You probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that psychology, and social psychology in particular, plays a crucial role in times of crisis. It helps us understand how people think, feel, and behave under pressure, and how those processes are shaped through interactions with and exposure to others: your loved ones, your social network and work environment, other citizens, and the authorities formally tasked with managing the crisis. Let me share some insights (social) psychology has to offer in light of our Adapt! Programme and the trade-offs for dealing with crisis that come with it (which call for further scientific exploration!).
People behave quite predictably, but rarely as assumed. Decades of psychological research have thoroughly dismantled the idea that people make decisions by carefully weighing costs and benefits, arriving at the optimal choice. The Nobel Prize-winning concept of bounded rationality captures the reality more accurately: people make decisions under the constraints of limited information, limited time, and limited cognitive capacity. We use mental shortcuts or heuristics that work well enough most of the time but systematically misfire under pressure. For example, we weigh the first information they receive more heavily than what follows. They feel a loss more acutely than an equivalent gain. They double down on a failing course of action rather than cut their losses. They are more likely to change their behaviour based on an emotionally charged and vivid story than on clear and well-substantiated facts. Without understanding these cognitive human tendencies, well-intentioned policies fail because human behaviour was never factored in.
A crisis is inherently social, because when the shit hits the fan people do not experience, interpret, and respond in isolation. Particularly in ambiguous situations such as crises, people look to others for cues and interpret events through shared frameworks. Others can be anchors, and a source of comfort and help. Solidarity, mutual aid, and spontaneous cooperation are well-documented first responses to crises and disasters. At the same time, others (particularly those with different views) may increasingly become a source of irritation and be seen as hindering the ‘right’ course of action. Groups form on the basis of like minds. Through interaction within those groups, they often become more extreme, both in thoughts and behaviour (something known as risky shift). They may clash with other groups. Those interaction dynamics (think polarised debate, grim protest encounters) often come with escalatory processes that absorb crucial resources and may derail societies in times of crisis. Given that democracy thrives with all voices being heard, how do we keep those escalatory dynamics within acceptable boundaries? We know a lot about escalatory processes, but much less about effective de-escalatory interventions (and please note: de-escalation is not the inverse of escalation).
Maybe these conflict dynamics also contribute to authorities frequently operating from a pessimistic view of human nature: that people are essentially egoistic and opportunistic and will cheat a system if they can. It leads to paternalistic decisions made for people rather than with them. It ignores that human potential is one of the most powerful forces of resilience. That stance comes with real costs: people who are systematically shielded from adversity lose the capacity to cope with it (a concept labelled learned helplessness) or even disconnect from society entirely. If we genuinely want resilient societies, people need to be exposed to difficulty, trusted with transparency, and given the agency to respond.
A related benefit is that adversity can also make people more resilient. Resilience is not a fixed trait: it can be learned and supported. It can translate into post-traumatic growth, the well-evidenced phenomenon of people emerging from crisis with greater strength and perspective. But how people cope is profoundly shaped by their social environment: whether they feel heard, understood, and accepted, even when their response is not what others expect. Our tendency to believe in a just world (people get what they deserve) or our unease with difficult to understand responses, makes it easy to dismiss, doubt, or even blame those whose experience does not fit a tidy narrative. If we genuinely want resilient societies, we need to make room for the full diversity of how people experience and respond to crisis, not just the stories that are easiest to embrace.
Finally, under crisis conditions, decision-makers face the same cognitive and social pressures as everyone else. Dealing with uncertainty and threat is one of the most difficult things for any human being. Therefore, we often see a tendency to think in scripts rather than scenarios: mentally rehearsing the crisis as expected (Harvard security expert Bruce Schreier calls it movie plot threats) rather than mapping the full range of what could happen. But reality rarely follows the script, and the gap between what leaders anticipate and what they actually encounter is a consistent and costly finding in crisis research. There is another dynamic at work inside crisis teams that deserves attention. Time pressure and high stakes can drive the wish for error-free performance and unintentionally silence precisely the signals a team most needs to hear. When conflicting information goes unchallenged, or early warnings are quietly dismissed, it is rarely because nobody noticed but because speaking up felt risky. Research consistently shows that psychological safety, the freedom to voice concerns and flag uncertainties without fear of personal consequences, is a strong predictor of effective team performance. Yet crisis contexts make it especially hard to sustain. Recent work points toward what researchers call performance safety: combining the freedom to speak up with shared awareness of the responsibility errors entail. Getting that balance right in high-level decision-making teams is one of the most important underexplored questions in crisis psychology.
Crises are, at their core, interactional and collective ‘stress tests’: moments where the quality of exchanges between people, groups, and institutions determines how things unfold. What decision-making settings really work under pressure? What narratives help citizens and those caught in crisis make sense of what is happening to them? How can that foster solidarity? What de-escalation paths are helpful when groups clash in society? These are questions we are actively pursuing within Adapt!, with a key challenge: how do we take them out of the lab and study them in naturalistic settings, following the crisis as it unfolds. That is one of the ambitions of our work within Adapt! for the coming years in our living labs and crisis decision-making challenges. Stay tuned!