want to have some sense of certainty. It feels like at this time of change, an important part of our mindset is to adjust and adapt, is to accept the fact that there could be a lot of uncertainties and that we need to handle and try to able to be adapted to deal with. ","The most salient one is about the possibility that this pandemic is actually exaggerating initial inequality in a community. We talk about positive changes that in order to benefit from the positive change, people need to be able to adapt and adjust very quickly to the changing situations, to the changing requirement of work or school. And in order to adapt and adjust what would be needed? It would be access to resources. So, if you have more resources, you might be better able to adjust and adapt. But if you have limited resources, it makes it difficult. For example, from the standpoint of schools, when the children can no longer attend school in person, some schools that have more resources are able to adjust and change very quickly they started offering classes online, whereas for other schools, they might not have the technical support and resources to do that to offer classes online. Then what happens to the students? And even if the school were able to offer online classes, are the children able to attend those online classes? It depends on the amount to current resources that they have access to. And adding to the complexity is that when parents no longer have work, or they might be working from home, this all tie into access to resources. People are talking about how this pandemic is exaggerating the initial inequality that the societies have. Whereas people who have more resources are more able in adapting to the changes, and people who have limited resources would be disadvantaged further, because of this rapid change. In addition to that, other layers of negative impact can also be psychological. Though we talk about positive change where people have a stronger sense of community, at the same time, we also see that there are people experiencing distress.","An important first step is the sense of awareness. We need to be aware of the fact that although some of us might be adapting and adjusting comfortably to these changes, there are people who are struggling when trying to adapt. It could be because they might have limited access to resources, they might have limited support in doing it. While some of us might be adapting comfortably, it might also be important to look around and see whether there are people that we can help and support and, of course, in an ideal world, on a community level, I think it's also important for a community as a whole, to be a community leader, be aware of the needs of people who might potentially be in need of additional support. And I think on the part of individuals, I think that it's also important to reach out for support when one needs it. ","We need to accept the possibility that things might not change back to how it used to be, there is potentially a “new normal” that we need to adapt and adjust to. We need to accept the fact that there could be a lot of uncertainty that we need to deal with and handle. Things might change so quickly; change by the day or by the minute or by the hour. And so we need to be able to adjust and adapt. And I think it's important to be aware of the fact that while some of us might be benefiting from the positive change, there are others who might be struggling in trying to adapt and adjust. It might be also a good time to reflect on how we might be able to contribute in helping not just ourselves to adjust and adapt, but help the community as a whole.",Associate Professor,1
12-Sep-20,Gross,Male,US,Non-SC,No,"One of the things that pandemic has done is to really shake up our patterns of work, social interaction, and leisure. Often, these are painful and difficult changes. But out of this chaos, and this alteration in our habitual modes of existence, and in these different domains, I think there are opportunities for really re-evaluating what gives us joy and meaning in our lives. And if we are able to take stock in what we've found has changed, that's actually led to greater sense of meaning and joy, I think there's opportunity for gain at the individual level. At a societal level, too, I think there are opportunities for benefit. In one place that we might see benefit, or something positive coming from this very difficult time is an appreciation, greater appreciation of the need for collaboration at transnational levels. This has always been a tension between the national and the transnational ever since the innovation of the nation state. And it's been very difficult for us to remember the importance of collaborative activity across nations and across cultures. And I think this is an opportunity to see that there are threats, many threats that we face as a species that really are best addressed at this collective level.  ","At the level of the individual, in and amidst the pain and difficulty of disruption, I think we need the wisdom to find the places where our behavior pattern changes have actually led to increase pleasure and joy and contact and meaning of what sources are of great value to us. And it's difficult, because I think we, as we live our lives, have many ideas or models for the kind of life we must lead or should lead. And I think having the wisdom to have a fresh perspective, and to attend to places where our long-standing images of how our lives should be led, or really at variance with what is giving us joy and pleasure and meaning. I think that if we can have that wisdom, we can build new patterns of living, that will be more satisfying for many more of us. At the level of the society, I think the wisdom that we'll need for capitalizing on this positive change potential is really just working against the many forces that push decision-making and power to the national level. So, I think, resisting those forces and maintaining a long-term view of the importance of transnational collaboration will be crucial.  ","I think the unifying theme there is probably the growing inequity. We are, as is well understood, are experiencing growing inequity in distribution of resources, across nations and cultures, and certainly within any given nation. And that represents, I think, a tremendous source of suffering, because so much of our sense of wellbeing derives from a comparison of how we're doing to how others are doing. And the greater the inequity, the greater the suffering.  ",We're looking to have individual and societal level structures that can support and sustain efforts to increase equity. And this is the classic trade off - intertemporal choice between short term apparent gain and long term much larger gain. And I think structures and practices that support a longer-term perspective with the appreciation of the greater equity will bring greater happiness for all of us are really going to be necessary to overcome this negative societal change.,"One of the places it's important to focus on is the emotions that we each have, as we encounter changes in our lives, loss for many of us, of health, even of life of loved ones. Certainly, loss of things that we care about. Sometimes you're replaceable, lost years of school, lost years of training, lost years or childhood, lost years of interaction with others. And I think being aware of those losses, is an important step to understanding that these negative emotions that are rightly generated are not destiny. We can, in fact, find ways to manage or regulate our emotions in productive ways, decreasing negative emotions through attentional practices and forms of cognitive regulation. And we can also increase positive emotions by finding joy and meaning in our interactions with others and in our pursuit of highly valued goals. ",Professor,2
14-Sep-20,Inayatullah,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"I have been running workshops and seminars with dozens of groups on their responses. And there's two things they tell me: one is workplace flexibility, second—wellbeing. Everyone says this is the part irrespective of what happens the next 10 years they wish to keep. ","The most important perspective, approach, is developing trust. In a world where trust is in deficit, you want to make trust your asset, and increase it, enhance it, demonstrate it and create it. ","I think it would be based on fear. The fear leads to a lack of epistemic agreement on what is real. And there's the rise of conspiracy theories, which lead to a rise of, I would say, deep racism throughout the world. So that would be the most negative thing I can see going on right now. ","So there's two aspects. One is really, you might say, new humanism. Which is, we don't see the world from our own ego, or nation state or our tribe, but the entire planet with Gaia, to its nature plus planet, and this is a practice we try to do every day. The second of that, of course, is solid science. We want this ethical, almost spiritual perspective, with solid science. Putting those two together, they become pathways forward. ","Certainly, in our scenario work we've done is, when it's difficult to find meaning and purpose in it. If you know Victor Frankl's work, those in extremely difficult situations, they do better when they have purpose. So we have one scenario called the Great Pause. If you're stuck and you can't get out, it's pausing, slowing down, breathing. Of course, finding a metaphor, or narrative in which this makes sense. You might feel like it was a prison, but you transform it to “here's my time for inner reflection.” So, you want to find a way to transform your current situation so that is purposeful. You find a way to find a metaphor that gives meaning. And then once the pause ends you have more energy to create the future you want. ",Professor,2
17-Sep-20,Passig,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"Most of the people think this is the end of the pandemic, in about a couple months, we're going to have a vaccine or something like that. But actually, we are just at the very initial stage of a very long crisis that might take between three to five years. But we know from previous kind of pandemics, that at the beginning, people tend to lose confidence in their leaders, they tend to be very aggressive towards other groups. And they tend to be melancholic about almost anything in their surrounding. But about 5 to 10 years after such a crisis, we know that people regain confidence, they are trying to restart the new thinking about their social paradigms.One of those consequences is that people will be much attentive to understand how connected we are as a species.They will understand how we are in a kind of symbiosis with each other, we are not just, you know, affiliated. Those kind of terms, affiliation, be part of a group or sharing will be probably old terms of understanding how we connect with each other. Our connections are much, much deeper, they go through very deep layers of existence and that consciousness will be a much more spread across very different kinds of social groups. ","There is an idea in quantum physics that says that particles are entangled with some other particles. The entanglement idea is that for each particle in this universe, there are other particles that are kind of connected in a symbiotic way. And whenever you do something on one particle, the other particle that is far away in different place in the universe is reacting as if you were acting on him or only it specifically. So the idea of entanglement is probably one of the sources of this social consciousness that is going to develop, the more we enter the 21st century. So if you wish, this is something which is fascinating if we are to experience it. What happened in the last century was a similar process. After the Spanish flu, we started developing that idea of globalization. And that was the main idea of the 20th century. And we achieved a lot of thing because of that paradigm: Combining forces, combining entities, combining nations, etc, in order to multiply a force of unity. But globalization is primitive stage of understanding how we are connected.The globalization paradigm is based on a voluntarily kind of set of mindset. If I want to be part of a group of, let's say, institutes or nations, then it's my decision to make. If I decide that it's not doing me any good, then I retreat and that's it. But that's not a paradigm that can avoid such a crisis. The World Health Organization was based exactly upon that idea that it's voluntarily kind of Institute and it didn't have any authority to influence the nations to act upon their guidelines. So we will be able to develop new institutes in the 21st