Australian psychologist Steven Taylor published what would turn out to be a prophetic book, and it has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic.----Pandemics are large-scale epidemics that spread throughout the world. Virologists predict that the next pandemic could occur in the coming years, probably from some form of influenza, with potentially devastating consequences. Vaccinations, if available, and behavioral methods are vital for stemming the spread of infection.

Pandemics

Remarkably little attention has been devoted to the psychological factors that influence the spread of pandemic infection and the associated emotional distress and social disruption. Psychological factors are important. They play a role in nonadherence to vaccination and hygiene programs and play an important role in how people cope with the threat of infection and associated losses. They help in understanding and managing societal problems, such as the spreading of excessive fear, stigmatization, and xenophobia that occur when people are threatened with infection.

Psychological Factors

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the psychology of pandemics. It describes the psychological reactions to pandemics, including maladaptive behaviors, emotions, and defensive reactions, and reviews the psychological vulnerability factors that contribute to the spreading of disease and distress. It also considers empirically supported methods for addressing these problems and outlines the implications for public health planning.

This Book

<figure><picture itemprop="contentUrl"><source srcset="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=1020&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=8f19aaada181ac6a6957f3e16a7dec71 2040w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=940&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=333127c4474b3233afdfbfcd5c4820e1 1880w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=700&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=b2db243974b82066e61de198dc385d12 1400w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=700&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=b2db243974b82066e61de198dc385d12 1400w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=660&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=fd111ce80a835322137103a18ec344a9 1320w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=645&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=8b14f22bf7336d9cf2c022594055df58 1290w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=465&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=9fcb93d5938afc88c0f871d8e14ba731 930w" sizes="(min-width: 1300px) 1020px, (min-width: 1140px) 940px, (min-width: 740px) 700px, (min-width: 660px) 660px, 100vw" media="(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25), (min-resolution: 120dpi)"><source srcset="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=1020&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=50c8ea4c70f5006714f55ed3839dbdfc 1020w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=940&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=afb45bf161b93c6fcbc9a9ab1d91bf61 940w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=700&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=34ed53a02caffbdbd80a28386d8e488a 700w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=700&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=34ed53a02caffbdbd80a28386d8e488a 700w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=660&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=1d2585840b45ac45757a132212f993f8 660w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=645&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=3add2281f594f609f197a0398351a100 645w, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=465&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=5ce7b5b7496f908430d464e02bfc9ba3 465w" sizes="(min-width: 1300px) 1020px, (min-width: 1140px) 940px, (min-width: 740px) 700px, (min-width: 660px) 660px, 100vw"><img alt="Thousands protested on 31 July in Toulouse against the near mandatory vaccination and against the health pass in France. " src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2c30564f9a3e9e501558b5ada4a8a36462214a12/0_0_7360_4912/master/7360.jpg?width=465&amp;quality=45&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;dpr=2&amp;s=9fcb93d5938afc88c0f871d8e14ba731" height="466" width="698"></picture><figcaption dir="auto">Thousands protested on 31 July in Toulouse against the near mandatory vaccination and against the health pass in France. Photograph: Alain Pitton/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock</figcaption></figure>Australian psychologist Steven Taylor published what would turn out to be a prophetic book, and it has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic<div><label for="dateToggle">Thu 19 Aug 2021 02.00 EDT</label></div>Last modified on Thu 19 Aug 2021 04.49 EDTIn October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, <a href="https://www.drsteventaylor.com/" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">Steven Taylor,</a> an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.Even his publishers had doubts about its relevance and market potential. But in the 22 months since, the book has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic, passed around and marked up like waypoints along a new and dreadful global health journey.Taylor’s book, as its foreword points out, is a picture of “how human factors impact the spreading of disease and emotional disturbance”. The stops along the way include prejudices, the role of the media, attitudes to vaccinations, how society manages rumors, and the psychology of conspiracy theories.The western world, with its enviable access to healthcare compared with much of the planet, is approximately at Chapter 10 in this journey: improving vaccine adherence. “Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t really get at the motivational roots for why people don’t want to get vaccinated,” Taylor told the Guardian.<a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#pop-factors_14daynewcases" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">CDC data showing that urban and rural rates of Covid-19 transmission closely shadow each other,</a> and broad availability of vaccines across much of the western world, suggests denser psychological complexities around “hesitancy” than described by political or economic orthodoxies to explain why 90 million adult Americans remain unprotected by any vaccine. A preferable term, Taylor writes, and one that has been used by psychologists for close to 60 years, is <a href="https://dictionary.apa.org/reactance-theory" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">psychological reactance </a>– a motivational response to “rules, regulation, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening to one’s autonomy and freedom of choice”.Despite this, Taylor says that what people say about vaccination is often different from what they do, and <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/global-attitudes-covid-19-vaccine-october-2020" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">studies before vaccines were released </a>predicted a lower take-up than what has actually taken place when faced with a lethal pandemic. That, in many ways, is an optimistic sign, as are signs that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/31/covid-coronavirus-vaccination-us-media-white-house" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">vaccination take-up is again rising as the Delta variant surges, especially among unvaccinated populations</a>.What is clear, Taylor says, is that anger directed politically or personally toward vaccinate-hesitant groups is likely to be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/health/coronavirus-vaccination-hesitancy-delta.html" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">counterproductive.