Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused immense distress but also created opportunity for radical change. Two main avenues for recovery from the pandemic have been discussed: A “back to normal” that foregrounds economic recovery, and a sustainable and progressive “build back better” approach that seeks to address global problems such as inequality and climate change. The article reports two experiments conducted on representative British and American samples (N = 600 and N = 800, respectively, for the two experiments) that show that people in both countries overall prefer a progressive future to a return to normal, although that preference is stronger on the political left and center-left with ambivalence prevailing on the right. However, irrespective of political leanings, people consider a return to normal more likely than a progressive future. People also mistakenly believe that others want the progressive scenarios less, and the return to normal more, than they actually do. The divergence between what people want and what they think others want represents an instance of pluralistic ignorance, which arises when public discourse is not reflecting people’s actual opinions. Publicizing public opinion is thus crucial to facilitate a future with broad support. In additional open-ended items, participants cited working from home, reduced commuting, and a collective sense of civility as worth retaining post pandemic.
Highlights
The open-ended responses in Experiment 1 identified the strong sense of loss suffered by many participants, in particular involving social interactions with friends and family and the lost freedom to travel
The responses identified several silver linings; that is, people were hoping for some things to stay different after the pandemic, such as working from home or reduced commuting
These results mesh well with findings from New Zealand (Every-Palmer et al, 2020), which showed that people suffered profound losses during the lockdown, combined with similar silver linings
Summary
Our aim is to inform this debate by exploring the public’s attitudes towards possible futures in the United States and the United Kingdom
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