Abstract
With the acute stage of COVID-19 behind us, reflection can inform future preparedness. During the pandemic, behavioural and social sciences often studied human behaviour through the lens of alignment with public health recommendations, implicitly treating concern and compliance as desirable and rational. While understandable, this emphasis was relatively narrow. Uncertainty, uneven risk distribution and competing values could have led to heterogeneous appraisals of risk and intervention benefit, even with the evidence available at the time. We show that engaging with the possibility that people could have been heterogeneously rational can broaden understanding of behaviour during COVID-19. Our aim is not to revisit the legitimacy of the response but to encourage reflection on the role of behavioural and social sciences in knowledge generation and highlight opportunities to examine pandemic salience and risk calibration. We outline research directions to guide the field and strengthen decision-making, trust and adaptability in future crises, promoting short-term compliance and long-term trust.
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Authors and Affiliations
Organisational Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands
Maja Grašo, Kyriaki Fousiani & Claudia C. Kitz
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Karl Aquino
Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
Stefan Baral
Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Nathan Berg
Division of Social Sciences, New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA
Cory J. Clark
Department of Psychology, Grove City College, Grove City, PA, USA
Lucian Gideon Conway III
Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Paul Dolan & Dario Krpan
Department of Management, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Steven Grover
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M.G. conceived the manuscript, and led all aspects of argument development, data integration, writing and revision. Through a constructive adversarial collaboration, all authors contributed through feedback, discussion, writing, editing, and efforts to ensure accuracy, balance and overall quality. All authors approved the final version
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Grašo, M., Aquino, K., Baral, S. et al. Refining the role of behavioural and social sciences in pandemic response post-COVID-19.
Nat Hum Behav (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02506-4
Received:22 February 2025
Accepted:22 May 2026
Published:25 August 2026
Version of record:25 August 2026
DOI
:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02506-4