century that will reflect the idea that we are really connected in a symbiotic way. And in those institutes, we will be given the authority to bring their decisions and their suggestions into play. Even though nations and other cultures will not accept those decisions, we will be giving them a lot of power to be able to institute their ideas. It looks and it sounds horrible, to say at this point, because we're not exactly attuned to an international institute that will force the local and the national entities to do whatever they want. Even though we have been trying to do this in the last century, but we are moving towards the next stage of the development of that paradigm. ","In the short term, which is in the next 5-10 years, we're going to see hate crimes skyrocketing. We are going to see unusual leadership that is going to take over a democracy.We're going to see leaders that are self-confident, that they will be able to do things that others are not able to do and we're going to see some characters that are going to be very colorful in the leadership area worldwide in different places, specifically in democracies.","We are a species that is evolving. And fortunately one of the mechanisms of evolution is a pandemic, and then generally speaking, the crises. And we have to be very patient to see how we evolve. Because evolving is not an easy process to go through. Most of the time, it hurts. Most of the time, people are not willing to change and to be very creative in new ways in order to survive. We need patience to go through these times, but humanity is evolving, and thank God, we have a crisis that is hitting us in the head to awake from previous ideas. ","If we are to learn something from the past and from previous pandemics, we know that whoever was organized in a very tight communities, and has a greater change chance to go in those times without the significant byproducts, because communal organization is something that can provide for the very individual person, provide the psychological umbrella, and financial assistance in times that person and individual needs that assistance. The national entities and institutions in those kinds of times have hard time understanding the genuine needs of individuals, and they have hard time acting as fast as possible in order to address those needs in an immediate way. The only organizational entities that are able to act very fast and really be attentive to genuine needs are our communities. And whoever is not part of the community, this is the time to be part of the community. And by community, I mean any type of community. But that community needs to be constantly in contact with each other and with the group. We have technologies, it's much easier to do. ",Associate Professor,1
18-Sep-20,Renn,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"There are three major changes that I can foresee as part of the consequences of the pandemic. Number one is that people feel that our societies are more vulnerable than they thought before. And then we need to invest more in societal resilience. Second, is a belief that a lot of people now have the feeling that much of what they've done in the past, like going to conferences, using a lot of airplanes, or doing a lot of traveling is not really necessary, when you look at the possibilities that virtual reality can actually offer to you, specifically in terms of conferencing services. And number three, I can also see that some people, not all of them, are now questioning our patterns of consumption, that they feel now that things like health and like harmony with family and solidarity are so important, that many of the other things that they have strived for, like more income or more consumption, is not as important for having a happy life. So those are the three major implications that I can see coming from the pandemic. ","There are three aspects that I would like to mention. The first one is people feel that they have the capacity to deal with major constraints and major challenges. That's not true for all people, that's very clear, but for many. The second, I think, what we can capitalize on, is the large amount of solidarity and assistance that has been given to those who needed it the most. And at least for my country, Germany, I can see that around 70% of the population has said in recent polls, that they felt that there is more coherence, more empathy among the people with respect to the coronavirus and its impact on human health. And that this kind of increased empathy is also something that have experienced themselves, or they have given it to others. Secondly, I think that the capacity to cope with the situations that are not as easy as the ones that they had faced before, and that they now are more resourceful in terms of dealing with these kinds of challenges. And thirdly, I think there is a capacity also, to endure, even our strict measures, if people feel that that is absolutely necessary, and that it's fair. So those two conditions are very important. They need to be seen as necessary, but also as fair, so that nobody is more to an advantage than somebody else.  ","Looking into the German situation, I can see that the pandemic has also increased the polarization in society and polarization in two different fields. One is that we have more violations of equity, so that people are very differently affected by the pandemic, and specifically, the poor and the less educated, less skilled, have much more to suffer than the other ones. And secondly, I think that we have seen a polarization in political views that several groups in society feel very much estranged from the political sphere. They may not feel the solidarity, but rather feel that they have been obliged to do things that they don't want to do, and that have radicalized, at least some of the people on the far left or the far right, but also in different other areas of society.  ","The first important element is that we keep on communicating with those that feel estranged or that feel alienated from the measures that they feel are repressive or even anti-democratic. And there are quite a few people that have had very hard consequences to suffer as specifically people in the manufacturing businesses partially and the entertainment business specifically, but also in all kinds of leisurely activities like astronomy, or conferencing or others where a lot of people meet. And I think it's very important that the solidarity that we have developed already, then extends to these kinds of people that suffer the most. And I think the second point is that in addition to communication, and to really given assistance to those that suffer most, we need to continue on this feeling of solidarity, and provide a political climate in which this kind of empathy and solidarity becomes a much more significant part of our social life.  ","In Germany, we have basically three different groups of people. One third went fairly well through the pandemic, because they were in a job position that was absolutely secured, and they could use home office for all the things that they need to do. So, they were in a very comfortable position. There's another third of population that coped well, but they had a harder time with it. There're, for example, small kids to take care of at the same time, or they could do only partially home office, or they were partially laid off from work, but then could be returned. So, all these people that gone through hardship, but coped with it very well. And then we have a little less than a third, that really suffered a lot and are still suffering. And I think the most important part is make sure that this last third that has suffered the most, will not bear all the costs of the pandemic. And that's something where we are all obliged to fight to programs to help them to give them financial aid, but also to give them the needed resources so that they can also feel more empowered to help themselves. ",Professor,2
22-Sep-20,Modis,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"For the first question, in which aspects of social life we might observe the most significant positive change? My answer is: the work environment. Working from home has proven far more feasible than originally thought. And it's here to stay, to a large extent anyway.","For the second question, the kind of wisdom people will need in order to work from home. My answer is familiarity with computers, teleconferencing, social media, and information technology in general. ","For the third question, which aspects of social life we might observe the most negative change? My answer is, again, the work environment. And I'm not being witty here. I mean it, because working from home has considerable negative aspects to it, as some of you have found out. There's an ancient Greek saying “There's nothing bad without something good in it.” And a modern Greek philosopher enhanced this saying by adding “and good and bad always come in the same amount.” One needs to ponder this for a while to fully appreciate this validity.  ","For the fourth question, what kind of wisdom people will need to deal with the negative aspects of working from home? My answer is: personal development in the direction of peace of mind, tolerance, internal calmness, with such activities as meditation, yoga, physical exercises, and even praying, depending on one's predilection. ","For the fifth question, which piece of advice is important to give people now to help them make it to the pandemic, my answer is  - try to live in the present and stop putting all his or her hopes on the vaccine. The vaccine may well come someday, and if not, effective meditation will certainly be eventually developed. But by that time, society will have proven that they can handle the virus. The vaccine, or the effective meditation was put on in the final touches on the society's winning the battle against COVID-19. ",Professor Emeritus/Emerita/Retired,3
24-Sep-20,Christakis,Male,US,SC,No,"What the pandemic is doing is exploiting some very deep and fundamental aspects of human nature. We humans evolved to live in groups in very particular ways. And in some ways, you could even argue that the spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas. In other words, I come near you in order to benefit from the opportunity for social learning, and teaching, or we assemble ourselves in groups in order to be able to cooperate, for example, and achieve benefits as a group we couldn't as individuals. And these contagious pathogens have evolved to take into account the kind of network structure that we have, and the kind of social behaviors that we manifest. So if we didn't live socially, there'd be no opportunity for the germ to spread from me to you. These germs that we're facing, the pandemic we're facing right now, is exploiting that and attacking us, if you think about it, at our most fundamental humanity, at the fact that we are living as social animals. And ironically, therefore, in order to combat the pathogen, we have to abandon a whole set of behaviors that ordinarily are very normal to us, like spending time with our friends, or touching each other, consoling each other physically, for example, living socially in general. So we have to spread physically apart. But there are some things that the germ does not take away from us that are equally social and important and that we can use to combat the pathogen. And one of those things is that we can band together, to work together, to stay physically apart, for example. And another example is that we benefit from our capacity for cumulative culture, we benefit from the capacity that we have over millennia acquired information which we transmit about how to deal with pandemics. