Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months

Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being

Social capital and especially trust are the foundation of most personal relationships and it is considered a key factor of many economic and social outcomes. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, we investigate the links between social capital (trust and voluntary association membership) and life satisfaction. Then, we analyse the impact of the structure of the country wealth on life satisfaction. Our original empirical approach address simultaneously both questions, using a recursive mixed-process model, with bootstrapped standard errors accounting for the sampling design. The role of social capital regarding the well-being of individuals is preponderant, but we underline that the mechanisms at work are not the same for all countries. The process of well-being improvement corresponds to varying models that depend on the country’s initial stocks of capital