During the winter of 2020, I was expecting to have a very different project for the summer. COVID was not something that was on everyone’s minds all the time, and I was spending time looking and applying for internships in a lab performing biological research. Biology has always been of great interest to me, and I want to pursue biomedical engineering in the future. When the pandemic hit, my summer plans were upended. Labs everywhere were closed and not accepting any interns. Worried that I would not have a project for the following school year, I realized that I needed to shift gears. I was suddenly tasked with coming up with an idea for a project that I could perform almost completely independently on my computer at home. I also had to find a mentor to answer any questions I had. As I watched the media cover stories about anti-masker protests and COVID deniers, I started to think about the psychology of the crisis that we were in. Why did the United States, one of the countries best equipped to deal with a pandemic, have such a dismal response? I started to research the psychology behind crisis responses, especially the theory of reasoned action, and that led me to my politics-focused question. I thought that it was possible that people were looking to sources of information that they trust, and as a result were consuming partisan information with conflicting messages, resulting in the disastrous first few months of the pandemic. Read More

• Psychology
• Medicine