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, we don't need to needlessly die. Because we're rediscovering how to deal with a deadly germ, we can open up a book, or look online or consult an expert, all of those activities, opening up a book looking online consulting an expert, our social learning, and teaching and that is a key fundamental aspect of our species. What the epidemic is highlighted, the positive things that it's highlighted, is this kind of banding together and helping each other by a teaching. One example of that is also our very capacity to develop drugs and vaccines to develop pharmaceutical interventions to fight this germ, which other animals can’t do. And that's another wonderful quality that we have.","I'm dispositionally a very optimistic person. And I have a very optimistic perspective on our species. I think we're pretty remarkable species. And in ""Blueprint: The evolutionary origins of a good society"" , the title says its all. I think we evolved to have a good society with very wonderful qualities. I would say that the epidemic has highlighted our ability to collaborate to work together. And, and we evolved to do this thing, and we do it typically when we're threatened. And here, we're threatened by a pathogen. I think that survival instinct is important, but in addition to that I think our kind of goodwill. Now, I should say, because some people listening to this will rightly observe that, in times of deadly pandemics, people can also be horribly violent and brutal and cruel to each other. We have many examples of this, during the outbreaks of bubonic plague in Medieval Europe, during a smallpox outbreaks, that of course, when the when the Conquistadores and the other settlers of the of the New World, you know, brought smallpox here, it decimated the native populations. We know of many examples of people that act abysmally, when there's catastrophes, there's no doubt about that. And I don't want to be seen as minimizing that, but equally, we are prone to these wonderful qualities. And generally, I would argue, that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. There is more good in human beings than there is bad, at least that's my belief.","Many people have highlighted things like increasing loneliness, and which is true. And many children being out of school will experience adverse childhood events.  There's an epidemic of this even in the United States right now, of children whose parents get divorced or die, or live in poverty, many of our children are harmed by, unfortunately, even though they live in a rich country like ours, just by being children. And the pandemic has no doubt exacerbated this. It's killing people. It's stressing people out people lose their jobs, they suffer, their children suffer. There is, of course, the lockdown measures have led to an epidemic of loneliness, there's been a rise in intimate partner violence, because people are stuck at home, their police are less able to respond. So there's a lot of bad stuff that has happened as a result of the pandemic. There's no doubt about it. I mean, you have to understand that something very unusual in the life of our species has happened, it happened to have happened in 2020 when we're alive, it happens every 50 or 100 years. It just happens to be happening now, which is that a new serious pathogen is being introduced into our species and this germ SARS CoV-2 is going to circulate among us forever now, and it's going to do what it wants. There's some debate about whether viruses are living, but for the sake of argument, it's acting like a living thing. And it's had an ecological release. We're a wholly susceptible population. It's like releasing rats on an isolated island. And then they just decimate the local wildlife because that's what they do. That's what this germ is going to do. It's just going to move among us. It has its own will to survive, and it's just gonna kill us, until it ends.","I don't think I have anything unusual to say about that, except, the classic ""Do unto others, as you wish would have others do unto you."" I think a kind of Zen-like perception on our common humanity is required. I think cultivating in yourself a kind of sense of concern for other people is very important. It's very tempting to be selfish when there is a catastrophe and I think that's something that one needs to use will to combat. And we all have these natural tendencies to, with few exceptions, great majority of people have these natural tendencies to be nice. And I think sort of reflection on that, and a kind of desire to be a good guy right now is necessary and admirable. And frankly, it's good for you too. It's not just that you're being altruistic for altruism sake. There is good evidence that this these types of sensibilities rebound back to you. First of all, you feel better about yourself, and then others also treat you better. So, everyone benefits when people you know, act positively. There's that whole thing about mask wearing, my mask protects you, and your mask protects me. So, when I wear a mask it cultivates a sensibility in those around me that this is normative and beneficial behavior. Incidentally, is a kind of interesting footnote and kind of epidemiological detail that might interest some of your listeners, there's some intriguing evidence from experiments that have been done that one of the ways that masks help is that when I wear a mask, it makes you stay further away from me. So, one of the behavioral impacts is not just that it stops me from inhaling what you exhale, my mask wearing is a signal that I take this seriously. So, you stay away. And they did these experiments where they got people to, randomly assign them, to wait in lines and wear a mask or not wear a mask. And then had a hidden observer track, how far away did people stay in line. And they found that when I was wearing a mask, people stood farther away from me than when I wasn't, for example. ","As I discussed in ""Apollo's Arrow,"" this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. So I don't have any kind of psychological or philosophical wisdom, I just have some epidemiological wisdom, which is we're not at the beginning of the end, we're not even at the end of the beginning, frankly. We're still at the beginning of the beginning of this pandemic! And it's sad news. I mean, probably in the United States, in North America, probably no more than 4 or 5% of people have ever been exposed to this pathogen. And in the end, about 40% of the planet will be exposed. So I think we have many hundreds of thousands of deaths to go. And even if we get a vaccine, which I think is likely, but not certain, in the early part of 2021, if we invent it. We still have to manufacture, distribute, and accept the vaccine. We have to persuade people to take it and at least the United States, we've done such an abysmal job in maintaining the credibility of public health officials, that I'm very worried that people won't believe the officials when they say that the vaccine is safe. And of course, if there are any complications, those will be breathlessly reported by the media. And so people will lose confidence. So  even if a vaccine is invented by early 2021, it'll take at least a year before we could successfully roll it out. And by there, the germ is still spreading. So the germ is going to keep spreading for a while. We're gonna have multiple waves of it. And I just think it's important we accept that unfortunate reality. ",Professor,2
29-Sep-20,Carstensen,Female,US,Non-SC,No,"My hope is that one positive change that can come about because of the pandemic is that people will be better able to challenge and see some of the tacit assumptions that they make about life. The certainty with which we predict that our lives will remain stable, the certainty that we will have health and financial security and contact with our loved ones. And by recognizing the fragility of these aspects of our lives, they will come to have greater importance and greater value.","In order to really benefit from the challenges that this pandemic has presented, we will need to remember these experiences. We will need to remember what it was like to step outside of our culture and look inward. To the extent that we forget, and we simply go back to the way that our lives were lived before, we will lose the lessons that we have, hopefully, been taught during this challenging time. ","I fear that the pandemic has the potential to raise the sense of alienation from others and even a sense of fear of others. That we will keep our distance, so to speak, which we're being told to do every day, but to allow that to create a psychological distance between us as individuals and the people who live in our communities that we see every day. We need to connect with others around these times and... It would be a terrible shame if instead we distanced ourselves, and even worse, came to dislike and fear others.","To me, recognition of the fragility of life. And certainly, the COVID pandemic is reminding us of that. It's really one of the greatest gifts that we have, as humans. That is, the abilities that we have. To our knowledge, we are the only species that is aware of our mortality throughout virtually all of our lives. And this appreciation for fragility contributes to a concern for the world, as we know it. It allows us to see what's important and what's not important. And it turns out, most of the things we worry about in life are not important. And so to the extent that we can keep that sense of that awareness, of fragility of ourselves and others around us, I think we will be able to capitalize on these insights and be able to live our lives more mindfully, aware that the way that we use time is important, that we shouldn't waste time, that we need to savor the best aspects of life and let the negative aspects of life go. ","I am reluctant to label any words that I have as wise. I do believe that a perspective that often comes with age is one that helps people through tough times. And the that insight is that a bad times pass. This, too, will pass. And maybe more importantly, we recognize the good times pass, too. And so we should find strength in the knowledge that the toughest times will recede. And we should focus more than ever and savor more, the really good times in life because they are also fleeting, and thus precious. ",Professor,2
6-Oct-20,Park,Female,US,SC,Yes,"Well, first of all, I have to say that, frankly, we may not see any changes whatsoever in the in the long run, or even in the medium run, because the people tend to kind of revert to their baseline pretty quickly after major positive and major negative events, for the most part. But on a more hopeful note, if we do see something positive, perhaps it will be that we recognize that we are more adaptable than we have often thought of ourselves. And in this time of the pandemic, people have done a lot of amazingly creative things to meet needs that were unable to be met in the usual ways, and have been remarkably adaptable to a whole new world. And so perhaps some of that sense of being more resilient and adaptable will persist. Another thing that may have happened is that we've had a realization of how interconnected the world is that people and places around the globe are connected. And perhaps this will have even some hopeful, positive effects on our ability to manage climate change. Because of the interconnectedness of the world, you know, what happened in China affects the whole world, what happens in different parts of our own society affect an entire society.   ","I suppose that having an ability to be self - reflective, and to keep in mind the sorts of things that people have gone through is part of what might help people to capitalize on this positive change.   ","In our own data, as well as the data of others, what I've been seeing is a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty and the sort of common in people turning more conservative, people being more [and I mean, that in the sense of the sort of terror management circle the wagons] being concerned with your own in group and less concerned with the welfare of others. It's a sort of natural tendency when people have scarce resources or feel afraid and see more of that which in some ways does come out politically. And another, maybe connected place where we're seeing some potential negative longer term effects are in people's willingness or ability to trust in science. Sometimes I think that we may have lost a couple thousand years of human progress in the way that the misinformation and lack of information and lack of respect for scientific ways of knowing have been brought about as a result of this pandemic and the polarization of it. And so that's something that I am actually quite concerned about, as are many other people.","First of all, maybe having compassion for others. We have certainly seen lots of places around the world where people have had compassion and help others through the pandemic. And hopefully, that's a countervailing force that will take away some of the the rough edges of that conservatism. And having diverse perspectives, foresight, long-term thinking, those sorts of aspects of wisdom are clearly going to be needed, and hopefully, not in short supply, to help people as the world returns to some new normal, after we are past the pandemic. ","What I would say is that discernment process, the old, figuring out what you can change, figuring out what you have to just accept. We've seen in our data, again, with several of the COVID studies I'm involved with it, that there are a lot of ways that people can be a agentic and change their situations for the better. As well as having to accept, having to note,  nobody wanted this, nobody likes all the restrictions on their behavior, and movement and so on. Just a lot of acceptance, a lot of things that people need to do that they didn't want to do, but being able to sort of lean into that. So that's really a process of discernment, which I think is kind of the core of wisdom. And maybe getting that practice, through this pandemic will have made people more wise and resilient. That's my hope anyway. ",Professor,2
