How do pandemics spread across people of different social status? – Our alumna Jana Berkessel has recently published a paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science, which tackles exactly this question. Jana was part of the 2016-17 JRP cohort, where she investigated the effectiveness of user-generated content for reducing excessive consumption. Currently, she is a PhD student in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

In the current paper – together with her colleagues Tobias Ebert, Jochen Gebauer, Thorsteinn Jonsson, and Shigehiro Oishi – Jana analyzed recent COVID-19 infection data as well as historical data from witnesses of the 1918/1919 Spanish Flu pandemic.

For both pandemics, the authors detected a particular pattern of virus spread: During the initial phases of pandemic, the virus spread more strongly among people of higher social status. On the opposite, in later stages, people of lower social status were at the center of the spread. 

Interested to know more? You can find the full paper here.

We congratulate Jana for this important theoretical and practical contribution and are excited to read more from her in the future!