Pandemic Psychology: Nothing New Under the Sun

March 14, 2022

(Knowable Magazine) – I wrote the book because, as a psychologist, I sought to deeply understand the interactions between human behavior, disease, distress and social disruption. There’s a lot to study. There have been more than 20 pandemics over the past 200 years alone, including the 1889-90 “Russian flu,” which killed a million of the planet’s 1.5 billion people, and the infamous 1918-20 “Spanish flu” that took more than 50 million lives. The 2003 SARS outbreak, which did not reach pandemic proportions, fortunately petered out. Although each pandemic had a unique historical context and disease characteristics, human behavior was less variable than you might think. (Read More)