
The Psychological Impact of Lockdown
The way that dogs like to play can indeed look very rough to sheltered suburbanites. There is a lot of rolling around and bared teeth. But dogs are really wolves, and that’s what they like to do. When dog owners try to stop what is normal canine behaviour they tend to produce pets that are neurotic, nervous, or aggressive.
Human beings are not dogs, but like them we are social animals. There are natural patterns of human behaviour which if suppressed can result in psychological dissonance – rather like the dog that is never allowed to act like a dog.
The lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions that were imposed in response to the pandemic were an extended experiment in disrupting normal human behaviour. Unsurprisingly, we are now seeing the psychological dissonance this caused. A new study in the USA, involving 7000 participants, has looked at the impact of the pandemic on the ‘Big 5’ personality traits: extroversion versus introversion, agreeableness versus antagonism, conscientiousness versus lack of direction, neuroticism versus emotional stability, and openness versus closedness to experience.
The results of the study are sobering, showing that,
The pandemic appears to have negatively affected the following areas:
• our ability to express sympathy and kindness towards others (agreeableness);
• our capacity to be open to new concepts and willing to engage in novel situations (openness);
• our tendency to seek out and enjoy other people’s company (extraversion);
• our desire to strive towards our goals, do tasks well or take responsibilities towards others seriously (conscientiousness).
As well as the implications for society at large, there are things here for us to think about in our call to make disciples. I’ve heard many pastors lament that since the pandemic they have found a greater reluctance in their congregations to ‘engage’: fewer volunteers, less commitment, reduced socialising. These things all fly in the face of the biblical exhortations of how we are to ‘one another’ in the church. The study found that these trends were especially pronounced among the young, which is unsurprising, but again has implications for Christian community.
Whatever one’s personal perspective on the effectiveness or otherwise of covid NPIs (and regular readers will know that this blog was generally sceptical - a scepticism that looks increasingly well-founded) the longer-term impacts should concern us all. Lockdown was a mass experiment in behaviour modification. To do this with puppies would be one thing, to do it with people is quite another.
So we are going to have to work harder, because lockdown made the pastoral task harder. In the church we want people to take their responsibilities seriously, to seek out the company of others, to be open to new ideas, and to demonstrate love to one another. The good news is that we do not have to be conformed to the negative impacts of lockdown: we have been made alive in Christ and that frees us to put to death what is negative and clothe ourselves with all that is positive (Col.3:1-17). In Christ we can be what humans were really made to be.