The novel coronavirus SARS‐CoV‐2 has likely been circulating around the globe since November 2019. At the time of writing in January 2020, the New York Times COVID‐19 tracker documented 90.3 million+ cases and 1.9 million+ deaths (“Coronavirus World Map,”). In addition to the sky‐high morbidity and mortality rates brought by the pandemic, the global and local outbreaks have dislocated economies and social conditions. As reviewed by Dennis (2020), the Asian Development Bank announced that COVID‐19 could cost the global economy between $5.8 and $8.8 trillion. The estimated number of jobs lost has been 81 million in the Asian Pacific region (International Labour Organization, 2020a), 30 million in Latin America and the Caribbean 2020 (International Labour Organization, 2020), and 22 million in the United States (Ponciano, 2020).

Unprecedented devastation reinstates old scientific questions and brings new ones. For social psychologists who study attitudes, persuasion, self‐regulation, or behavioural change, these questions are inspired by the need to systematically identify the content of persuasive messages, the self‐regulatory consequences of the pandemic, the processing of prevalence and incidence information, and changes to prosocial behaviour and group identities brought about by the pandemic.

自2019年11月以来，新型冠状病毒SARS-CoV-2可能已在全球范围内流传。在撰写本文时，2020年1月，《纽约时报》 COVID-19追踪器记录了9030万例以上的病例和190万例以上的死亡事件（“ Coronavirus World Map， ”）。除了大流行带来的高发病率和高死亡率之外，全球和地方性暴发也使经济和社会状况错位。正如丹尼斯（2020年），亚洲开发银行宣布，COVID-19可能使全球经济损失5.8至8.8万亿美元。在亚太地区（国际劳工组织，2020a），估计失去了8100万个工作岗位；在拉丁美洲和加勒比地区，2020年（国际劳工组织，2020年），失去了3000万个工作岗位；在美国，（庞恰诺，2020年）。

前所未有的破坏恢复了旧的科学问题并带来了新的问题。对于研究态度，说服力，自我调节或行为改变的社会心理学家来说，这些问题的灵感来自于需要系统性地确定说服性信息的内容，大流行的自我调节后果，普遍性和发生率信息的处理，以及由大流行引起的亲社会行为和群体身份的变化。