The COVID-19 pandemic may have brought many changes to how you live your life, and with it, at times, uncertainty, altered daily routines, financial pressures and social isolation. I worried about getting sick, how long the pandemic will last, whether my job will be affected and what the future will bring. Information overload, rumors and misinformation can make your life feel out of control and make it unclear what to do. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I experienced stress, anxiety, fear, sadness and loneliness. Students are increasingly recognized as a vulnerable population. Therefore, when the nature of the educational experiences radically changes – such as sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic – the burden on the mental health of this vulnerable population is amplified.
deed, almost all STI research has been conducted about individuals (Hamilton, Chen, Ko, Winczewski, Banerji, & Thurston, 2015). It is important to include group-based research in this line of work, given the importance of group membership and belonging in social interactions (Hamilton et al., 2015). Otten and Moskowitz (2000) found that behaviors implying positive traits about ingroup members led to the formation of STIs more than either negative behavior descriptions or behavior descriptions of outgroup members. Hamilton et al. (2015) have found evidence for the existence of STIs about groups (dubbed STIGs). Importantly, they noted that these STIGs lay a framework for (a) stereotype formation about a group and (b) generalizations about the behavior of an individual based solely on his or her group membership.
In addition to the limited research involving groups, STI research has largely eschewed the study of how purported moral behaviors affect participants’ likelihood of inferring moral traits. In one such study, Ma et al. (2012) found that participants do generate STIs for moral and immoral behaviors, though a limitation of this work is the lack of a nonmoral group of traits to compare it to. Indeed, the lack of this variable makes it difficult to conclude whether moral behaviors increase STIs or immoral behaviors depress STIs. It is important to note that a host of research into impression formation has found a bias for negative behaviors over positive behaviors (for a review, see Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; see also Skowronski & Carlston, 1989), leading to the intuition that perhaps immoral traits may be more readily inferred over moral traits, independent of the effect of group membership.
Group Membership
Membership in a group is one of the main features of social interaction. It has been established that membership in a group can alter one’s perception of other individuals, with this effect extending to both ingroup and outgroup members (Hackel, Looser, & Van Bavel, 2014). This includes having a skewed, positive outlook toward one’s ingroup members while inhibiting the extension of empathy and mind perception toward outgroup members (Hackel et al., 2014). Mind perception is the process of attributing a mind to another entity, and is an important mechanism for determining what is not only capable of agency (i.e., taking autonomous actions), but is also capable of feeling emotions, pain, and suffering and thus being afforded em
