“Understanding Others in Moments of Crisis” A Special Issue of Social Psychology

Understanding what other people think and feel is a core capacity enabling complex human social interactions. Research on the core processes that enable us to do so, that is empathy, Theory of Mind and their related social behaviors are topics that currently receive enormous scientific attention (with over 13,800 publications for empathy and over 10,000 publications for Theory of Mind in the last 10 years according to Web of Science). These topics have been examined across different disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience and yielded many insights (Hein et al., 2016; Schaafsma et al., 2015; Zahavi, 2017).

However, despite the knowledge we have on social cognition and the understanding of others under “normal” circumstances, we have little consistent findings about how social cognition is affected in psychological crises. In recent years, the world has been confronted with several crises, some of which overlap. They are triggered by global health, environmental threats, and war. But besides these extreme events on a large scale, there are also difficult situations on a smaller scale like exposure to unknown or threatening others, relationships or family strains (e.g., forced contact to unpleasant strangers, unwanted separation or struggles around aging).

Social psychology in general may understand reactions to crises as a form of threat reaction that leads to different behavioral patterns. A model by Jonas et al. (2014) integrates results from social neuroscientific and social psychological experiments that converge on a general process model of threat and defense. In this model, some defenses are more proximal and symptom-focused, and result directly from anxious arousal and heightened attentional vigilance associated with anxious states. Other defenses operate more distally and mute anxiety by activating approach-oriented states.

Old and new intervention strategies for moments of crises include various approaches targeting for example dyadic interactions or the improvement of intergroup relations. Well-known and proven examples include active perspective and empathy taking (Sassenrath et al., 2016), self-affirmation (Badea et al., 2018), identity-restoration (Nadler & Shnabel, 2015), or paradoxical thinking (Hameiri et al., 2019).

This special issue pushes the field forward with cutting-edge research and theory on emotion recognition (1), loneliness in older age (2), concern for others (3), downwards social comparision (4), family disruption and childrens pro-social behavior (5), defence strategies (6), populist attitudes for compliance (7), children’s distress and parental support (8), beliefs about people's happiness (9). As such, the issue elucidates the impact of crises concerning social perception, social cognition at the micro, meso- and macro-level and social behavior.

This special issue begins with an article that examined how face coverings – of the kind commonly worn during the COVID-19 pandemic or in medical settings – impact face recognition ability. McCrackin et al (2023) showed that face coverings have a general detrimental effect on the recognition of emotional expressions, but the magnitude of these difficulties varies with individual differences in autistic traits and personality.

De Lillo et al. (2023) add insights on the development of social-cognitive abilities during later life. Old age is associated with increased feelings of loneliness and reduced social functioning, which the authors conceptualize as a moment of crisis. Although it is intuitively plausible that reduced social functioning and loneliness are associated with reduced social-cognitive functioning, too, little previous research investigated this link. The authors assessed older adults’ perspective-taking and mentalizing abilities using behavioral tasks and found that both age and loneliness significantly predicted egocentric biases during perspective-taking tasks, while mentalizing was unaffected by age and loneliness.

Next, Leder et al. (2023) present an article that compared the efficacy of three different health interventions as a means to alter peoples’ intentions to behave prosocially – using general information, mental simulation or inducing empathy. They found that prosocial intentions can be enhanced by prompting people to mentally simulate the consequences of their actions or inducing empathic concern for others, but that individual differences in empathic traits were the most reliable predictor of prosocial intentions, independent of health interventions.

Kulesza et al. (2023) examine the better-than-average effect (BTAE) during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 before vaccines had become widely available. Participants from Poland, Kazakhstan, and Iran indicated higher compliance with health recommendations such as social distancing compared to their peers. Across different points of measurement and populations, the findings suggest a robust BTAE both at the individual and group level which also seems to manifest in an increased willingness to obtain the vaccine. Their findings showcase the implications of comparing oneself to others for social behaviors during a health crisis.

Hughes, colleagues and the i-FAM COVID-19 Consortium (2023) investigated in their multi-site study in six countries with over 2,000 parental ratings how family disruption in the COVID-19 pandemic mediated 3–8-year-old children’s prosocial behavior. For all six sites, family disruption indirectly predicted reduced prosocial behavior. Negative feelings about COVID-19 regulations mediated this association in all sites except China. Contrariwise, understanding of COVID-19 regulations was not implicated in the link between family disruption and reduced prosocial behavior.

Hechler et al. (2023) investigate individual defense strategies in the context of perceived threats during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 in Germany and the United Kingdom. Their data suggests that perceptions of threat relate to personal distress. Additionally, some beneficial social reactions to threat such as empathic concern for others seem to map onto particular defense strategies that help individuals to cope with anxiety and stress evoked during the lockdowns. Taken together, Hechler et al.’ (2023) findings illustrate the importance of social defense strategies, in particular, to facilitate understanding others even during a crisis.

Ehrke et al. (2023) extend previous work on populism and investigate the relationship between populist attitudes, trust in several institutions (media, politics, science), and COVID-19-related compliance attitudes as well as behaviors. Cross-sectional and longitudinal data from 2020 in Germany and Poland suggest that populist attitudes are linked to trust in alternative media but lack of trust in mainstream media, politics, and science. Particularly trust in political and scientific institutions seems to be relevant for compliance. Ehrke et al.’ (2023) findings thereby highlight social-cognitive processes such as trust that may underly the detrimental consequences of populist attitudes during a health crisis.

Mullins et al. (2023) examined the extent to which parental understanding of Latina children’s distress predicted children’s affective empathy and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. They report that parental empathic accuracy interacted with children’s distress proneness to predict children’s empathy and altruistic sharing, highlighting the importance of positive parental socialization and understanding during times of crisis.

This special issue ends with an article by Olivos et al. (2023). This work extends the literature on people’s understanding of happiness by asking whether positive and negative events could affect the causal attributions of what makes others happy. Using a factorial survey applied to a representative and probabilistic sample of Chileans, they examined three central causal attributions rooted in Latin American folk culture. The results show that the positive family causal attribution of others’ happiness is reinforced by both negative and positive events that happened to the observer. Finally, the researchers discuss how their study contributes to understanding people’s causal attributions by examining how they are modified by critical events that affect the observer.

A last note, to all contributors and readers that have been enormously patient with us, most contents for this special issue were put together during the second hard year of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021) and pushed our planned bundled publication way out of time. Still, we wish to express how rewarding we found the editorial work on this issue. We hope that scientists and the interested general public enjoy this collection of papers, and find they provide useful information about where the field of social cognition stands in 2023. As will have become clear, new scientific questions have emerged at least as quickly as older ones have been answered. We look forward to an exciting future of research on “Understanding Others.”