A research agenda for the post‐COVID‐19 world: Theory and research in social psychology

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has likely been circulating around the globe since November 2019.At the time of writing in January 2020, the New York Times COVID-19 tracker documented 90.3 million+ cases and 1.9 million+ deaths ("Coronavirus World Map,").In addition to the sky-high morbidity and mortality rates brought by the pandemic, the global and local outbreaks have dislocated economies and social conditions.As reviewed by Dennis (2020), the Asian Development Bank announced that COVID-19 could cost the global economy between $5.8 and $8.8 trillion.The estimated number of jobs lost has been 81 million in the Asian Pacific region (International Labour Organization, 2020a), 30 million in Latin America and the Caribbean 2020 (International Labour Organization, 2020), and 22 million in the United States (Ponciano, 2020).Unprecedented devastation reinstates old scientific questions and brings new ones.For social psychologists who study attitudes, persuasion, self-regulation, or behavioural change, these questions are inspired by the need to systematically identify the content of persuasive messages, the self-regulatory consequences of the pandemic, the processing of prevalence and incidence information, and changes to prosocial behaviour and group identities brought about by the pandemic.