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Narratives provide simple rules about how we ought to live and what our priorities ought to be. They are especially appealing in times of high uncertainty. Using the uncertainty surrounding Covid-19 as an illustration, we show how a narrative to preserve life has become dominant, and we illustrate how it has been reinforced by several behavioural biases. We argue that being able to identify and critically evaluate the impact of dominant narratives is vital to ensuring optimal decision-making. To facilitate this, we offer five recommendations—the ABCDE of decision-making—that can help to reduce the “narrative trap” in decision-making in any uncertain environment.

It is widely assumed that the longer we spend in happier activities the happier we will be. In an intensive study of momentary happiness, we show that, in fact, longer time spent in happier activities does not lead to higher levels of reported happiness overall. This finding is replicated with different samples (student and diverse, multi-national panel), measures and methods of analysis. We explore different explanations for this seemingly paradoxical finding, providing fresh insight into the factors that do and do not affect the relationship between how happy we report feeling as a function of how long it lasts. This work calls into question the assumption that spending more time doing what we like will show up in making us happier, presenting a fundamental challenge to the validity of current tools used to measure happiness.

People’s natural tendencies to either approach or avoid different stimuli in their environment are considered fundamental motivators of human behaviour. There is a wealth of research exploring how changes in approach and avoidance motivational orientations impact behaviour with consequences for wellbeing. However, research has seldom explored this relationship in reverse. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a unique opportunity to explore whether widespread changes in social behaviour are associated with changes in automatic approach-avoidance tendencies over time. We gathered online survey data on people’s adherence to 7 of the prescribed social restrictions set out by the UK government and people’s automatic approach-avoidance tendencies in response to different stimuli (sad/happy faces and social scenes) at three time points during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reduced-overall-interaction (digital and in person) was found to be significantly associated with faster avoidance relative to approach of sad faces. The results suggest that automatic approach-avoidance tendencies may function to protect people against the typically negative experience of reduced social interaction, with important implications for understanding public resilience during times of crisis, and beyond.

People’s natural tendencies to either approach or avoid different stimuli in their environment are considered fundamental motivators of human behaviour. There is a wealth of research exploring how changes in approach and avoidance motivational orientations impact behaviour with consequences for wellbeing. However, research has seldom explored this relationship in reverse. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a unique opportunity to explore whether widespread changes in social behaviour predict changes in automatic approach-avoidance tendencies over time. We gathered data on people’s adherence to 7 of the prescribed social behaviours set out by the UK government and people’s automatic approach-avoidance tendencies in response to different stimuli (sad/happy/neutral faces and social scenes) at three time points during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reduced-overall-interaction (digital and in person) was found to predict faster avoidance relative to approach of sad faces. The results suggest that automatic approach-avoidance tendencies may function to counterbalance the negative impacts of reduced social interaction, with important implications for understanding public resilience during time of crisis, and beyond.