Professor Patricia Greenfield will discuss the social, cultural, behavioral, and psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of helping the audience make sense of its own pandemic experience.

What are the cultural, behavioral, and psychological effects of the coronavirus pandemic? Patricia Greenfield’s theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development predicted that, when survival concerns augment and one’s social world narrows, behavior shifts towards activities, values, relationships, and parenting expectations typical of small-scale rural subsistence environments with low life expectancy. In the U.S., big-data studies of spontaneous online behavior and large-scale survey research confirmed these predictions. Subsequent cross-cultural study demonstrated the same effects across the globe in Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, and Japan. However, the impulse to turn towards activities and values found at a much earlier point in human history took place in a very different environment, notably an environment with sophisticated capacities for electronic communication. Given this communication technology, Greenfield’s team explored how people were using the electronic environment and the psychological effects of mediated communication. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was found that increases in texting, video calls, and phone were serving as a compensation when in-person interaction was not possible; and this compensatory effort had positive effects on people’s sense of well-being and emotional state.