</a> Especially, when available vaccines are both overwhelmingly safe and highly effective.“Psychological reactance has been an issue around any public health guidance, whether that’s increasing the intake of more fruit and vegetables, good dental hygiene or vaccinations and masks,” Taylor said. “The you’re-not-the-boss-of-me kind of response is seen particularly in people raised in cultures that take pride in freedom and individualism.”He added: “The harder you try to push and persuade these psychologically reactive people, the more they are likely to push back because they perceive their freedoms are being threatened. While they may be a minority, they are also highly vocal, and so we see many different types of people joining in.”That in turn, leads to what psychologists term “motivated thinking”, otherwise fantasy-thinking in which Covid-19, or climate change, are seen as hoaxes so people can tell themselves positive stories that everything is going to be fine and their freedom is not threatened.What has often been depicted as conservative individualistic intransigence is in fact a stand-in for diverse groups comprising conspiracy theorists, white evangelicals, some historically traumatized communities of color, new-age believers in natural immunity and others who believe that vaccines are a con by big pharma to maximize profits. The list goes on.“Putting a foreign object in your body via a needle, from an evolutionary perspective, is contaminating yourself. You’re not, of course, but you can see how some people have developed views about what is pure and faithful,” Taylor says.Taylor, who has spent 30 years studying anxiety disorders, including excessive fears and phobias, or hypochondriasis, decided to write The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/psychology" data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">Psychology</a> of Pandemics in 2018 after reading about the Spanish flu a century earlier and disease modellers’ predictions of the next pandemic.He interpreted that pandemics “are essentially a psychological phenomenon and about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people” and that “the psychological footprint is bigger than the medical footprint”.That, Taylor says, is not to downplay the significance of the disease to those that have become sick or died, but that many more people have been psychologically affected. The analysis was fleshed out in another academic paper, <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oNftz83ySAc4pHrHA_dDNzAbxwTSWWU1/view" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr">published in Canadian Psychology, </a>in which he wrote that “pandemics are not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral’”.He wrote: “Psychology plays a central role in pandemics, influencing the spreading and containment of diseases, and shaping pandemic-related distress and socially disruptive, divisive and potentially harmful phenomena such as panic buying, racism and protests against pandemic mitigation restrictions.”The Psychology of Pandemics was rejected by the publisher of Taylor’s previous books, who commented that the subject was “interesting, but no one’s going to want to read it”.The attitude, ironically, was characteristic of Taylor’s thesis – that people tend to be too preoccupied with the present to plan for the future and that left the world hugely underprepared to cope. Still, he says: “I was bummed out. Psychology is hugely important to pandemics.”The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and its psychological effects, remarkably or not, is firmly in keeping with previous pandemics, including Russian flu, Spanish flu and the Sars outbreaks.“I was pretty much surprised that pretty much everything in the book unfolded,” he says. “These were not Nostradamus predictions – they were predictions of reactions based on research of what happened during previous pandemics. So it was reasonable to expect that with a similar pandemic, with social restrictions in place, you would get broadly similar phenomena.”What’s been different about this pandemic, Taylor says, is that all the basic phenomena seen in the past have happened on a broader, grander scale.Part of the reason, he says, is social media and the 24/7 news cycle that can fuel these movements. Looking back to the anti-mask league in San Francisco in 1919, the reasons given then were the same as today.“The anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vax protests have been a lot more prevalent than they were 100 years ago, even if they were motivated for the same reasons,” he said.One exception, Taylor says, is the prominence of conspiratorial thinking. “A lot of conspiracy theorists who had tended to communicate with one another emerged from their silos to promote their theories more widely and, I suppose, indoctrinated more people as a result of Covid-19.”Taylor theorizes that with the Delta variant on the rise, any return to lockdown could trigger an exaggerated backlash and rebellion – part of the psychological phenomenon commonly known as pandemic fatigue.Lockdowns, he says, are not a long-term strategy for managing pandemics. “They’re a necessary evil but if we have another wave when people have just got a taste of freedom it’s going to demoralize people and be bad for mental health,” he said.By the same token, people’s desire to get back to pre-pandemic life doesn’t speak to health resilience any more than psychological reactance, he says.“The consequence of people rushing out to socialize prematurely is part of the uncertainty, especially for people who see themselves as impervious or of robust health,” Taylor points out.“We’re going to see recurrent outbreaks of Covid, but the desire to socialize is stronger than the fear of getting infected.” And that is psychology.… we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s high-impact journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million readers, from 180 countries, have recently taken the step to support us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.With no shareholders or billionaire owner, we can set our own agenda and provide trustworthy journalism that’s free from commercial and political influence, offering a counterweight to the spread of misinformation. When it’s never mattered more, we can investigate and challenge without fear or favour. Unlike many others, Guardian journalism is available for everyone to read, regardless of what they can afford to pay. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of global events, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. We aim to offer readers a comprehensive, international perspective on critical events shaping our world – from the Black Lives Matter movement, to the new American administration, Brexit, and the world's slow emergence from a global pandemic. We are committed to upholding our reputation for urgent, powerful reporting on the climate emergency, and made the decision to reject advertising from fossil fuel companies, divest from the oil and gas industries, and set a course to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future. Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