7-Oct-20,Kennedy,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"I think there's the potential for renewed enthusiasm about the importance of face-to-face meetings. When I'm talking with colleagues and students, I get a sense that they really miss in person trust building and relationships and interactions. And so, I think there's the chance for renewed vigor with those.  ","Now, the wisdom that we need, I think, is discernment. It's really easy to tell narratives of all travel is bad, or all travel is good for that matter. And so, I think, we really need start having more complex conversations that say: yeah, you probably don't need to jet across the ocean to deliver a document. But it's actually really valuable to travel to experience new cultures or meet family or build trusted research collaborations.  ","Negative outcome I worry a lot about is the divergence between different groups in society. I worry a lot about the way that this pandemic has created worlds in which there are those of us who are privileged who can work from home, who can control our risk, who have lots of medical support, versus those who are more exposed to work in in central roles in the front lines, and who don't have that ability to work from home, who sometimes are in much more financially precarious positions, and historically have often not been granted the same kinds of powers in society. And so I'm really worried about what economists have talked about as the case-shaped recovery, right, the splitting between the rich and the poor. But not just in economics, in every facet of our lives, in terms of who has power, who has voice, who has a risk exposure, all of those elements.  ","The wisdom there is all about empathy, and compassion, it's about realizing that my lived experience is not the same as yours, and that there are systematic contributors to the differential ways that we experience life. And so we need empathy and compassion, to help build social systems that are more accessible and equitable and inclusive.  ","It's hard not to point to compassion, again, the importance of being good to yourself and those around you during these really remarkable times and remembering that the world that we've built, the kinds of technical infrastructures that make it so that we have to keep working during these abnormal times and try to push the same level of productivity. These are technical infrastructures that are exerting a lot of control over our lives. And so I think being compassionate with ourselves, with each other, is so critically important. I'm reminded of something that was told recently about how the pandemic has really brought out the fact that this is a time when all of us need some slack and no one has slack to give. And so, I think, if we can find that kind of compassion and those ways of giving other people slack when we all desperately need it, that will be helpful. ",Assistant Professor,1
9-Oct-20,Fancourt,Female,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"I'm hoping that we're going to see a lot more community engagement from individuals after this pandemic. Early on in the process, we saw a lot of people joining mutual aid groups or other kinds of voluntary associations, people helping their neighbors offering to go and get food or medications for them, people actually started to speak much more to those people who live around them. And I think this is an opportunity for us to build on as we move beyond this pandemic. ","I think it's really crucial as this pandemic continues that we try and maintain a sense of social cohesion. We saw that very strongly early on in the pandemic. But over the last few months, there started to be a lot more social fragmentation within different societies and certain countries, such as the UK, starting to be more blame about the virus, or more realization of the differences between different social groups' experiences. But it's really crucial that we try and overcome this if we want to try and preserve that community spirit moving forwards. ","In the UK, we've certainly started to see less and less trust of the government and people really not actually placing as much confidence in the rules they're coming up with and statements they're making. And this has consequences beyond the pandemic, as well as. We might start to have less respect for that institution. And this is quite concerning moving forwards for what that means for how we function as a democracy. ","I think it's going to be really important that people feel they've got a role to play that they feel like they're not just dependent on higher authorities to make statements or to define rules, but they feel that they can affect change themselves at local levels. So I think there'll be a huge role for community groups, voluntary associations, and grassroots organizations so that people feel that they can make a difference from the ground up. ","I think it's important for people to identify what factors of their lives mean the most of them are meant the most to them before the pandemic, and to almost use this to reprioritize how they live as we move forward. For some people, that might have been a greater appreciation of the value of family or friends. For others, it might be about hobbies, or leisure activities that give them a sense of purpose or help them to cope. And for other people, it might also be that their work has changed in terms of its importance to them. And I think people are going to have to think very carefully about these priorities and their lives in order to redefine what things they focus on and prioritize as we move forwards. ",Associate Professor,1
9-Oct-20,Pietromonaco,Female,US,SC,No,"One aspect of social life that is clearly impacted by the current pandemic is couples’ relationships. As a result of quarantines and social distancing, married and cohabiting couples are spending more time in the same space; often, while they're facing significant stress from an array of problems, such as financial losses, changes in their jobs or unemployment, lack of daycare and school closures and the daily stress of falling precautions to avoid contracting the virus. Some couples may be resilient in the face of these significant stressors and benefit from the opportunity to spend more time together, to work together, to solve problems, and to support each other. And by facing adversity together, their relationships may become even stronger in the long term. We know from a large body of research, that having supportive, well-functioning close relationships is closely tied to better emotional and physical health. And so an additional positive impact is that couples who are able to be resilient over time also may do better in terms of their health, and general wellbeing.","People will need wisdom about how to effectively communicate with their partner, especially about conflicts, as well as how to be supportive and responsive. Effective communication means avoiding being hostile and critical, giving your partner the benefit of the doubt when mistakes are made, and directly engaging in problem solving together as a team, with both partners being motivated and invested in improving the situation and willing to compromise when needed. Providing effective support means listening attentively to partner's concerns and being responsive to and understanding your partner's needs. For some partners, emotional support and comfort may be most helpful. Whereas for other partners providing concrete practical support may be most helpful. The pandemic also may open opportunities to expand and strengthen relationships not only through effective communication and support, but also by providing opportunities to spend more time together, to do enjoyable activities together, like playing a relaxing game or sharing happy memories. Because these types of activities build closest and allow for growth in a relationship. ","I just suggested that some couples will capitalize on opportunities for growth in their relationships. But these are likely to be couples who are not particularly economically or socially vulnerable. We know from many research studies that when people are faced with stress that comes from outside the relationship, such as financial or job stress, they're more likely to interact with their partner in ways that are potentially damaging to the relationship. They're more likely to be overly critical, or argue, to blame their partner to find it harder to listen to their partner's concerns and understand their partner's perspective. And over time, they may become less satisfied with their relationship and may even break up. So couples who are most vulnerable, those facing the most severe economic hardship, also may suffer the most damage to their relationships over the long term. ","There is tremendous variability in how the pandemic is affecting couples’ relationships, and how it may continue to do so even after the crisis ends. Couples who are struggling the most, who have major financial concerns have other vulnerable abilities such as emotional or physical illnesses, who have young children at home, or who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups, who are more likely to face severe stress from the pandemic, as well as stress from systemic inequality and discrimination are at the most risk for these couples. The wisdom will come initially from a societal effort to put in place social policies that will alleviate some of the burden and increase the likelihood that couples can effectively communicate and support each other. Couples who are not as vulnerable will do best if they practice communicating constructively, need a supportive caring partner, and engaging in positive enjoyable activities with their partner. ","Realize that stress makes it harder for everyone to talk about problems in constructive relationship protecting ways and so it is especially important to give partners the benefit of the doubt rather than blame them and to keep in mind that the pandemic, not your relationship or your partner, is likely the primary cause of many problems people are experiencing and that eventually, the crisis will be over. And because supportive close relationships are closely tied to health, doing what you can to strengthen your relationship during this challenging time is also making an investment in your and your partner's longer term emotional and physical health.",Professor Emeritus/Emerita/Retired,3
12-Oct-20,Pentland,Male,US,Non-SC,No,"I think the biggest change will be where people will look to their community rather than the central government, or sort of the big guys. Help comes from people nearby and the people you know, not necessarily big systems and society. ","Perhaps, the biggest problem in our society is just the lack of trust in institutions. Trust, which is different than reliability, seems to come mostly from working with people, from actually interacting and knowing that they have your back. So the way to rebuild trust and make society work again, is to start working with the people around you to build back. ","I think people are beginning to realize that all of the media are driving craziness. They're all driven by cliques. Not just Facebook, The New York Times, as well. They're all just trying to make us crazy. And I think that we ought to do something about that. ","Well, I think the way we think about news, about information, will undergo a big change. I think that probably, hopefully, much more local conversations will take its place, where you can get a feel for what's really happening on the ground around you, from people who you know, who don't make money by making you crazy. But we'll see, won’t we? ","I think people need to try and keep in mind that this isn't as bad as 1918. It's not as bad as 1930. And it's not even as bad or it's about as bad as 1960. People don't think of 1960 as bad. But the flu then was a similar sort of death rates. And we were in the middle or the beginning of the Cold War. For instance, when I went to school, we had to practice getting under our desks, because that way we would live through the nuclear flash. Right? I mean, we made it through that. We passed the Civil Rights Act. We did a number of positive things. And I think we can probably do that again.",Professor,2
