What Coronavirus tells us about collective psychology, our quarantine by tech, and the better system to come
From Wired.com
We pause for blogging—and then a global pandemic kicks off… At the very least, it has shone a klieg-light through our modern fragilities.
Any loss of life is deeply to be mourned. However, the most striking fact, from our perspective in A/UK, is the way that our social response to halting the Coronavirus’s spread - staying at home, away from our working and shopping centres - has resulted in the kind of radical decarbonisation that climate activists have long dreamed of. (China, locus of the virus, has taken a quarter off its carbon emissions during its strict lockdown period). Of course, it’s a brutal and regrettable path to that end - and our Alternative Editorial this Sunday will reflect more deeply on the phenomenon.
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Here are three takes on the Corona virus which echo some of our (recently refocussed) A/UK interests - in the emotional/psychological response to events; the pervasiveness of technology which mediates them; and how we might think systemically about it, connecting all the factors.
From The Psychologist blog: Don’t personalise, collectivise!
The way we deal with the coronavirus is bound up with the way we think about society and about the individual. And the problem is that we are in danger of getting it wrong on all counts, with the consequence that we will be less effective in containing the virus. There is nothing new about us being wrong. But this time, lives are at stake.
The commonsense assumption, which is reflected in the advice being handed out to the public, is that the way to change behaviour is to appeal to individual interests. To make sure people take notice, personalise the message: ‘change your behaviour so that you will survive’. Surely that makes sense? Well no. It is precisely the wrong thing to do. Here’s why.
At a practical level, those least at risk (young, fit, healthy) may well feel it isn’t worthwhile to make the necessary changes and so continue to act in ways that put the most vulnerable (old and infirm) at risk of infection.
Additionally, at a moral level, we have the right to disregard dangers to ourselves and some even glory in being risk takers. It might be foolish, but it isn’t disreputable to ignore safety advice.
On top of this, if we frame things individually – look after yourself! – we run into difficulties when it comes to getting people to behave in ways that are inconvenient to themselves but benefit others (self quarantining, for instance).
The same goes when it comes to distributing scarce resources (doctors time, medicines, hand gel etc.). If we prioritise the individual then the strongest rather than the neediest will win out. In both cases, the pursuit of self-interest is inefficient, it undermines the overall response to the crisis and many more will die.
Our own research on emergencies shows that it is precisely when people stop thinking in terms of ‘I’ and start thinking in terms of ‘we’ – more technically, when they develop a sense of shared social identity – that they start to coordinate, support each-other and ensure that the neediest get the greatest help.
Sometimes this sense of shared identity emerges by the very fact of experiencing a common threat. But messaging also matters. When a threat is framed in group rather than individual terms, the public response is more robust and more effective.
So, let’s look again at the coronavirus response. Instead of personalising the issue we need to collectivise it. The key issue is not so much ‘will I survive’ as ‘how do we get through it’. The emphasis must lie on how we can act to ensure that the most vulnerable amongst us are protected and losses to the community are minimised – after all, from a collective perspective, a loss to one is a loss to all.
If framed in this way, then it becomes important for everyone to wash their hands and cover their coughs because of the implications for others as well as for themselves.
Moreover, while we might have a right to take risks for ourselves, we have a moral obligation to avoid imposing risks on others (especially those who are vulnerable and connected to us – just think how your driving changes when you have children in the car). Both of these considerations are powerful motivators of action.
What is more, once certain actions become communal issues subject to collective norms, then violating them invokes collective pressure. The best way to stop people going out when unwell or demanding resources they need less than others is not simply to change internal motivations but also to mobilise external disapproval.
From Wired UK
The feverish person who goes to work, the fit young person demanding access to A&E will be best dissuaded when the community comes together to make clear that these are not acceptable behaviours.
Once you collectivise the response to coronavirus, and once you create clear norms about maximising community well-being, then you become less reliant upon external forces such as the police to regulate behaviours – say around who is prioritised in getting medical help – with all the risk of clashes that entails.
Instead, the community itself will constrain would-be deviants in their midst. As always, the best regulation is collective self-regulation.
The difficulty with this approach, of course, is that it is so much at odds with contemporary psychological commonsense, which insists that behaviour is governed by individual self interest.
It is also at odds with social changes which relentlessly undermine communities and collectivities, seek to transform social groups into individual consumers and view every relationship as a market based interpersonal exchange.