Australian psychologist Steven Taylor published what would turn out to be a prophetic book, and it has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

health

Health

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Australian psychologist Steven Taylor published what would turn out to be a prophetic book, and it has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic

Last modified on Thu 19 Aug 2021 04.49 EDT

I n October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.drsteventaylor.com/">Steven Taylor, </a>an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.

Even his publishers had doubts about its relevance and market potential. But in the 22 months since, the book has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic, passed around and marked up like waypoints along a new and dreadful global health journey.

Taylor’s book, as its foreword points out, is a picture of “how human factors impact the spreading of disease and emotional disturbance”. The stops along the way include prejudices, the role of the media, attitudes to vaccinations, how society manages rumors, and the psychology of conspiracy theories.

The western world, with its enviable access to healthcare compared with much of the planet, is approximately at Chapter 10 in this journey: improving vaccine adherence. “Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t really get at the motivational roots for why people don’t want to get vaccinated,” Taylor told the Guardian.

<a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#pop-factors_14daynewcases">CDC data showing that urban and rural rates of Covid-19 transmission closely shadow each other, </a>and broad availability of vaccines across much of the western world, suggests denser psychological complexities around “hesitancy” than described by political or economic orthodoxies to explain why 90 million adult Americans remain unprotected by any vaccine.

A preferable term, Taylor writes, and one that has been used by psychologists for close to 60 years, is <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://dictionary.apa.org/reactance-theory">psychological reactance </a>– a motivational response to “rules, regulation, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening to one’s autonomy and freedom of choice”.

Despite this, Taylor says that what people say about vaccination is often different from what they do, and <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/global-attitudes-covid-19-vaccine-october-2020">studies before vaccines were released </a>predicted a lower take-up than what has actually taken place when faced with a lethal pandemic. That, in many ways, is an optimistic sign, as are signs that <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/31/covid-coronavirus-vaccination-us-media-white-house">vaccination take-up is again rising as the Delta variant surges, especially among unvaccinated populations </a>.

What is clear, Taylor says, is that anger directed politically or personally toward vaccinate-hesitant groups is likely to be <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/health/coronavirus-vaccination-hesitancy-delta.html">counterproductive. </a>Especially, when available vaccines are both overwhelmingly safe and highly effective.

“Psychological reactance has been an issue around any public health guidance, whether that’s increasing the intake of more fruit and vegetables, good dental hygiene or vaccinations and masks,” Taylor said. “The you’re-not-the-boss-of-me kind of response is seen particularly in people raised in cultures that take pride in freedom and individualism.”

He added: “The harder you try to push and persuade these psychologically reactive people, the more they are likely to push back because they perceive their freedoms are being threatened. While they may be a minority, they are also highly vocal, and so we see many different types of people joining in.”

That in turn, leads to what psychologists term “motivated thinking”, otherwise fantasy-thinking in which Covid-19, or climate change, are seen as hoaxes so people can tell themselves positive stories that everything is going to be fine and their freedom is not threatened.