13-Oct-20,Hertwig,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,No,"Well, let me first say that, as we all know, predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. And another important insight that we should keep in mind is that nothing is per se, only positive or only negative. A lot of these things have unintended consequences, and they can be negative and positive. So, in answering your question, I think what the pandemic will do, it will work as a catalyst for a stronger digitalization, the impact of digital technologies on our life. And that is, in my view, going to have major consequences, of which I hope most are positive. It will affect the way we educated. It will affect the way we live, where we live, in cities or on the countryside. It will affect the way we work, our working hours, it will affect the way we shop, it will affect the way we interact with each other. These are going to be major changes. That will be my prediction. ","I would say two things. One is to have a good attitude of an experimenter, things will be different. And we need to experiment and we look at the consequences of our behavior and how it interacts with the world and act accordingly or choose accordingly. And the other one is the wisdom to discern between the good and the bad consequences of the impact of digitalization on our lives.","I think, unfortunately, the most notable difference that I fear is going to occur is an increase in inequality. I think that as a consequence of this pandemic, certain jobs will disappear. The importance of education will increase and some people in the way we educate now will be left behind. We will also see differences, of course, between countries. So, I think that both within our countries individually, but also globally, we will see, unfortunately, a real increase in inequality. ","Here I actually think I would not expect that the solution lies in the behavior of the individual. But, I think here society and institutions are particularly important and I think they have to provide the foundation, the scaffolding for coping with these inequalities. ","Here would just say one word: care. And with care, I mean care about ourselves. That means exercise, eat good food, think about what you really like and enjoy and do it. But also, care about other people. Care about other people, care about your family, care about your friends, help where you can without jeopardizing your safety. Helping other people, it's also something that makes us feel good, and is good for wellbeing. So, care.",Professor,2
13-Oct-20,Norton,Male,US,SC,No,"One of the things that I think the pandemic has really highlighted even more than it was already being highlighted is inequality, not just income but in health outcomes. If you look at the people who are most affected by COVID, it's older people, it's people with pre-existing health conditions, it's lower income people, all people who are vulnerable in one way or another. And the pandemic sort of throws that into stark relief, even though we're aware of it, now we can really see how this plays out in the health domain. My hope is that people will see inequality in a different way than they were seeing it before and hopefully be more motivated to do something about it. ","We've seen in our research for 10 years now that people are pretty unaware of inequality. They're aware that things aren't equal, but they're often really not aware of the extent of inequality. And we've been looking for ways to help people understand the extent of inequality, so that they might be more motivated to do something about it. I think when these unfortunate events happen, but they show us the world as it really is, the goal is that that knowledge will then help people behave differently going forward and think differently about the distribution of things, not just money, and not just wealth, but health and life and things that we really hold dear. ","I think this is going to vary a lot by country-to-country and by city-to-city and even by neighborhood to neighborhood. But, the role of trust in everyday life, I think, has taken a big hit. Both trust in big institutions like government and health agencies across the world, but also local trust in your local governments, and even in your neighbors and in your communities. Because we've been so isolated, and because we got hit by such a negative, external blow, it's hard to trust anymore. When things are going so badly, it's hard to know that you could ever trust again a big organization or even the people in your community. So there is, I think, a real worry, that that trust won't rebound a little bit so that we can have some faith in institutions and have some faith in our communities as we move forward. ","Trust is such a funny word because we know it's so important. Everyone would say trust is important in government and in your relationships and things like that. But, it also often feels nebulous. What does it mean to trust somebody or not trust somebody? My sense is that trust has been so broken that it will take quite some time and a lot of actions to build it back up. So you'll need to see that people in your community can be trusted, for example, to take care of your health by taking care of their own health. And you'll need to see that institutions can actually deliver on the promises that they have been supposed to be delivering on. And that's going to take some time and also some understanding in order to build it back up. ","Another thing that we've been working on for quite some time is the role of rituals in people's everyday lives. I don't mean rituals, like religious ceremonies, although those help to. But I mean little rituals that we all have with our romantic partners and in our families and with our co-workers. And those all got really disrupted during COVID, for a million different reasons, because our lives got turned upside down. And we've been looking, actually, to see at when people are developing new rituals and new routines in life, how that can help them deal with the stress of what's happening a little bit more. For example, parents who develop new rituals with their young children around mask wearing and hand washing feel better about their parenting because they they're taking control, and they're engaging in rituals with their kids. By rituals, by the way, I mean, first the bunny says something and then we read this other book. I don't mean rituals in a scary way. But these little rituals that people bring on board with grief, for example. We can show that they actually really can help you cope with these issues. They can't solve them, but they can help people cope with them. ",Professor,2
14-Oct-20,Zacks,Male,US,Non-SC,No,"I think one thing the pandemic has done is broken some habits. One of those that's striking to me is business travel. Lots of us had all these trips scheduled in February and March that just disappeared. And this is no doubt induce some social and collaboration costs, but also has had real benefits for families and for the environment, reducing our carbon footprint. And I think we should take advantage of that lesson. ","Here, I think, history should lead us to be pessimistic. When a crisis hits, we often have this feeling that everything has changed in some domain and that it's going to stick forever. But history tells us that often the crisis ends, and things snap back. So, I think the big challenge is to take new habits that we discovered to be adaptive as a result of a crisis and make them permanent. And to avoid being seduced by habit-driven behavior that is from pre-crisis that we don't want to go back to when that's more adaptive. ","I'd start by saying that I think the big obvious negative consequences are social and psychopathological. And these are not to be neglected. But they're also not so much an area that I have expertise in. One issue, which I don't think is as important, but I think is pretty interesting and is of some importance concerns episodic memory. And the issue here is that we know that differentiating context is super important for burning in effective, episodic and autobiographical memories. And our normal existence offers a bunch of contextual cues that have been eliminated by living on zoom. So, in my normal life, I might teach a class and then walk from one physical location to another and have a meeting, and then ride my bike across town for a lunch or another meeting. Now, I go from zoom meeting to zoom meeting, as do we all. And lots of folks have told me that they feel like one event just blends into the other, blends in together in their memory. And I worry that we may wind up with a kind of collective fog in our memories for these couple of years. ","My advice is to cheat. And what I mean is use external aides to support your memory. We're lucky in this regard that we do so much on email, because if you save your emails that provides an ongoing record. But we can also take notes, we can make recordings, we can take pictures. I also think we can do some things to increase the contextual cues in our ongoing days. So if you're just getting up from the computer, which is good for lots and lots of reasons, you know, taking a walk, getting out making a cup of tea... Breaking up your day in that way can help boost the contextual segregation of memories. ","I wish I had a lot of wisdom here. And I'm just speaking, not as a psychologist, but just as a person. And speaking as a person, what I would say is, this is a time for all of us to have a lot of grace, for ourselves and for our friends, and family and colleagues. I also think it's important in the midst of all the horrors that this pandemic brings to take advantage of some of the silver linings. We have more quiet moments and it's worth appreciating those. We have maybe a little more opportunity to get outside, and I think that getting outside has lots of benefits. ",Professor,2
3-Nov-20,Lerner,Female,US,SC,No,"Sociologists, political scientists, behavioral scientists have recently written about the decline of social capital. And probably the most famous book on this is Bob Putnam's book ""Bowling Alone."" And, in a sense, in recent decades we've become a kind of hyper individualistic society, in the United States, even more so than we've ever been. Where, we listen to our own music, we individualize everything, and even when we're on public transportation, we're tuned in for our own podcasts, our own music, etc. So there has been this real decline in social capital, where we don't know our neighbors as much, we're not in clubs with them, we're not in bowling leagues. And so I think a positive benefit that is coming already, and will, I hope, continue out of the pandemic, is the recognition of how valuable community is. As the basic building block of social capital, many people are now learning who their neighbors are, even though they didn't know their neighbors before, because we've discovered that we need them. And people who are in many different social clubs, social support groups, community organizations are doing better in this pandemic, because they are receiving help. There are neighbors delivering groceries to elderly people, or people with chronic disease, that sort of thing. We're learning that this kind of maximalist individualism isn't necessarily the best way to be. That, in fact, we are better when we live within rich layers of community and social networks. ","Certainly perspective-taking, something that you've written about. Because we are at, we're in such a fractured time in our society, we really can't continue like this. We need to be able to think about people who are in different shoes, and in different positions. For example, I was just listening to the radio today and hearing about an African-American man who lives in a neighborhood in Boston called Dorchester. And he happens to be voting for Trump. And he was saying he's doing that. Because under recent democratic presidential administrations, there was mass incarceration of African American men. And this is the kind of thing where I think a lot of liberals would tend to overgeneralize and think: ""ah, someone's African American, they're probably a Democrat."" While that might be true, statistically, we have to remember that people have individual experiences. And we need to try to take these diverse perspectives, to understand what's meaningful to different people, and so many liberals that I know condemn Trump voters, and think of them as sort-of subhuman. But we are all human. And we all are going to need to continue to live in this country together. That's what democracy requires. And part of doing