In this sense, perhaps coronavirus is a powerful wake-up call.
From The Atlantic website, Ian Bogost on how technology already had us in quarantine:
…If conditions get truly bad, a serious public-health lockdown would indeed upend ordinary life. Barring that extreme, these efforts [to encourage home-working] extend a process that was under way long before a novel virus threatened to go pandemic.
In a way, “quarantine” is just a raw, surprising name for the condition that computer technologies have brought about over the last two decades: making almost everything possible from the quiet isolation of a desk or a chair illuminated by an internet-connected laptop or tablet.
…The benefits of a life online have begun to outweigh the costs for some Americans. The flip side of quarantine’s threat is technology’s promise—we have been preparing for the end of in-person work for some time.
As this week began, one of my Georgia Tech school chairs encouraged faculty to consider how we might conduct our classes remotely should the need arise. But that possibility is already daily practice. Canvas, an online courseware platform, powers our classes. We hold institutional licenses to videoconferencing services similar to Zoom.
And we are invested in large-scale online education, including online degrees that enroll thousands of students all around the world.
Never before in human history has it been so easy to do so much without going anywhere.
From InsurgeIntelligence, Nafeez Ahmed on how a better global system maybe lies on the other side of the Coronavirus:
The coronavirus outbreak is, ultimately, a lesson in not just the inherent systemic fragilities in industrial civilization, but also the limits of its underlying paradigm.
This is a paradigm premised on a specific theory of human nature, the neoclassical view of Homo-Economicus, human beings as dislocated units which compete with each other to maximise their material self-gratification through endless consumption and production.
That paradigm and its values have brought us so far in our journey as a species, but they have long outlasted their usefulness and now threaten to undermine our societies, and even our survival as a species.
Getting through coronavirus will be an exercise not just in building societal resilience, but relearning the values of cooperation, compassion, generosity and kindness, and building systems which institutionalize these values.
From The Economist
It is high time to recognize that such ethical values are not simply human constructs, products of socialization. They are cognitive categories which reflect patterns of behaviour in individuals and organizations that have an evolutionary, adaptive function.
In the global phase shift, systems which fail to incorporate these values into their structures will eventually die…
Futurist Azeem Azhar has put together an intriguing list of how societies are already adapting rapidly to the crisis.
Firstly, he points out that the coronavirus is spurring a new global scientific culture of open collaboration, rapid publication, and open-sourcing. We have seen new platforms created and even new illegal scientific archives go up to aid the process of tracking and understanding the coronavirus. What happens when we leverage such processes to tackle wider issues? When we realise that the buck doesn’t just stop at the coronavirus, but at climate change, global poverty, water scarcity, conflict resolution and myriad other issues that are destroying people’s lives right now — and will do so further in the near future? The mutual, collaborative scientific efforts to understand and respond, to feed scientific rigour into policymaking, provides an exciting model for how human beings can work together to address numerous social problems.
Secondly, there are now numerous remote working initiatives to attempt to keep businesses operational despite the closure of offices. This could be end up dovetailing with gym-at-home and livestreaming cultures. As global travel cuts back, remote working and remote office solutions are being furiously explored. Going forward, we may realise how much is in fact possible without spending excessively on fossil fuel consumption for wide-scale travel — that it’s possible for companies, firms and individuals to dramatically rollback their carbon footprints by being more circumspect about our travel choices.
Thirdly, Azhar points out that as global supply chains feel the pain from the silence of Chinese factories, the demand for local solutions will ramp up. There could be two results from this, in my view. One is that we may learn that we really don’t need to keep buying ‘shit we don’t need’. Another is that for the stuff we do need, we may innovate simpler local-based solutions. Local manufacturing will be increasingly important, and powerful technologies like 3D printing may come of age.
Relatedly, Azhar highlights the need for more local food and energy production. Could the impact of this crisis, as it strains supply chains, also end up feeding into greater public demand for more investment in resilience at the local level for access to food and energy? It’s worth noting that even the renewable energy transition is currently heavily dependent on critical raw materials and rare earths imported from China — but there has been lots of research into how those can be substituted with other materials, or more powerfully, recycled. Those process are currently in their infancy in Europe — currently recycling rates for critical raw materials are at below 1 percent, meaning that the potential is exponential. A prolonged crisis may spur innovation in this area.