What has often been depicted as conservative individualistic intransigence is in fact a stand-in for diverse groups comprising conspiracy theorists, white evangelicals, some historically traumatized communities of color, new-age believers in natural immunity and others who believe that vaccines are a con by big pharma to maximize profits. The list goes on.

“Putting a foreign object in your body via a needle, from an evolutionary perspective, is contaminating yourself. You’re not, of course, but you can see how some people have developed views about what is pure and faithful,” Taylor says.

Taylor, who has spent 30 years studying anxiety disorders, including excessive fears and phobias, or hypochondriasis, decided to write The <a data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/psychology">Psychology </a>of Pandemics in 2018 after reading about the Spanish flu a century earlier and disease modellers’ predictions of the next pandemic.

He interpreted that pandemics “are essentially a psychological phenomenon and about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people” and that “the psychological footprint is bigger than the medical footprint”.

That, Taylor says, is not to downplay the significance of the disease to those that have become sick or died, but that many more people have been psychologically affected. The analysis was fleshed out in another academic paper, <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oNftz83ySAc4pHrHA_dDNzAbxwTSWWU1/view">published in Canadian Psychology, </a>in which he wrote that “pandemics are not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral’”.

He wrote: “Psychology plays a central role in pandemics, influencing the spreading and containment of diseases, and shaping pandemic-related distress and socially disruptive, divisive and potentially harmful phenomena such as panic buying, racism and protests against pandemic mitigation restrictions.”

The Psychology of Pandemics was rejected by the publisher of Taylor’s previous books, who commented that the subject was “interesting, but no one’s going to want to read it”.

The attitude, ironically, was characteristic of Taylor’s thesis – that people tend to be too preoccupied with the present to plan for the future and that left the world hugely underprepared to cope. Still, he says: “I was bummed out. Psychology is hugely important to pandemics.”

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and its psychological effects, remarkably or not, is firmly in keeping with previous pandemics, including Russian flu, Spanish flu and the Sars outbreaks.

“I was pretty much surprised that pretty much everything in the book unfolded,” he says. “These were not Nostradamus predictions – they were predictions of reactions based on research of what happened during previous pandemics. So it was reasonable to expect that with a similar pandemic, with social restrictions in place, you would get broadly similar phenomena.”

What’s been different about this pandemic, Taylor says, is that all the basic phenomena seen in the past have happened on a broader, grander scale.

Part of the reason, he says, is social media and the 24/7 news cycle that can fuel these movements. Looking back to the anti-mask league in San Francisco in 1919, the reasons given then were the same as today.

“The anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vax protests have been a lot more prevalent than they were 100 years ago, even if they were motivated for the same reasons,” he said.

One exception, Taylor says, is the prominence of conspiratorial thinking. “A lot of conspiracy theorists who had tended to communicate with one another emerged from their silos to promote their theories more widely and, I suppose, indoctrinated more people as a result of Covid-19.”

Taylor theorizes that with the Delta variant on the rise, any return to lockdown could trigger an exaggerated backlash and rebellion – part of the psychological phenomenon commonly known as pandemic fatigue.

Lockdowns, he says, are not a long-term strategy for managing pandemics. “They’re a necessary evil but if we have another wave when people have just got a taste of freedom it’s going to demoralize people and be bad for mental health,” he said.

By the same token, people’s desire to get back to pre-pandemic life doesn’t speak to health resilience any more than psychological reactance, he says.

“The consequence of people rushing out to socialize prematurely is part of the uncertainty, especially for people who see themselves as impervious or of robust health,” Taylor points out.

“We’re going to see recurrent outbreaks of Covid, but the desire to socialize is stronger than the fear of getting infected.” And that is psychology.

… we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s high-impact journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million readers, from 180 countries, have recently taken the step to support us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.

With no shareholders or billionaire owner, we can set our own agenda and provide trustworthy journalism that’s free from commercial and political influence, offering a counterweight to the spread of misinformation. When it’s never mattered more, we can investigate and challenge without fear or favour.

Unlike many others, Guardian journalism is available for everyone to read, regardless of what they can afford to pay. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of global events, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action.

We aim to offer readers a comprehensive, international perspective on critical events shaping our world – from the Black Lives Matter movement, to the new American administration, Brexit, and the world's slow emergence from a global pandemic. We are committed to upholding our reputation for urgent, powerful reporting on the climate emergency, and made the decision to reject advertising from fossil fuel companies, divest from the oil and gas industries, and set a course to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.

If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future. Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology – then Covid hit

Pandemics

Psychological Factors

This Book

CURATED BY

Related collections

More like this