that is understanding other people's perspectives. And it's not necessarily fun work, to think about other views, because we want to... It feels good to think that we're the right person, the right way of looking at it. But I think we do need to try to understand that people have real reasons why they vote the way they do. And some of them might be thoughtless, but some of them are quite thoughtful. So as we try to heal these divides, and kind of improve the fabric, the social fabric, going forward, because we all do need each other, clearly, we're not going to get rid of this pandemic, unless we cooperate, I think perspective-taking is a really important piece of wisdom. ","This is a really hard question for me, because I think that there are so many significant negative aspects. Being the mother of a teenager, I can see how disillusioning it is for children to see the mishandling by government of this crisis. And I think that will have lasting effects. If we handle it the right way, as parents and in schools, this can be an energizing experience for a lot of young people, but I think it also will have lasting wounds of divisiveness, and disillusionment. I think we need to really work hard, ideally with a new administration, to help people believe again in government. That the people we vote for actually will represent us, keep us safe, not tell lies. And that's one of I think, the most negative devastating effects of this pandemic. I think probably the most devastating effect is the deaths and disease and suffering. Because, you know, there's nothing worse than that. And so I don't want to leave that unnoticed. Then in terms of other social aspects, I think the pandemic has been a great amplifier of existing fault lines. And so the divisions between rich and poor, between elites and non-elites has really been amplified. So, there are people like me, who get to work at home in the comfort of my WiFi-enabled house, and then there are people who have lost their livelihoods, because they were in the service sector, and those services are no longer being offered during the pandemic. Or a variety of other kinds of jobs that have gone by the wayside during the pandemic. And then, of course, differences in access to healthcare. And then the inherent biases within the healthcare system mean that African-American individuals have been dying at much higher rates than they should be relative to their representation within the population. So, a really frightening amplifier of our fault lines, of our weaknesses in society, that I can only hope that those of us who are in a position to take note of and make changes on will, that this will ultimately catalyze change. ","Well, for one thing, and I don't know if this fits your definition of wisdom, but I think that an openness to learning is certainly needed. And so in this class, I just taught with 68 executive level people from around the world we had generals, military generals, from Western Africa, we had police chiefs, from here in the United States, we had diplomats from around the world -- a really diverse group. And we systematically went through a lot of data on bias. Looking at, for example, randomized field experiments in hiring and discrimination that takes place at the level of resume screening. And, even though we had people from across the political spectrum, and from many different countries, and different sectors, we all were able in this group, to agree on what the facts revealed about systematic biases in many different gateways in life, such as just trying to get a job, just trying to get an interview, just trying to get into graduate school, that sort of thing. And so, certainly one factor is a willingness to learn. One of the studies that's particularly compelling to me is one showing that faculty at elite universities in the United States are more likely to respond to email messages from prospective graduate students whose race or ethnicity and gender matches their own. That homophily, as we call it, or in-group bias means that we have this tendency to want to hear from, recruit, mentor little ""mini-Mes"", who look like us. And to see that data is very compelling because it comes from people who are usually considered relatively more open-minded -- professors at universities. And yet any of us can have that ""mini-Me"" tendency. So, in so many ways, I think we need to be willing to learn. We also need to be able to tolerate difference. And so, for example, I have a little cottage in a more rural part of Massachusetts then here in the Harvard Square area and my neighbors support the opposite political party from my own, and we completely disagree on everything politically. But he waters my lawn and we are great fans of his dog. And we have managed to get along with communal shared lawns and communal shared property, more generally a communally-shared pool, and there is a way to do that and to model that for our children, to allow for there to be difference. We won't allow for discrimination. We won't allow for anything like hate speech, we absolutely draw a line on anything like that. We would never tolerate any outward racism or any kind of discrimination, but we can coexist and share along with people who differ from us. We have to have that commitment to live with difference. ","So, again, it's very hard to come up with one piece of wisdom, I think there are many things. But there is certainly a lot of science behind the practice of gratitude. And gratitude has, I think, two key benefits. One is that when we do things like make a ""gratitude list"" each day, it enables us to psychologically feel like our bucket is full, and that we've taken stock of what we have. And even if all we have is that we can stand up and walk around, we're not confined to a chair, or something like that, it has a resilience building quality for ourselves. And then the second key benefit of gratitude is that when we are in a grateful state, it triggers a cascade of benefits that also affect others. So, when we're in a grateful state, we're more likely to help others and to feel predisposed to giving assistance to others. It also predisposes a sense of impatience, so that we don't make mistakes where we grab something less than is ideal just to get it now, as opposed to waiting for something better. Our research shows that we are more financially patient and more therefore willing to save money, for example. And so, in sum, I would say -- cultivate gratitude. Emotions give us many benefits, they are they help us have adaptive responses to life. And in this case, gratitude is my favorite emotion because it confers benefits to ourselves and benefits to others. ",Professor,2
9-Nov-20,Hong,Female,Non-US,SC,No,"I think in response to the pandemic, you see that many people work together, cooperate together in order to prevent and protect themselves from the COVID-19. And indeed, what we find is that, for example, in some of the countries, for example, in mainland China, we have data to show that people become more... higher, they'll hold higher identification with the nation. And also actually people who hold higher national identity engage more in preventive behaviors. So we see a reciprocal effect in terms of having higher national identity, they're more likely to engage in preventive behaviors, and the more they engage in preventive behavior, the higher they become, the higher they identify with the nation. So we saw that in China, and I think there are some data coming out of New Zealand as well. But you know, other places might not necessarily be the same. But what we find so far is: Higher national identity is related to higher preventive behaviors towards COVID-19. So I think that might suggest that, in order to prevent the disease, people cooperate more. People are more likely to help out each other, and as a result increase the cohesion of the group.",,"On the one hand, it's nice to have a higher group cohesion. But I also can see a downside of it if it's too extreme. So if you are so nationalistic in the sense that you only favor your in-group, but not, I mean, wanting to help our-group. Actually, this is a classic phenomenon when there is a lot of disease around or there is a high probability of contracting infectious disease many groups become more closed-off. They don't want to reach out to strangers, or people of the other group, people that they are not familiar with, because they are so afraid of contracting the disease. So some of this, actually, you might see happening when there are people from a place where the contagion, I mean the infection rate, is high. People might be more worried about people coming from those regions. ","I think compassion is very important under this time. Compassion towards not only your own in-group but also compassion to people from the other group, people that you don't know of. Also,q nowadays, we can communicate. I think technology is coming to our rescue or coming, to rescue us a lot, under this widespread pandemic, people are, very afraid to travel with you,  many of us cannot move from country to country. But still, because of the technology, I can talk to you now. Through zoom, or through this internet platform. So instead of really  meeting people in person, you can see, we can still rely on the technology to communicate, I think, one very important thing is to keep communicating with other people, and especially people from other countries, other cultures. ","I think being compassionate and being understanding, and don't stop communicating. And also, don't stop communicating with people that you are not familiar with, or people who have different views. And I think this is the time when many people are under stress and under insecurity, and it's very easy to shut other people off, especially those one who you are not familiar with or who have very different views.",Professor,2
20-Nov-20,McLaughlin,Female,US,Non-SC,No,"These kinds of mass community stressors, or even traumatic events provide this opportunity for us to come together as communities. And one of the positive things that we've seen is this sort of enormous outpouring of behaviors that reflect help, helping behaviors towards one another in our communities. So at the beginning of the pandemic, you saw high school students playing musical instruments for residents of nursing homes who were isolated. You see people and communities who are more advantaged, who have more financial resources, giving to those in their communities who don't, people taking meals to older neighbors who are unable to go to the grocery store, to leave their houses as readily, because they're more vulnerable. And something that we know from psychological research is that in moments of stress when we give to others in our communities, when we help, those behaviors actually have a stress-buffering effect for those who are helping. So, they're not only positive for the people who receive the help. But giving of ourselves to others actually provides a stress buffering effect that prevents some of the negative health consequences of experiencing stress for those who are doing the helping. And so I think this is an opportunity for us to become more engaged with our communities and more committed to supporting and helping one another. ","There's lots of ways that people respond when they feel threatened. The pandemic has introduced threats on numerous fronts, threats to our health, uncertainty about the future, threats to our economic wellbeing, and an enormous uncertainty on that front and many other areas of life. One way we can respond is to draw into ourselves, to engage in behaviors that are really designed to protect us and those closest to us, our families. You saw some aspects of these behaviors early on in the pandemic: Hoarding behaviors, you know -- buying lots of things and hoarding them for ourselves. Another way of responding, though, is kind of looking out to others who are in need, who may be in more need than ourselves, and directing our energies towards doing what we can to help and support other people, especially those who are most vulnerable to the effects of this pandemic, whether it's restaurant workers, people who have lost their jobs, and so on. Frontline workers, health care workers... And the more that we can orient our efforts, instead of towards sort of withdrawing and kind of protecting ourselves, to thinking about how we can help others who are more vulnerable. What the science says is that that will be helpful not only in our communities, but actually beneficial to us as well. That's really the orientation that's going to facilitate that type of positive change.","Here, I would say, the mental health consequences of the pandemic