23 hours ago Ulli Ecker posted this on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BehSciResearch/comments/ftkavp/planned_study_the_world_post_covid19/

COVID-19 will change the world forever. But how will it change? What will the post-COVID world look like? More important, what do we want it to look like?

We cannot be sure how the future will unfold, but it takes little imagination to see that we are at a bifurcation in history, and we may spiral towards one of two radically different new states. Ed Yong—focusing on the U.S.—put it brilliantly in The Atlantic:

“..Trump’s approval rating has surged… bla bla …foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat. One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit..; bla bla ..The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation.. bla bla ..The U.S. leads a new global partnership.. bla bla bla”

Simon Mair spelled out 4 possible futures in the Conversation that fall along the same continuum from nationalist-Darwinian to multilateral-cooperative.

In this study, we plan to present (representative) participants with two brief vignettes that instantiate those two possible extreme futures and then ask 4 questions: bla bla bla and bla.

Comparing responses to a. against responses to c. and d. would allow us to detect potential pluralistic ignorance – that is, a state in which people who hold the majority opinion feel they are in the minority. This can happen if loud voices in society are overshadowing the quieter majority.

Also 23 hours ago, Professor Lewandowsky tweeted a link to what he describes as “New project being planned with @UlliEcker,” inviting collaboration and comments. The tweet is carefully phrased in the passive voice, avoiding first person pronouns, but I think we can take it that at the back of the Ulli is a Lew.

So far no-one has replied.