reshaping

The effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be “imprinted on the personality of our nation for a very long time,” predicted Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. No doubt in the future people will mourn those who’ve died and remember the challenges of this period. But how would COVID-19 shape people’s personalities – and into what? I am a psychology researcher interested in how people’s minds shape, and are shaped by, their life circumstances. Human beings are born into this world ready to deal with basic problems – forming close relationships, maintaining status in groups, finding mates and avoiding disease. People are adaptable, though, and react to the circumstances they find themselves in. Psychological research suggests that concerns...

After the movie Black Panther became a cultural landmark in 2018, it’s appeared as if Black people have been an integral and natural presence in science fiction. That hasn’t always been the case. Science fiction as a genre has been around since the 1920s, when the namesake of the field’s prestigious Hugo Awards, Hugo Gernsback, coined the term. However, the first widely notable Black sci-fi characters in U.S. popular culture wouldn’t appear until 1966, with the first the Black Panther character appearing in Marvel comics, and Lt. Uhura appeared on the bridge of the starship Enterprise in the first season of Star Trek. The Black characters, stories, and even the creators in the genre have had to struggle to gain a foothold. So, when scholar Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” in 1993,...

Tag: reshaping

How people react to the threat of disease could mean COVID-19 is reshaping personalities