are where I see the biggest potential for lasting negative effects. So, we know that exposure to stress is among the most powerful determinants of mental health problems like depression, anxiety, increases in substance use. And the pandemic has introduced innumerable stressors into the lives of everyone, whether it's changes in work, changes in children's ability to go to school, worries for the future, worries about our health and ability to access goods and services that we routinely engage in, and many, many, many others. What we know is that work on resilience, such as the work of George Bonanno, has shown that even after very extreme traumatic stressors, many people do just fine. They exhibit resilience, about half of people across lots of different studies, even in the face of very extreme forms of stress. Their mental health and functioning remain high throughout. For the rest of people, we see about half of them so maybe 25%, maybe one third of people will experience a transient increase in symptoms like depression and anxiety that that go away over time. And that pattern is likely what we'll see here as well. But we also see that a smaller proportion of people anywhere from 15 to 30%, depending on the study experience increases in mental health problems like depression and anxiety that are going to persist over time, that may become more chronic. And that's really the group that I think we need to be thinking about in terms of interventions and ways of supporting those who have been more impacted in terms of mental health, with effects that could last well beyond when the pandemic ends.","I think that looking to sources of resilience that you all have access to as one of the best strategies that that we can use to kind of buffer against these increases in mental health problems that are very normal to expect after a major stressor. Now, resilience is... I like Ann Masten's way of describing this, where she describes it as ordinary magic. Resilience is promoted by many different kinds of behaviors and attitudes that many of us have access to. But I'm just going to highlight one that is among the most consistent sources of resilience across lots of studies, which is social support. So our ability to feel emotionally supported by others in our lives when we face stress is a factor that has been shown to buffer against, you know, not only anxiety and depression and the mental health consequences of stressors. But Sheldon Cohen's work has even shown that social support buffers against changes in the immune system that happened when we experienced stress, changes in physical health, that can accompany stress. And so, you know, one of the challenges of the pandemic is that our access to social support has also been affected. We're not seeing people in the same way we used to. Of course, tools like Zoom, how you and I are interacting right now, don't fully take the place of that. But I think the more creative we can be about building those support networks into our daily lives, even when we're not seeing the people we normally see, is going to be an incredibly important way to buffer against some of the sort of normative mental health problems that we expect to see on the rise, and evidence suggests are on the rise during the pandemic.","In addition to thinking about for you, what are the most important sources of resilience, the things that help you to feel good in times of difficulty... We've done some recent studies in children, where we find that even simple strategies like spending time outside in nature, getting exercise, keeping a daily routine, not watching too much news media, whether it's online or on the television, reducing screen time... are simple strategies that seem to protect against some of the stress related increases and anxiety and depression that are accompanying the pandemic. So finding those sources of resilience that work for you, strategies that help to improve your mood during these times of difficulty... But also that keeping in mind that there's also an upside to stress. We often think about stress as a really bad thing. But the way that we think about stress has an enormous impact on the way that it ultimately impacts our functioning, our mental and physical health. And if we can think about this experience as one that is going to build our resilience, provide us with skills to cope with challenges that we'll see in the future, and really is an opportunity to build our own capacities to cope with difficulty, the outcomes are likely to be much more positive. And we actually have good evidence that some degree of stress actually does build resilience. That at very high levels of stress we see in general physical and mental health decline. But what's interesting is that we see the same pattern at the opposite end of the continuum. People who have very low levels of stress we encounter no stressors at all, are similarly more at risk for anxiety, depression and physical health problems, then people who have more moderate amounts of stress. And what we think that reflects is that some degree of stress helps us to build resilience and capacities and skills that will help us to deal with the inevitable life's challenges that will come our way in the future. And if we can think about this as an opportunity for ourselves, for our children, for our communities... to develop that resilience, it will help us make it through these times in better stead.",Associate Professor,1
30-Nov-20,Jeste,Male,US,Non-SC,Yes,"The COVID-19 pandemic has psychologically affected every single person in the US. We all personally know of somebody else who tested positive for coronavirus. The COVID-19 has impacted lives outside of physical health also. For example, having to work from home or having to take care of children who could not go to their schools. Thus, this virus has an adverse impact on the whole population without an exception. This is unprecedented in the modern times. Probably one positive effect of tears could be that everybody will feel empathy for others who are affected more severely no matter where they live, or who they are.","The component of wisdom that people will need to capitalize on is compassion and altruism. Empathy means sharing somebody else's emotions or thoughts. But that's not enough. We must act on their empathy. Compassion means acting on the empathy and going out to help others. Altruism goes even beyond compassion. And it means helping others without expecting any reward in return. People should help others, no matter where they are, no matter what age, sex, race, national regions they have, or even their political beliefs. It will mean truly ""sharing the world,"" as John Lennon famously put it in a beautiful song.","I worry that the political polarization that we are observing today in the US and the world will only increase. The recent US election was viewed as having winners and losers. And this categorization didn't apply only to the candidates. It also applied to the supporters. And these two groups are nearly equal in size. It is like the West Side Story's Jets and Sharks. The watch word is revenge by the losers. As Mahatma Gandhi said: ""an eye for an eye leaves both people blind."" The current political division is also splitting families and friends. And this is becoming a vicious circle. ","What is needed are two other components of wisdom, namely, self-reflection and acceptance of uncertainty and diversity of perspectives. Both of these are in very much short supply right now, and there is no sign of abatement There's a critical need for wise leadership that has the power of inspiring people to change their attitudes and behaviors in a major way. I am optimistic that the Homo sapiens, which literally means a wise man--and of course, woman, will slowly but surely succeed in breaking the vicious cycle that we are seeing now and convert that into a virtuous cycle.","The component of wisdom that is particularly important right now is emotional regulation with positivity. It is perfectly understandable why people feel angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, distressed right now. But we need to control these negative emotions and slowly begin to replace them with positivity. After the World War II and the Holocaust, humanity came together. And we established institutions like the United Nations and the World Health Organization, which are still functioning well. Effective vaccines against the coronavirus are already here. Of course, it will take a few months for their distribution and mass inoculation. Past pandemics of plague and cholera are history now. And the same thing will happen with COVID-19, too. Once herd immunity develops across the globe, the requirements, well physical distancing, will go away. And we all will be able to have the social connectedness that is so critical for our health, well being and longevity.  ",Professor,2
1-Dec-20,Rooney,Male,Non-US,Non-SC,Yes,"Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question. And it's one that's caught my interest right from the start of the pandemic. And because, you know, I'm a business school prof, I'm really interested in what happens in the workplace. And with social distancing, and people working from home and working, you know, in virtual teams, or whatever it is. And what I'm seeing here in Australia is that for a decade or more now, workplaces have been very reluctant to allow people not to work from home. But we've seen so many positives coming from it, that it seems like that natural resistance that managers have - to allowing people not to come into the office to work, has finally kind of worn down. And so, there's much more openness about doing that. And I like it for a number of reasons. One is that we know that psychological outcomes in workplaces at the moment, around the world, are not very good. And we see anxiety, depression, mood disorders, generally, as really high-level characteristics of workplaces and the toxicity that we see in the workplace these days, which comes from hyper competitiveness, and neoliberal economic ideology, and so on. And so I think, in the long term, having kind of broken that, that umbilical cord that sees managers and business leaders wanting people to be stuck forever, and in the workplace at their desk, so that they can be controlled and observed, and all of that sort of stuff... is finally perhaps going to be a thing of the past. And that's got to be a good outcome for people's general mental health. But also, it helps people, you know. We all have busy lives, we're dealing with, with career and family and our social life and having that additional flexibility so that we're not spending, you know, let's say up to four hours a day commuting, has got to be a good thing. ","Yeah, that's a great question. And I think wisdom speaks very directly to this issue with managers and leaders. So, I think courage is one part of wisdom that we rarely ever talk about. And so I think managers and leaders need the courage to trust people to not be in the office all the time. And I think that's going to be hard for a lot of people. All of us need some level of empathy, so that we can support these new ways of configuring teams and relationships in productive work. And, of course, empathy... I think most of us in this space would agree is an important part of being wise. And I guess, kind of a flip side to the first one about the courage to trust is humility. And so we need to see managers who have the humility, to not want to be control freaks, to not want to sit down and watch and measure every moment of everyone's day. ","I'm going to focus here on anxiety. And I think this is a big issue for us. Because you know, with we live in a world, we have lived in a world, where we have unlimited amounts of data, unlimited amounts of information, and our capacity of crave knowledge is unprecedented in human history. So we're kind of used to knowing everything. So we're used to certainty. And we've become the kind of lazy and inexpert coping with ambiguity. And so I think there are some real questions about anxiety. And John F. Kennedy said, in the midst of the Cold War, you know, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And, you know, I think some of the, some of the negative behavior we're seeing in relation to people dealing with COVID is ultimately links back to: ""Oh hell, you know, we've got this pandemic, we don't really know how to deal with pandemics. We're afraid. We don't understand this virus, the science is not in on it yet. What the hell do we do? We're not in control of this."" So there's a big set of questions there about fear of fear itself for me. this extends beyond the workplace into our