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.

The spread of COVID-19 represents a global public health crisis, yet some nations were more effective than others at limiting the spread of the virus during the early stages of the pandemic. Here we show that institutional and cultural factors combine to partly explain these cross-cultural differences. Nations with tight cultures and efficient governments were the most effective at limiting COVID-19’s growth and mortality rates as of early April, and this interaction of cultural tightness and government efficiency is robust to controlling for underreporting of cases, economic development, inequality, median age, population density, climatological variation, and other dimensions of cross-cultural variation (collectivism, power distance, relational mobility). A formal evolutionary model explores the mechanism that may underlie our findings, suggesting that these cross-cultural trends may be associated with group variation in cooperation under conditions of high threat. These analyses shed light on why some nations contained COVID-19 more effectively than others.

Humans have believed in gods and spirits since the earliest days of the Holocene, and many people still believe in them today. Although the existence of religious belief has been a human constant, the nature and prevalence of religion has changed dramatically throughout human history. Here we describe the emerging science of religious change. We first outline a multilevel framework for studying religious change drawn from theories of socioecological psychology and cultural evolution. We illustrate this framework with four case studies featuring two ancient religious changes (the rise of punitive religions and doctrinal rituals) and two modern religious changes (the rise of atheism and nontraditional religions). We then review useful methods for examining religious change, including ethnographic coding, agent-based modeling, and time-series analysis. Next, we explore future directions, highlighting the need for predictive forecasts, nonlinear models, and non-Western samples. We also outline ten key questions that need to be answered for a fuller understanding of religious change.

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