daily lives. And if I'm looking at some of the aberrant decision making that is going on in political leadership around the world, where we're seeing prime ministers, presidents, who just not grasping with the problems that are in front of us, I see a certain level of anxiety in those people as well. And that then leads to poor decision making, or unwise decision making as you and I might think about it. And I guess, if we scale that up to a social level, I think one of the problems we're already seeing, but which I think is going to get worse as we progress, is the falling apart of social cohesion. And you know, we're seeing that in the US in particular. And we've seen identity politics rise and it whole ingroup outgroup dynamic rise. There are people now who are sort of pigeon-holing research knowledge as something that people on the left of politics believe. And charismatic narcissism is something that conservative people believe in, and nothing good can come from that. I mean, this is an unwise society written very broadly in the sky, and I think it's actually very dangerous. And we've seen an erosion of the fundamental democratic values. I do see that as very serious and you know, in the way it links to populist, charismatic narcissistic leaders, whose position in politics is really based in  dividing people and, you know, what they call in politics ""dog whistle politics,"" where you inflame people's fear of the unknown, or fear of the other, the fear of different groups in society that have different points of view. And I think it's something that we just desperately have to acknowledge. And then get on with dealing with, so I think that  that's, this is kind of, I think, where I feel particularly worried, going forward, and where I feel particularly concerned that we need, we need to change the conversation and say that wisdom is not just an individual level phenomenon, it's also a group or a community or a society, a society-wide phenomenon. ","So psychological distancing, I think is an important thing. And, you know, I think you've, you've been published on that, haven't you, Igor. And, but I want to go back a step further. And I hesitate to do this, because this is a complex idea that comes to us from Buddhist wisdom. And it's the idea of ""nonjudgmental acceptance."" So, in psychology terms, in therapeutic terms, we, you know, we know about acceptance based therapy. And that comes from this very concept, and I think we, to make it a little bit easier. Let's go back to Al Gore's ""Inconvenient Truth."" And he's kind of speaking to this issue with that idea of an inconvenient truth. So, a pandemic is an inconvenient truth for all of us. We don't want to give our individual freedoms, you know, the freedom to associate and not social distance and all of that, you know, have a social life and all of that sort of stuff that  we've just taken for granted. But we actually don't live in that world anymore. And so, a Buddhist wisdom perspective would say : ""Okay, but the first step to be able to live in that world is to be able to say, well, whether I like it or not, and even if I want to wish this fact out of existence, I need to kind of psychologically distance myself from it, and sit and just nonjudgmentally process the very idea of a pandemic, and the very ideas that that I've been talking about already about, you know, the things that we need to change psychologically in the way we approach thinking about our workplace, but also those larger community issues, that social cohesion."" it's almost like there's a new version of middle-class privilege. And we feel that that privilege has been threatened by having restrictions placed on us, so that we don't have people dying unnecessarily. You know, in the US alone we're starting to get close to a quarter of a million deaths from COVID. Many of them, many, many, and probably most of them are actually unavoidable deaths, and how do we get into a situation like that? Well, one of the ways we get into a situation like that is by just simply not accepting that it's real that exists. And even if we don't like it, like climate change, many people won't like what happens in the future around climate change, and the restrictions that that places on our lifestyle. But we can act in a constructive and helpful way that will actually, in the long run, improve the quality of our lives, unless we can be nonjudgmental and accept and through that allow our thinking processes to process the meaning of what's going on. And the salience of different measures that governments are putting in place to slow down the contagiousness of COVID... Because I mean, it's here forever. I mean, it's, it's not going to go away. And yes, maybe we'll have a vaccine that we can all get in 12 months’ time, end of 2021. Perhaps sooner... But it still won't make the virus go away. A lot of people will already understand that concept of nonjudgmental acceptance, which is linked to mindfulness. These are difficult skills to master. but they're ancient. They don't just belong to Eastern mysticism, they, you know, the same ideas proliferated in ancient Greece, in Athens, that the stoics and the epicureans had almost identical ideas to the Buddhists. But we know that we can, because of history, we know that, that these things are doable. And they're also doable at a community level, because the whole point of doing these things was to build wise communities. ","I would reiterate the nonjudgmental acceptance idea and perhaps learning the basic mindfulness skills that underpin them. But to say something new on something very quickly, it also tells me that we really need to think in interdisciplinary ways. And one of the things that if I look at it, all the advice that the epidemiologists are giving us about dealing with pandemics now and into the future. Wouldn't it be great if people like you and me, were talking to the epidemiologists and saying: ""okay, so when you start building these policy level responses to changing people's behavior, to help with the pandemic, what would be a wisdom approach to that? How would we, how would we deal with that?"" And I am thinking, so we saw in New Zealand, after 100 days of being COVID-free, they had a breakout. And just last week, here in Australia, in the city of Adelaide, they've gone 100 days COVID-free, and then all of a sudden, there's a breakout. So, there's something going on in people and people's behavior, at around about that three- to four-month period, which is not a medical or a virus issue. It's a human behavior and a human wisdom issue. And so, wouldn't it be great, if we could see that kind of interdisciplinarity come into how we respond with this new world of high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity and, and the dangers that are attached to living in a pandemic world? ",Professor,2
3-Dec-20,Ardelt,Female,US,Non-SC,Yes,"One positive note might be that we realize that this kind of pandemics, or these kinds of global events, can only be solved if we work together as a community, as a word community. And that's does not only mean different countries working together, but also working together between rich and poor. So, because we are not safe if only the rich that the vaccines and the poor will not. And in some ways, what I hope what might come out of this is that this might be maybe a practice run for something more dangerous, more dangerous pandemic later, but also for the effect of global warming, quite frankly, because a lot of people say that this is a really existential threat and we all have to work together. So, maybe this is a kind of a practice run to get us all working together, and then using the established connections to work on global warming and maybe other global problems.","One of the things in the wisdom research, and from my Three-dimensional Wisdom Scale, is the reflective component. And in the reflective component, you know, you look at things from multiple perspectives, and looking at oneself from a third perspective, and hopefully, getting some insight into that we are all the same, you know. So that we are all... I'm not better than you and we have all our positive aspects, but we also have our negative aspects. And the hope is that this reduces a little bit our self-centeredness and makes, you know, helps us to become more... less self-centered and more self-transcendent. And I think this is what is required here: to be less self-centered, and thinking about our own tribe, our own family, our own country, you know. That we really see this as what Bob Sternberg calls ""the common good."" You know, we need to do this for the common good because it is not helping me, you know, to just take care of my own family for these global threats, like a pandemic, like global warming. We really have to work on this together. And so, overcoming self-centeredness, I think, is the key, which is also one of the components of wisdom.","Well, that's the other side of the coin, right? I mean, where we have the positive side, we're realizing that we have to work together on this to overcome this. The other side of the coin is exactly that we become more self-centered and looking out for number one, and my tribe, which we have be seeing in the United States. You know, these really two tribes fighting each other and not really caring about others or caring about immigrants or caring about people who are poor, or who have no health insurance and all these kinds of things. So, because resources are scarce that means that we're fighting over the resources and just looking out for ourselves and... yeah, our own family, our… the people that think like us, that look like us. And that would be the unfortunate negative outcome if it comes to that.","I am coming back to my reflective component to see basically that we are all in the same boat, that it doesn't help me if only a part of society succeeds. It's really if I am successful, if I am rich, if I am healthy, and a lot of my neighbors are not... that, in fact, it does affect me in some ways. It affects me in the long run, because people are unsatisfied, and they are not happy and they might actually, you know, one changes  and then they might vote for somebody who does not necessarily have the best interest in mind for them, but the person might promise them, and... I'm from Germany, and we had a situation like that, and it didn't turn out very well. It's the inside of being... that this is really about the common good, and not just about me. If I have health insurance, but my neighbor does not, and therefore I cannot afford to get tested for COVID and affect everybody else. Or because my neighbor wants to go and doesn't wear a mask because individualism - ""I should have the freedom"" and then affects a lot of other people and they affect a lot of other people. This doesn't help anybody. So, really, to thinking about the next person - ""how can we help the next person to succeed under these conditions,"" and then having a positive ripple effect, rather than a negative ripple effect. So just the insight that we're all connected, we are not individuals, but we are all connected in some ways. If we have a positive influence on each other, then everybody wins. It's a win-win situation. Rather than if I'm just thinking about myself, then in the end it will not be beneficial for me.","So right now, I think people are impatient. They want to go out, they want to meet with friends, they want to go to a restaurant, they don't want to be a mask everywhere. And as a lot of public health officials are saying, you know, just be patient. And one of the things what I think wisdom teaches is develop this patience, develop this acceptance for things you cannot change. So, it's like the Stoics, right? You have to first find out, is this a situation that you can change, that you have control over it? And if you don't have control over it, then you have to accept it. And right now, is COVID a situation that we have control over it? Do I have control over it right now? And no, I don't have control over it that I can wish it away. But I have control over that I can wear a mask and I can, you know, obey social distancing, and try to protect others. And if everybody does the part that they have control over, the situation will look so much better. So, it's this, you know, patience, and developing of acceptance and development of equanimity and knowing that this will get better, that this will change. It will get better. It's just that we have to have a little bit more patience and wait until we all get vaccinated. And then, you know, it basically disappears. But it's not enough to just wishing it that it disappears, and it really has to run its course.",Professor,2